Farm Policy: Overview

On a hot day you load up your family and the boat for a short trip to the Mississippi River for some fun. When you get there, the river is brown and smells disgusting. One sign says don't swim here because the bacteria level is high. Another sign says don't eat the fish because they might contain chemicals bad for your health. The nearby backwaters are so full of silt, you decide not to risk getting your boat hung up. At a stop in town for refreshments, they are selling bottled water at exorbitant prices because the tap water is high in nitrates and dangerous for young children to drink.

What's happened to our beautiful Mississippi River?

Decades of bad farming practices in the heartland of Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri have caused sediment, fertilizer, and pesticides to be carried by rainfall runoff from farm fields into creeks and rivers that feed the big Mississippi River.

Downstream in the Gulf of Mexico the situation is even worse. The Mississippi River brings the nutrients from the Midwest to a 6,000- to 8,000-square-mile "Dead Zone" just off the coast, where each summer there is no oxygen for fish and other aquatic life because fertilizers upset the food chain. Shrimp boats and fishermen are losing a tremendously rich resource because of pollution from far away.

Are farmers just being careless? Certainly most could use better conservation practices and different farming systems. Indeed, some of the most careful working farms have already stopped applying excess fertilizer, reduced soil disturbance, sheltered the soil with living plants or residue from last year's crops, and rotated crops so plants better anchor the soil and help absorb rainfall. They raise livestock on pasture, where the permanent grass virtually stops pollution from leaving the farm. They plant grasses and trees next to rivers and on steeper slopes to filter runoff. But many other farmers in the Mississippi's watershed are still using bad practices that endanger water quality and the health of the river's ecosystem. The question—why?

Farm policies drive farmers' decisions

What drives farmers' decisions? Why don't they all stop the pollution?

Farmers do care about resources, but they are also trying to make a living in a difficult economy. They respond to farm policies that determine the economics of their business. The reality is that U.S. farm policies richly reward maximum production of a few commodity crops, while providing modest financial incentives—or even disincentives—for conservation. The pollution that destroys the watershed of the Mississippi River is not intended by farm policies or by the farmers, but nevertheless, it's a predictable result.

Agriculture policies are set by Congress every five years or so in a package of laws and programs called the "farm bill." Those policies are neither inevitable nor unchanging. Each farm bill brings the opportunity to drop bad programs and launch or expand better ones.

Indeed, the most recent farm bill in 2002 turned a corner and nearly doubled funding for conservation incentives. It created a new working lands policy called the Conservation Security Program which provides a new model for farm policy—one that rewards the environmental benefits farmers provide, rather than rewarding maximum production of a few intensive crops.

The Conservation Security Program allows every farmer the opportunity to design a whole farm plan to solve resource problems on their farm, in return for 5 to 10 years of annual payments commensurate with the environmental benefits provided. Farmers can earn up to $45,000 per year for solving all resource concerns on their entire farm. The Conservation Security Program is starting off slowly with limited funds and numerous enrollment restrictions in 2004. But with strong support, it can grow to be a premier conservation program and a model for future farm policy.

It's not too early to begin shaping the next farm bill. Because of its dominance in the Mississippi River basin, agriculture is both the biggest threat to the river as well as the biggest opportunity to restore a functioning ecosystem. Moving towards a "green payments" policy in 2007 could support working farmlands that produce both profit and environmental benefits.