Special Report
Conservation cuts concern groups
Conservation is promoted and practiced with help from other organizations. There is, however, a degree of concern among conservation interests about proposed Obama Administration budget cuts.
At the same time that President Obama was proposing his budget, USDA Undersecretary Harris Sherman was telling the National Association of Conservation Districts annual convention that many federal programs will have to live with frozen or lower budgets.
NACD Secretary Treasurer Jack Majeres, a land owner from Dell Rapids, South Dakota, hopes that increased conservation funding of the 2008 Farm Bill will stand, but regardless of that, he says conservation districts have help.
“We have many partners out there across the country, other farm organizations, wildlife groups, what have you, that are partnering together with us to make sure that those dollars are continuing to flow to conserve our natural resources,” Majeres told Brownfield in an interview during a break in the convention.
AUDIO: Jack Majeres (5 min. MP3)
Later Monday, however, as more details of the budget emerged, it was learned that the President proposes to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from conservation programs provided in the 2008 Farm Bill. While funding for many conservation programs is higher than it was last year, President Obama’s proposed budget includes cuts in what Congress authorized for conservation this year, according to Natural Resources Conservation Service Chief Dave White, who spoke Tuesday at the NACD convention.
Regardless, the proposed cuts in authorization are drawing criticism from the group American Farmland Trust.
“The fact of the matter is, slashing these programs will do nothing significant to address our nation’s budget problems while it will dramatically reduce our ability to protect the resources,” says Jon Scholl, American Farmland Trust (AFT) President, in a news release. “We’re concerned that it is penny-wise now, and will be very pound foolish in the future.”
In the news release, Scholl pointed out that the proposal represents nearly a 20% cut to working-lands conservation programs, “yet agriculture is the most cost-effective solution to these very real environmental challenges,” he said.
Some of the key cuts concerning AFT include the Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program. The FRPP is a cost-share program that helps farmers keep their land in agriculture in perpetuity and is slated for $55 million in cuts over the next two years.
Another cut in funds authorized by Congress is proposed for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). Those funds help landowners install buffer strips between fields and streams and fence livestock out of waterways. The authorization is slated to be reduced by $380 million, or by 31% in 2011, although according to NRCS Chief White, actual funding for EQIP is slightly higher than a year ago.
The Conservation Security Program (CSP) is to be cut by hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on the final reimbursement rate per acre used, according to the AFT news release. CSP provides cost-share monies to farmers to assist in implementing on-farm stewardship practices on working farm and ranchland.
The incentive program EQIP is vital in helping our farmers and ranchers to continue in business, especially with the economy in such bad shape. It just seems to me that, cuts can be made somewhere else other than conservation.