Farm Bill: LSP makes a difference
at the national level

By Mark Schultz, LSP Policy Program Director
May 10, 2002

Unfortunately, the bulk of the 2002 Farm Bill is a giant step backward in its budget-busting support for large-scale agribusiness to the detriment of the land and people of rural America. Perhaps the worst betrayal of the public interest was the Farm Bill conference committee's removal of the ban on corporate meatpacker ownership of livestock from the bill, despite nationwide support for the measure by America's farmers and ranchers. The leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives, and particularly House Agriculture Committee Chairman Larry Combest of Texas, is to blame for this. Such pro-corporate policy shows the House leadership's true colors, despite any "free market and opportunity" rhetoric.

LSP, with our allies in the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment (CFFE), brought the "packer ban" to the very brink of victory—an outcome we were discouraged from even thinking about by all the political insiders in D.C. and our own states. The CFFE made corporate control of agriculture a central issue of the Farm Bill debate through all—out grassroots organizing in which literally tens of thousands of people participated between September and April. While the loss of the packer ban in conference committee is bitter indeed—in a healthy democracy, the ban would have passed because it was truly supported by the people—we will continue to fight for the packer ban as federal legislation. At the end of April, Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone committed to work with LSP and the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment to win the packer ban. A step was taken on May 7, as reported by the Congressional Quarterly, when Senate Ag Committee chair Tom Harkin, responding to Senator Wellstone's request on the Senate floor to re-introduce the packer ban in the Senate, "thanked Senator Paul Wellstone for his authorship of the country-of-origin food labeling amendment, and gave him an 'iron-clad commitment' to pursue a ban on packer ownership of livestock."

Economic justice is an essential ingredient to LSP's work, just as livestock owned and dispersed across the landscape on family farms (and not in packer-controlled factory farms) is a critical ingredient of a sustainable food and agriculture system. The reality is that the 2002 Farm Bill is an example of Congress and the Administration using the people's money for corporate welfare and industrial agriculture expansion at the expense of the people of this country and the land. In the commodity title (or section) of the bill, $56 billion of new spending is added to commodity program payments for the maximum production of a few "program" crops (e.g. corn, soybeans, cotton, wheat, and rice), which benefit the largest farms the most. These payments also contribute to overproduction of a few crops, leading to lower prices, excessive soil erosion and other environmental degradation. Because of inflated land values and land rents, such a policy makes it harder for young farmers to get started. We need to continue to generate strong grassroots participation to address what is wrong with the current corporate-driven American farm policy, while working to make the most of our gains, such as the Conservation Security Program, and push for more proactive policy.

Winning the Conservation Security Program:
A huge victory for sustainable family farms

The CSP represents an excellent new approach towards environmental stewardship on working farmlands. Right now, 85 percent of federal conservation funds go to take land out of production, or "idle" it. At the same time, U.S. farm policy has for years prioritized billions of dollars of government payments for the maximum production of corn and soybeans and other commodity crops, a policy which has caused untold damage to our nation's soil and water and which is designed to keep the price of grain artificially low to the benefit of factory farms and big grain corporations like Cargill.

In late 1998, LSP's Federal Farm Policy Committee decided to work for a major change in the existing farm policy. Beginning with the idea of full-cost accounting (making sure that the costs that society pays through the loss of a farm-based rural middle class or through higher taxes for environmental clean up or flood mitigation, for example, are factored into the cost of agricultural systems), LSP set a course to draft new farm policy that would be developed from the experience of sustainable agriculture and would truly support the stewardship of the land, rural communities, and the family farm system of agriculture.

At the end of February 1999, a contingent of 13 sustainable farmers from organizations active in the Midwest Sustainable Agriculture (LSP, Illinois Stewardship Alliance, Practical Farmers of Iowa and Nebraska Sustainable Agriculture Society), led by LSP Federal Farm Policy Committee members, traveled to Washington, D.C. In the course of three days, we held 36 meetings with U.S. Senators and Representatives, and USDA officials, promoting the idea of a Farm Results Index, which would provide the basis for directly connecting farm program payments to environmental and social benefits produced, and describing how current farm policy was dramatically tilted against stewardship. These ideas formed the core of Senator Harkin's Conservation Security Act, which he proposed in 1999.

