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Congressional Testimony
July 31, 2001, Tuesday
SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY
LENGTH: 1658 words
COMMITTEE:
SENATE AGRICULTURE,NUTRITION & FORESTRY
HEADLINE: 2002
FARM BILL
TESTIMONY-BY: DAVE SERFLING
BODY: July 31, 2001
Statement of Dave
Serfling
Good morning. My name is Dave Serfling and I want to thank the
Committee for the opportunity to speak with you today. I am testifying on behalf
of the Land Stewardship Project, a Minnesota- based, non-profit farm
organization committed to fostering a renewed ethic and practice of stewardship
toward farmland and promoting a sustainable system of agriculture. LSP is a
member of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the National Campaign for
Sustainable Agriculture.
I appreciate this opportunity to share my
perspectives with you. I would like to sincerely thank you for your generous
support of my farm in southeast Minnesota over the past five years. Through the
help of the AMTA, LDP, SHOP, EQIP and SARE programs, we have been able to
average a little over $20,000 in government subsidies over the last five years
on our 350 acre farm. It has really helped. Our farm has beef, swine, and sheep
enterprises. We try really hard to market all our crop production through the
livestock. We have a six-year crop rotation of CCOMMM (corn, corn, oats, meadow,
meadow, meadow) with the meadow either being hayed or grazed rotationally. Our
farm is gently rolling, but is 85 percent classified as HEL (highly erodible
land). It is good land but needs to be protected.
My area of southeast
Minnesota is still populated by many family farmers similar to me. They too have
benefited and survived in large part because of your generosity. Farmers have
become adept at "farming" the government program to maximize their subsidies.
The present strategy has become maximize yield, maximize LDP, and sell at higher
prices that may come. This is the so-called "Redeem and Dream" strategy: redeem
at high LDPs and dream about higher prices. Even though many marketing
consultants caution farmers about the risk of this strategy, most farmers have
found this strategy to be the most profitable, especially this year.
But
many farmers have looked at the latest government subsidies and have decided
that the easiest way to increase their government payments is to increase their
acres. A neighbor of mine, who used to run a farrow-to-finish hog operation, has
turned to contract hog production and increased crop acres because he said, "at
least we know the government will help the crop farmer." Decisions like that
have caused escalating rental rates and increasing land values even during this
time of terribly low market prices. This has even made it tougher for young
farmers to get started farming.
The popular corn and soybean rotation
has made big inroads on our rolling hills as our farms are consolidated and
enlarged. As a result, we have had the worst soil erosion that I have ever seen
occur during the last two years. Even our most conservation- minded farmers
using no-till and strip-till techniques have suffered severe erosion. Farmers
are not responding to the market, they are responding to government subsidies.
And taxpayers are paying twice: once when they support commodity payments and
again when they pay for the environmental cleanup needed because of overly
intensive row-crop production.
I am asking you today to consider a new
program to give farmers an incentive other than producing surpluses of program
crops. We need it for our farms and our farmers. This last April 5th we got an
inch and a half of rain in less than one hour during our snowmelt. We had a lot
of frost in the ground yet so it couldn't soak in. As I walked our farm after
the rain I saw severe soil erosion on every cornfield. Even cornstalks that
hadn't been touched except for a gleaning by our beef cows were ripped out by
their roots and carried away. Draws that drained as little as three acres looked
like river channels. The only fields on my farm that did not have any damage
were the hayfields and pastures. The tight sod just let the water run over it.
I'm a big believer in forages. They protect the land, spread out our labor,
build soil, and fix nitrogen. But it is terribly hard for them to compete with
program row crops economically.
