Copyright 2001 Times Publishing Company St.
Petersburg Times (Florida)
December 23, 2001, Sunday, 0 South Pinellas
Edition
SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. 8A
LENGTH: 745 words
HEADLINE:
Putnam takes heat from environmentalists - again
BYLINE: JOHN BALZ
DATELINE:
WASHINGTON
BODY: Adam Putnam
has finally made enemies, the same ones he made while serving in the state
Legislature: environmentalists.
Eleven months into his
congressional career, Putnam has drawn fire from environmental groups for
opposing an amendment to the farm bill last month that would
have taken $ 1.9-billion per year out of commodity crop programs and shifted the
money into conservation programs.
Environmentalists
claim that Putnam, R-Bartow, was a key reason for the amendment's defeat and
accuse him of not representing Florida farmers' interests.
Putnam denies the charge and defends his "no" vote, saying the
amendment would have excluded a majority of the state's producers.
But when a reporter commented that the adversarial
reputation he developed with Florida's environmental community seemed to be
repeating itself in Washington, Putnam said, "It is totally unintentional, but I
am going down that path."
Environmentalists had been
looking for support from states such as Florida that grow large amounts of
unsubsidized crops. Using data from the Department of Agriculture, the
Environmental Working Group predicted that Florida would have received an extra
$ 58-million a year if the amendment had passed, and Putnam's own district would
have seen $ 11.8-million of it.
The key detail buried
in the fine print, and one reason for Putnam's opposition, was that large
livestock farms of more than 1,000 beef cattle, 700 dairy cows or 200,000
chickens would have been excluded from the federal Environmental Quality
Incentives Programs. Dairy farmers are particularly sensitive to the $
200-million-a-year program to build the infrastructure to store and discard
manure safely.
"Adam Putnam stood for the position that
99 percent of the farms should lose because 99 percent and not 100 percent of
the farms would've won," said Scott Faber, a water resources specialist
with the Environmental Defense Fund.
The Florida Farm
Bureau, an opponent of the amendment, circulated its own figures indicating that
more than half of the state's dairy farms and 90 percent of the poultry farms
would be ineligible for the program. Disqualifying those larger producers,
Putnam said, would have effectively eliminated most of the state's local milk
production.
"It's the big dairy firms that are
producing the milk, not Tom and Jane with 12 cows in their back yard," he
said.
Craig Evans, the president of the Florida
Stewardship Foundation and a Putnam supporter, said that environmentalists in
Washington sat down to write the legislation without talking to farmers in
Florida about its effects.
By now, Putnam is familiar -
even comfortable - with environmentalists' wrath. Putnam said he doesn't
want to be the "poster child for looters and polluters," but once again, he
is on the environmental watch list.
Democrats think
Putnam has angered enough potential voters that they have targeted him as a
vulnerable Republican in the 2002 elections.
The
version of the farm bill that Putnam supported included $
14-billion in conservation funding, a 75 percent increase from 1996. And there
is no guarantee that fruit and vegetable growers would have gotten more money if
the amendment had passed.
But the pool of conservation
money would have been twice as big, and historically fruit and vegetable growers
do well under those programs.
Florida has 218 dairies
and roughly 80 have more than 700 cows, according to the Florida Department of
Agriculture. Hines Boyd, the department's dairy division director, said state
dairies grow every year as more homeowners balk at living close to new ones.
Two dairy farms operate in Putnam's home county of Polk.
Both have fewer than 700 cows and thus would have remained eligible under the
amendment.
Mike Carey owns one of them, H.C. Dairy in
Lakeland. He is a full-time farmer who likes Putnam because "he listens to both
sides."
Carey tends to about 500 cows and admits he
didn't follow the farm bill debate. He has never tried to take
advantage of the EQIP program because he didn't know it existed.
Every summer, Carey spends $ 10,000 to keep manure from seeping into a
lagoon on his property, a project that the government could fund half of if he
adhered to a certain environmental protocol.
Currently,
Carey said he is not hurting for any additional EQIP money, "but that isn't to
say I'm not going to need it in the future."
- John
Balz can be reached at (202) 463-0579 or at balz@sptimes.com.
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