SUMMER 2013
www.jhsph.edu/clf
FARM
BILL
PROTECTING
CONSERVATION
COMPLIANCE PROGRAMS
A PUBLIC HEALTH
PRIORITY
615 N. Wolfe Street W7010 Baltimore MD 21205-2179 410-502-7578 Fax: 410-502-7579 [email protected]
PROTECTING CONSERVATION
COMPLIANCE PROGRAMS
A PUBLIC HEALTH PRIORITY
Who We Are
Based within the Bloomberg School of
Public Health, The Johns Hopkins Center
for a Livable Future (CLF) is an academic
center that conducts and promotes
research and communicates information about the complex interrelationships
among food production, diet,
environment and human health. The
Center investigates these issues, and
advocates on behalf of policies to protect
the public’s health and the environment,
enhance food system sustainability, and
increase food security. Improving the
“Farm Bill” is a major priority for the CLF.
OUR POSITION:
The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable
Future (CLF) supports the continuation
and enforcement of conservation
compliance requirements by linking
them to all farm support programs,
especially crop insurance premium
subsidies.
1 Farm Bill: Protecting Conservation Compliance Programs
Introduction
The Farm Bill is the primary piece of legislation addressing food and agriculture
in the United States.1 By shaping production and conservation practices on U.S.
farms, including the types of crops grown
and where they are planted, the Farm Bill
exerts a powerful influence on the environment, the composition of the food supply
and ultimately, the public’s health.
The Farm Bill contains several
conservation programs that incentivize
healthier and more sustainable production
practices. In many respects, the most
far-reaching of these incentives is the
attachment of conservation requirements
to farm support programs like Direct
Payments, often referred to as “farm
subsidies.” In order to be eligible for Direct
Payments, farmers must comply with
certain environmental measures.2
Legislators are preparing to phase
out Direct Payments in the next Farm
Bill, putting conservation compliance
measures at risk. Other programs, such
as crop insurance subsidies—government
payments to cover a percentage of
farmers’ crop insurance premiums—
are expected to expand, becoming
the dominant farm support program.
Before 1996, conservation compliance
measures were tied to the receipt of crop
insurance premium subsidies. Re-linking
conservation compliance measures to
crop insurance subsidies and maintaining
the requirement across all farm support
programs would preserve a major incentive
for U.S. farmers to use such measures, and
in turn protect the public’s health.
What Is Conservation
Compliance?
Several United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs offer benefits
to farmers on the condition that they meet
certain standards of environmental protection on highly erodible land and wetlands.
Failure to comply with these provisions
could mean the loss of benefits. Among the
suite of programs tied to conservation compliance, Direct Payments make up nearly
half of the funds.2 USDA estimates that the
overall value of Farm Bill benefits subject
to conservation compliance between 19972007 ranged from $11.7 billion to $27.3
billion.3
The conservation compliance requirements
were enacted originally as part of the 1985
Farm Bill in an effort to address concerns
that commodity programs and conservation
programs were working against each other.
For example, while conservation programs
were designed to encourage farmers to
conserve soil and other environmental
resources, other programs such as
price supports and income payments
provided incentives for farmers to expand
crop production to highly erodible and
environmentally sensitive land. While
that contradiction persists, conservation
compliance rules help to mitigate the
problem.
2 Farm Bill: Protecting Conservation Compliance Programs
What are the components of
conservation compliance?
Conservation compliance measures aim to
promote soil quality, reduce soil erosion and
conserve wetlands. Farmers who violate
the requirements are subject to losing
some or all Farm Bill benefits contingent on
conservation compliance.2
Sodbuster: Highly erodible land
conservation
Under the “sodbuster” provisions of the
Farm Bill, farmers growing on highly erodible land are required to implement approved conservation systems. These systems typically include some combination of
conservation cropping, conservation tillage,
and seasonal crop residue management.4
Given the costs of not being in compliance,
Sodbuster has both improved agricultural
practices on highly erodible land and helped
keep such land out of production.4
Swampbuster: Wetland
conservation
Under the “swampbuster” provision, farmers
are prohibited from producing on cropland
converted for farming after 1985 and from
draining wetlands to then produce agricultural commodities on that land.2
How can conservation
compliance measures protect
public health?
Soil and wetland ecosystems perform a
range of “ecosystem services” such as
conserving freshwater, sequestering carbon
and filtering contaminants. Many of these
services directly or indirectly impact water
quality, flood prevention, food security and
climate change mitigation—ultimately ben-
efitting human health.
Water quality
Measures to protect soil and wetland
ecosystems may help to mitigate agricultural
impacts on water quality. Practices that
promote soil health, meaning there is
robust organic matter in the soil, may
reduce farmers’ dependence on fertilizer
inputs, capture runoff and filter certain
contaminants. Certain pesticides, for
example, bind to soil organic matter,
reducing their toxicity and preventing them
from leaching into groundwater.5 Practices
such as cover cropping can reduce runoff by
capturing residual nitrogen and building soil
organic matter.