Since that time, LSP has continued to take leadership in Minnesota and nationally to develop the concepts and build the public support for what has now become the Conservation Security Program. Members of the Federal Farm Policy Committee have met with Senators Wellstone, Mark Dayton and Harkin, and with U.S. Representatives Gil Gutknecht, Mark Kennedy, and Collin Peterson. During the course of 2001, LSP committee members Dave Serfling and Dan Specht, and LSP Board member Monica Kahout testified at U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee hearings in Washington and Minnesota. We have generated letters to the editor, newspaper and magazine stories and editorials, and countless calls and faxes to members of Congress on behalf of the Conservation Security Program, eventually winning the firm support of both of Minnesota's U.S. Senators, Paul Wellstone and Mark Dayton, for full funding for the program.

While the Senate, led by Agriculture Committee chair Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, championed this new stewardship-based approach to farm policy, the U.S. House, led by Representative Larry Combest, opposed it, favoring increased commodity program payments and conservation policy that is a combination of "more of the same" (more land taken out of farming and idled, for example) and (most unbelievably) huge increases in subsidies to factory farms in the name of conservation through a much-distorted Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). The existing restriction in EQIP that prevents funds from being provided to factory farms was removed in the 2002 Farm Bill, and the current maximum payment to any one operation of $50,000 over five years skyrocketed to $450,000 over six years. Overall, the 2002 Farm Bill is an acceleration of taxpayer subsidies for industrial agriculture. Major reforms, such as the ban on packer ownership of livestock and meaningful limits to the amount of public funds any one operation could receive in farm program payments, which were passed by the Senate, were stripped from the bill by the U.S. House in conference committee. For these reasons, LSP does not support the 2002 Farm Bill.

However, the Conservation Security Program is truly a bright spot on the farm policy landscape. For the first time, farmers who have practiced good stewardship (for example, have not planted corn or soybeans year after year on the fragile soils and steep slopes of southeast Minnesota and northeast Iowa, and instead used sophisticated resource-conserving crop rotations or grass-based livestock systems), will receive payments for the multiple benefits their farming systems generate for society - such as soil conservation, increased biodiversity and wildlife habitat, healthy food, maintaining small and moderate scale farms, and enhanced water quality. A broad range of farms-from Community Supported Agriculture farms such as many LSP members belong to, to rotationally grazed dairy or beef farms, to organic produce or crop farms, to sustainable swine operations, to farms using effective conservation tillage practices-can participate and receive CSP payments, not on the basis of how much of a commodity they produce, but on the basis of the environmental and conservation benefits they produce for society. That is truly a major victory.

The credit for this victory belongs to many people. The Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (SAC), of which LSP is an active member, has led the fight for the CSP from the very beginning. The Minnesota Project has provided excellent leadership nationally with the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture in developing the CSP policy and educating policymakers. Members of the Midwest Sustainable Agriculture Working Group kept pushing for CSP, educating the public and policymakers about CSP's benefits.

But LSP deserves to pat itself on its collective back. LSP members have helped make a difference, particularly this fall and winter as the final policy was being debated and voted on, and large numbers of LSP members called, faxed and e-mailed Congress to push for progressive farm policy. Especially critical to the CSP's success nationally was the hard work and far-reaching vision of LSP's Federal Farm Policy Committee: Dwight Ault, Dan French, Paul Homme, Jeff Klinge, Greg Koether, Mark Schultz, Dave Serfling, Paul Sobocinski, Dan Specht, and Sister Kathleen Storms. As committee member Dan French said in calling for LSP leadership for change in 1998, "We have to stop just reacting to bad proposals-we need to get ahead of the curve, get on the cutting edge, and push for what we want."

That is what we have done with the CSP. We had to fight off a last-minute attempt by opponents of the program to deny farmers the right to freely apply for the program and receive the benefits for which they qualified according to the level of environmental stewardship they were practicing. Out-of-touch environmental groups like Environmental Defense and the Environmental Working Group worked to undercut the CSP in favor of more money for EQIP, despite EQIP's terrible pro-factory farm orientation and bloated budget. These groups found willing allies in the U.S. House and with commodity groups like the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. In the end, however, good sense, good grassroots organizing and good coalition-building with groups like Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club prevailed, meaning stewardship farmers across the country now have at least one important element of U.S. farm policy that applies to them.

As Dave Serfling, who was the key drafter of LSP's original Farm Results Index, says, "With CSP, we have a big step forward for land stewardship and family farms. Now we need to make sure USDA implements it fairly and well, and then move on to further reforms to win an American farm policy that cares for the land, supports rural communities, and provides fair opportunities for family farmers."

For more information on how you can help get the Conservation Security Program up and running, and work to win other key policy reforms, contact LSP's Policy Program director Mark Schultz at 612-722-6377.

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