We need stewardship incentives that help
promote conservation on our working lands. We have spent 85 percent of our
conservation dollars on land retirement and only 15 percent on working land. We
need to achieve a better balance in our conservation spending. Resource-based
land retirement programs have their place, but are expensive on a per-acre basis
and need to be tightly targeted to achieve maximum environmental gain. But there
is an even bigger role for support for working, productive farmland. I would
challenge you to envision a future in which two-thirds of our conservation
funding is for working land--we can produce similar benefits as CRP and help
provide economic return for main street and for farmers. I urge you to adopt
this two-thirds/one-third split as your goal in the next
farm
bill. I am a big believer in farm ingenuity. In recent years
we've seen tremendous growth in grass dairying, organic production, and direct
marketing. You have over one million creative farmer minds out there in the
country. If you tell them the environmental results that you want and give them
financial incentive to achieve them, they will find a way to deliver.
This brings me to asking you for your support of the Conservation
Security Act. Enactment of CSA would be a great start on getting strong
conservation on our working lands. It consists of three levels of conservation.
The farmer has the choice of which level to participate in.
The first
level every farmer can achieve by using conservation tillage, nutrient
management, integrated pest management, and other core conservation practices.
The second level encourages farmers to incorporate a more complex crop rotation
than for instance in my area, corn-soybeans. A forage or small grain crop must
be included and if you are grazing you must have a planned rotational system.
Installation of buffer practices is also included in the second level. This
second level responds to the need for some shifts in land use to reach resource
conservation goals.
The third level is where I hope the farmer's
creativity really will come into play. This is where he can use such techniques
as whole farm, total resource planning to work with local NRCS staff to
individualize the conservation benefits on his or her farm through innovative
practices. For example, in my area we have actually documented a benefit to
streams by controlled grazing of stream banks. This was a farmer innovation that
produced a narrower but deeper channel and provided better fish habitat and
cleaner water.
A new Multiple Benefits of Agriculture Project study
being released shortly by the Land Stewardship Project has hard numbers showing
that innovative changes in farming systems would produce many "multiple
benefits" in our rural areas--everything from reduced erosion and less chemical
contamination to lower levels of greenhouse gases. I have attached a brief
summary of project results to date to the back of my testimony.
The
Conservation Security Act is a fundamental shift in farm policy. It isn't a land
retirement program. It does reward farmers for solid conservation, wildlife
habitat, and water protection. It does not affect the market or jeopardize trade
agreements. Under CSA farmers would produce their products for the market, and
receive a price for those products from the market. But the difference is this
policy will provide incentives for farmers to produce other, non-market
benefits. The CSA addresses all kinds of agriculture in all regions of the
country, and it supports diversification and public benefits while moving the
government away from supporting only program crop production. This will sell to
your urban and suburban constituents and to your colleagues from regions with
few program crop acres -- and we need their support to pass this
farm
bill. CSA in my view needs to achieve a funding base that is
substantial so that all farmers and ranchers who want to participate and develop
solid conservation plans can in fact participate, and not be turned away due to
lack of funding. CSA funding needs to be comparable to AMTA funding levels in
the
farm bill just ending.
I would also like to pass on
a few comments about the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). We
still need programs like EQIP to help farmers fix problems. Farmers can use EQIP
funds to address specific obstacles creatively and effectively, and then be able
to participate in the Conservation Security Program at the appropriate level. I
oppose EQIP's limited dollars going to very large confined animal feeding
operations. The largest operations must satisfy Clean Water Act requirements--it
is a cost of doing business, and has been for 25 years. The taxpayer should not
subsidize them with EQIP funds and the program should not be used to encourage
further concentration. In addition, we should consider going to a 50 percent
cost-share with EQIP funds. This will stretch the funds and give the farmer more
ownership and input on his or her solutions.
I also urge you to extend
conservation compliance into the new
farm bill and to apply it
to all federal subsidy programs, including crop insurance. I also urge you to
remove loopholes in conservation compliance and make sure it gets enforced. We
need a level playing field when it comes to compliance. Everyone should have to
do at least a minimum amount of soil protection to even qualify for these
programs. The new
farm bill should also ensure that grasslands
cannot be broken out and then qualify for program subsidies, increasing
overproduction at the expense of the taxpayer and the environment.
Please don't tell the farmers how to farm. Just tell us what results you
want to see on working land, give us meaningful financial incentives, and we
American farmers will not let you down. Thank you.
LOAD-DATE: August 2, 2001