When applied in excess of amounts
croplands can absorb, fertilizer nutrients
can enter nearby waterways or leach
into groundwater, contributing to a host
of human health and ecological harms.
Conservation compliance measures help
protect water quality by mitigating erosion
and maintaining the ability of soils and
wetlands to absorb nutrient-filled water that
would otherwise run into waterways.
Wetlands, dubbed “the kidneys of the
catchment,” play a key role in filtering
nutrients, pesticides and other pollutants
from water.6 In addition, wetlands help
to recharge groundwater sources used
for drinking water, irrigation and other
purposes.7
Preventing water contamination is
crucial to health. Ingesting nitratecontaminated drinking water has been
associated with various cancers, adverse
reproductive outcomes, diabetes, thyroid
conditions and “blue baby syndrome”
(methemoglobinemia), a potentially fatal
condition among infants.8 Nutrient pollution
in waterways drives algal growth and decay,
a process that can deplete oxygen from
3 Farm Bill: Protecting Conservation Compliance Programs
aquatic ecosystems, creating “dead zones”
largely devoid of life.9,10 Some of these
algal blooms produce toxins that have been
linked to stomach illness, allergic reactions,
liver damage, neurological symptoms and
cancer.11–15
Flooding
Wetlands have the potential to abate the
destructive potential of floods, reducing the
health, social, ecological and economic
impacts of these widespread natural
disasters. An acre of wetland can store
roughly one million gallons of water—an
amount equivalent to over two football fields
submerged one-foot deep in water. The
enormous storage capacity of wetlands can
absorb floodwaters that would otherwise
flow overland, while trees and other wetland
vegetation can help slow the speed of
floodwaters.16
The destruction and degradation of wetlands
as a result of agricultural practices can
significantly impair the services they offer.17
Between 1780 and 1990, twenty-two U.S.
states lost at least half of their wetlands.18
The rate of wetland loss increased by
140 percent between 2004 and 2009.19
Swampbuster has successfully worked
to help prevent farmers from draining
wetlands, the USDA estimates between
1.5 million and 3.3 million acres of wetlands
have been protected by the provisions.4
Food security
Healthy soil is, in many regards, the
foundation of the food supply. As soil
is depleted, its ability to support food
production diminishes. With lowered
crop yields come higher food prices and
decreased food security.
Conservation compliance measures help
protect, and sometimes improve, soil quality.
Soil quality, or “health,” refers to soil’s
capacity to perform a range of essential
functions. The organic matter in healthy soil
serves as a sponge-like reservoir of water
and nutrients, providing plants with a steady
supply of resources for growth. The capacity
of healthy soil to retain water is particularly
valuable during droughts. Organic matter
also improves soil structure, helping to
aerate roots, improve drainage and absorb
rainfall and irrigation, reducing runoff and
erosion.
The prevailing approach to crop production
in the U.S. relies heavily on synthetic and
mineral fertilizers, often at the expense of a
focus on soil health. These inputs dramatically increase short-term crop yields, and
can serve as a substitute for, or supplement
to, the nutrients cycled through soil organic
matter. However, many of these fertilizer
inputs are in finite supply; phosphate rock,
for example, is a non-renewable resource
estimated to be depleted in 50-100 years.20
As these resources become more costly
to extract, the value of soil health to global
food production likely will become even
greater.
Keeping soil healthy can limit the need for
agricultural chemical inputs, which not only
may be limited in supply, but also affect soil
health. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers have
been shown to deplete soil organic matter21
and lower crop resistance to certain insect
pests,22 perpetuating farmers’ dependence
on agrichemicals and the harms associated
with their use.
Because soil health is intimately tied to longterm crop productivity, it is a key component
of food security—particularly in light of an
expanding global population. Conversely,
agricultural practices that degrade soil
quality pose a significant threat to global
4 Farm Bill: Protecting Conservation Compliance Programs
food security. By one estimate, 30 percent of
U.S. farmland has been abandoned over the
past 200 years due to erosion, salinization
and waterlogging.23 By incentivizing
farmers to maintain or improve soil health,
conservation compliance measures may
help to mitigate this trend.
Climate change
Climate change poses serious challenges
to food and water security, and contributes
both directly and indirectly to infectious
disease, heat stress, respiratory conditions
and other health problems. The Lancet, a
leading medical journal, described climate
change as “the biggest global health threat
of the 21st century.” Wetland conservation,
conservation tillage, cover cropping and
other practices incentivized by conservation compliance measures can increase the
soil carbon pool, helping to mitigate climate
change.24 Conservation compliance helps
mitigate climate change in two ways. First, it
creates a disincentive for converting native
sod into cropland. The conversion process
from native sod to cropland emits large
amounts of greenhouse gases (GHG) that
contribute to climate change. Organic matter in healthy soil stores carbon that would
otherwise contribute to climate change (and
therefore it is important to provide incentives
to retain native sod on agricultural land).
