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Fact Sheet on the Dirty Farm Bill (H.R. 2646) The Dirty Farm Bill passed the House of Representative 226 - 200. Please visit Votewatch to see how your Representative voted.The House-passed bill subsidizes corporate agribusiness and does nothing to help the family farmer. H.R. 2646:
The House-passed bill fails to address clean water, critical habitat and other environmental concerns. H.R. 2646:
The Senate has the chance to correct these mistakes and enact a new Farm Bill that protects the environment and our food supply, and rewards family farmers. The Sierra Club opposes the House-passed Dirty Farm Bill and supports amendments to help farmers protect our environment. We support amendments that:
The House Dirty Farm Bill Subsidizes the Fat Cats H.R. 2646 continues the traditional farm program payments to the few basic farm commodities, such as corn, soybeans, wheat, oats and cotton. These payments favor large farms over small farms, cause excess production and keep prices artificially low. And they favor farming methods that have harsher environmental impacts. The bill also refocuses conservation and environmental improvement programs by making them more available to the largest farmers on the landowners own terms, without accountability to the public or concern for water quality or wildlife. The House Dirty Farm Bill Fails to Protect Clean Water by Subsidizing Animal Factories Massive hog, cow, and poultry factories that pollute our water and air have put more than half of smaller operators out of business already. The waste management practices of animal factories have caused millions of gallons of animal waste to enter streams and groundwater through leakage, flooding and bursting of lagoons. Air pollution and odor from CAFOs has sickened neighboring children, forced residents indoors, and decreased local property values. H.R. 2646 would allow these giant polluters to get subsidies through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). EQIP is a voluntary conservation program for farmers and ranchers who face serious threats to soil, water, and related natural resources. EQIP provides cost-share funds to allow agricultural and livestock operators to enroll in 5- to 10-year contracts to design and install practices to improve water quality, wildlife habitat, wetlands and grazing lands. Current eligibility requirements for enrollment in EQIP prohibit the use of cost-share funds for construction of animal waste storage and treatment facilities at large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), i.e., those with over 1000 animal units. The Dirty Farm bill removes this prohibition, redirecting the funds from small farmers to favor the giant, wealthy agribusinesses that can afford to, and should be paying to, clean up their own wastes. The House Dirty Farm Bill Fails to Protect Wetlands that Absorb Flood Waters and Pollution H.R. 2646 guts the Wetlands Reserve Program -- one of the most successful programs for protecting wetlands. The program has allowed farmers to successfully preserve or restore nearly 1 million acres of wetlands. The WRP helps farmers take out of production farmland that is otherwise unsuitable for agricultural use because it is highly prone to flooding. The land is preserved or restored to provide critical ecological functions such as storing floodwaters, filtering sediments that cause pollution, and providing habitat for wildlife. Removing such marginal lands from production also helps control prices by providing disincentives for farmers to overproduce. Today, there are over 3,000 farms and ranches waiting to enroll another 570,000 acres of wetlands. The Dirty Farm Bill authorizes only an additional 150,000 acres per year. In contrast, Rep. Ron Kind's Working Lands Stewardship Act (H.R. 2375) would allow for an additional 250,000 acres per year. Instead of strengthening the WRP, the Dirty Farm Bill removes many of the aspects that have made it successful, such as the prioritization on permanent easements, the prohibition of spraying or mowing for pest control, and requirements that USDA conduct restoration plans in coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The bill also guts the "Swampbuster" enforcement provisions of current laws. Swampbuster makes farmers who fill in or otherwise destroy wetlands ineligible for a broad range of farm assistance programs. H.R. 2646 narrows the loans and payments that USDA may consider making a producer ineligible for to only those loans and payments related to the agricultural commodity produced during the crop year in which the violation occurred. The House Dirty Farm Bill Fails to Reward Lands Conservation The Dirty Farm Bill authorizes funding for the Farmland Protection Program at a paltry $50 million annually. The Farmland Protection Program helps state and local governments purchase development rights from farmers and ranchers who volunteer to sell easements on their land and commit to keeping the land in agriculture permanently. More than 4,000 farmers are willing to enroll their land into the Farmland Protection Program, but demand already exceeds available funding by a six-to-one ratio. In contrast, legislation introduced by Rep. Ron Kind (H.R. 2375) authorizes Farmland Protection at $500 million annually. The House Dirty Farm Bill Fails to Adequately Protect Wildlife Habitat on Farmland The Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP) shares the cost of building wildlife habitat on private lands. Fifteen percent of program funding has historically been used to develop wildlife habitat for federally endangered and threatened species. Experts estimate that 10,000 landowners would annually seek assistance to protect and restore wildlife habitat if adequate funding were available. Currently, there is a backlog of over 3,000 landowners who have applied for funding but were not accepted due to low funding levels. The Dirty Farm Bill would reauthorize WHIP at a paltry $25 million annually, even though the program has enrolled 1.4 million acres and many farmers continue to wait in line to enroll. In contrast, Rep. Kind's Working Lands Stewardship Act (H.R. 2375) would provide $500 million annually for the program. The House Dirty Farm Bill Fails to Provide a Separate Source of Funding for Stewardship Incentives for Farmers on Working Lands Current conservation programs are heavily weighted toward taking sensitive lands out of production in order to preserve environmental values, with 85 percent of financial assistance currently going for land retirement and restoration. Yet the vast majority of farmland must stay in production, and financial assistance is needed for conservation practices on working lands. Farmers should be rewarded for integrating sustainable farming practices into their food and fiber production systems. Farmers can improve water quality, air quality, and wildlife habitat, and conserve energy if incentives are in place. Furthermore, current conservation programs are not equally available to all kinds of farms in all regions. The Conservation Security Act proposes an integrated incentives program whereby all farmers can earn financial rewards for the environmental benefits they produce on their farms. The Dirty House Farm Bill Provides Incentives for the Damaging Logging Program The House Farm Bill contains an anti-environmental provision that authorizes permanent stewardship contracting on National Forest lands. This authority is currently being tested by the U.S. Forest Service, which has been granted the authority for 56 stewardship pilot projects. Most of the projects are still in the planning phase but several have already become mired in controversy due to the amount of logging being proposed. Stewardship contracting creates a perverse financial incentive for resource extraction created by the "goods for services" authority which allows the Forest Service to give away unlimited amounts of trees to pay for stewardship projects. This financial incentive encourages managers to include resource extraction in restoration projects. The Forest Service has a history of lacking accountability on the implementation of these and other logging projects. Logging is no longer an appropriate use of federal public forests. An appropriate and effective restoration program should be based on creating desired ecological benefits and restoring natural conditions and processes. Logging creates only 2 percent of all jobs produced on the National Forest System. Increasing incentives to log will damage National Forest economic benefits and jobs, as well as degrade recreational opportunities and fish and wildlife habitat. Stewardship contracting should be removed from the Farm Bill entirely. For more information on these issues, contact Amy Maron at amy.maron@sierraclub.org or Brett Hulsey at brett.hulsey@sierraclub.org. Up to Top |