Second, it incentivizes keeping native wetlands intact. Wetland soils are a particularly
important carbon sink; draining these lands
is a significant source of carbon dioxide
emissions.25
Are conservation compliance
measures effective?
Tying conservation compliance requirements
to farm support programs is a cost-effective
conservation measure. The USDA views
the Direct Payment program as an effective compliance incentive because the payments are substantial (nearly $5 billion per
year), they cover a large share (71 percent)
of cropland, and they are paid on an annual
basis.4 This is despite inconsistent enforcement of these provisions. While the number
of spot-checks has fallen from 1.2 percent
of farms (1993) to 0.6 percent of farms in
2006,26 and there is also indication that in
some cases USDA/NRCS fails to enforce
provisions,27 conservation compliance provisions serve as a relatively affordable way for
USDA to protect marginal land, and a deterrent to environmentally damaging actions
that ultimately impact the public’s health.4
How much land is at stake if
Congress eliminates Direct
Payments?
Direct Payments may be excluded from the
next Farm Bill, effectively ending the conservation requirements linked to the payments.
While farmers receiving funds under other
conservation programs (See CLF’s report,
Working Lands Conservation Funding—A
Public Health Priority, for more information)
would still be required to use conservation
techniques, about 174 million acres of land
(44 percent of U.S. cropland) that were covered by Direct Payments but not conservation program payments would no longer be
covered.2 If it is be crucial to link conservation compliance requirements to other farm
support programs, such as crop insurance
premium subsidies, not only to recapture
and protect these lands, but also because
it is predicted that crop insurance programs
will become the cornerstone of the farm
safety net.
For a more detailed visual representation of
compliance requirements by acreage see:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/361085/
eib94_2_.pdf
We need a safety net for the
environment
Investment in crop insurance subsidies is
often presented as a way to maintain a farm
safety net. Crop insurance protects farmers
from losses due to extreme weather events,
insects, disease, low yields, low prices, low
quality, or any combination of these factors.28
Crop insurance subsidies cover a similar
commodity crop acreage to Direct Payments, and they also extend to some ranchlands and land used for producing fruits,
vegetables, and other non-commodity crops.
In addition to their role in protecting farmers,
crop insurance subsidies can also be (as
was the case until 1996) a vehicle to encourage conservation compliance.
Crop insurance subsidies are currently the
only large Farm Bill program not subject to
conservation compliance.2
Tying crop insurance premium subsidies
to conservation compliance represents a
promising means of protecting vulnerable
lands. Further, extending subsidies for crop
insurance without linking them to conservation compliance presents a concern with
regard to risk management. As mentioned,
crop insurance seeks to protect farmers
from extreme weather events like flooding
and drought. These types of weather events
are expected to increase in intensity and
frequency due to climate change.29 Draining wetlands and farming on highly erodible
5 Farm Bill: Protecting Conservation Compliance Programs
lands both increase the vulnerability of cropland to these weather events and decrease
carbon sequestration.24
Providing insurance reduces farmers’ risks
from environmental threats, while removing
conservation compliance requirements
reduces their incentive to prevent them.
Insurance without compliance thus may
contribute to real damage to food security,
health, and the environment, not to mention
higher payouts and increased costs for
taxpayers. By allowing farmers to benefit
from crop insurance, but letting them off
the hook for conservation compliance,
the taxpayer makes four payouts—
while allowing farmers to contribute to
environmental degradation. The first
payout is for the crop insurance subsidy
itself. The second payout is for the rise in
insurance costs as the lack of conservation
compliance creates more agricultural
loss. The third payout is for the cost of
environmental damage resulting from farm
practices that have been allowed, such
as converting wetlands into cropland. And
the fourth payout is for the health costs
associated with environmental damage.
6 Farm Bill: Protecting Conservation Compliance Programs
Conclusion
As crop insurance becomes the dominant
farm safety net, the only responsible action
is to tie conservation compliance to all farm
support programs. Soil erosion and loss of
wetlands contribute to poor water and soil
quality, which, in turn, contribute to negative health impacts such as cancer, allergic
reactions, and neurological and reproductive
health problems. For the next Farm Bill to
promote human health, it should link conservation compliance provisions to federal crop
insurance subsidy programs and strengthen
enforcement of the provisions across all
USDA farm support programs. Conservation
compliance benefits farmers, too. Conservation helps level the playing field and incentivizes farmers to safeguard their land for
the future. The next Farm Bill should seek
to extend these provisions to federal crop
insurance subsidy programs and strengthen
enforcement of the provisions across all
USDA farm support programs.
As direct payments, or “farm ance
programs.
The Johns Hopkins Center
for a Livable Future (CLF)
supports the continuation and
enforcement of conservation
compliance requirements by
linking them to all farm support
programs, especially crop
insurance premium subsidies.
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The opinions expressed do not necessarily
reflect the views of Johns Hopkins University.