EarthX Website: https://earthxmedia.com/
Agriculture affects our environment in significant ways, but farms are largely exempt from US environmental laws. The Farm Bill guides US farm policy, yet impacts the business choices farmers make.
About Law & Nature:
Discussions of Environmental Law & Policy developed by the EarthxLaw Advisory Council
Law & Nature promises lively discussions by environmental thought leaders on legal and policy issues of critical importance to environmental protection. This series is developed by the EarthxLaw Advisory Council, a blue ribbon board of prominent environmental law practitioners brought together by EarthX to assist in developing programs and facilitating dialog on environmental law and policy.
EarthX
Love Our Planet.
The Official Network of Earth Day.
About Us:
At EarthX, we believe our planet is a pretty special place. The people, landscapes, and critters are likely unique to the entire universe, so we consider ourselves lucky to be here. We are committed to protecting the environment by inspiring conservation and sustainability, and our programming along with our range of expert hosts support this mission. We’re glad you’re with us.
EarthX is a media company dedicated to inspiring people to care about the planet. We take an omni channel approach to reach audiences of every age through its robust 24/7 linear channel distributed across cable and FAST outlets, along with dynamic, solution oriented short form content on social and digital platforms. EarthX is home to original series, documentaries and snackable content that offer sustainable solutions to environmental challenges. EarthX is the only network that delivers entertaining and inspiring topics that impact and inspire our lives on climate and sustainability.
EarthX Website: https://earthxmedia.com/
Follow Us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/earthxmedia/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/earthxmedia
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EarthXMedia/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@earthxmedia
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EarthXMedia
How to watch:
United States:
- Spectrum
- AT&T U-verse (1267)
- DIRECTV (267)
- Philo
- FuboTV
- Plex
- Fire TV
#EarthDay #Environment #Sustainability #EcoFriendly #Conservation #EarthX
Agriculture affects our environment in significant ways, but farms are largely exempt from US environmental laws. The Farm Bill guides US farm policy, yet impacts the business choices farmers make.
About Law & Nature:
Discussions of Environmental Law & Policy developed by the EarthxLaw Advisory Council
Law & Nature promises lively discussions by environmental thought leaders on legal and policy issues of critical importance to environmental protection. This series is developed by the EarthxLaw Advisory Council, a blue ribbon board of prominent environmental law practitioners brought together by EarthX to assist in developing programs and facilitating dialog on environmental law and policy.
EarthX
Love Our Planet.
The Official Network of Earth Day.
About Us:
At EarthX, we believe our planet is a pretty special place. The people, landscapes, and critters are likely unique to the entire universe, so we consider ourselves lucky to be here. We are committed to protecting the environment by inspiring conservation and sustainability, and our programming along with our range of expert hosts support this mission. We’re glad you’re with us.
EarthX is a media company dedicated to inspiring people to care about the planet. We take an omni channel approach to reach audiences of every age through its robust 24/7 linear channel distributed across cable and FAST outlets, along with dynamic, solution oriented short form content on social and digital platforms. EarthX is home to original series, documentaries and snackable content that offer sustainable solutions to environmental challenges. EarthX is the only network that delivers entertaining and inspiring topics that impact and inspire our lives on climate and sustainability.
EarthX Website: https://earthxmedia.com/
Follow Us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/earthxmedia/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/earthxmedia
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EarthXMedia/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@earthxmedia
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EarthXMedia
How to watch:
United States:
- Spectrum
- AT&T U-verse (1267)
- DIRECTV (267)
- Philo
- FuboTV
- Plex
- Fire TV
#EarthDay #Environment #Sustainability #EcoFriendly #Conservation #EarthX
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Hello, I'm Susan Schneider, the William H. Enfield Professor at the University of Arkansas
00:12School of Law and the Director of the LLM Program in Agricultural and Food Law.
00:18Our topic today is the Farm Bill, the major environmental law you've never heard of.
00:25The Farm Bill is an omnibus, multi-year law that governs an array of agricultural and
00:29food programs.
00:31Enacted approximately every five years, it essentially sets farm policy.
00:37It's one of the last remnants of bipartisan agreement, with that agreement only reached
00:42because of the careful balancing of interests between the farm and nutrition communities.
00:49Its impacts are diverse and significant.
00:53Our current Farm Bill was enacted in 2018, and negotiations are already underway for
00:58its replacement in 2023.
01:03Today we're going to explore the Farm Bill and environmental law with two very distinguished
01:07environmental law attorneys.
01:10Peter Lehner is a managing attorney at Earth Justice, directing the Sustainable Food and
01:16Farming Program.
01:18And Michael Drysdale is of counsel with the law firm of Dorsey and Whitney, where he has
01:23practiced environmental law for over 25 years.
01:28Peter and Mike, could you each tell us a little bit about your environmental law and agriculture
01:33experience?
01:34Peter, let's begin with you.
01:37Sure.
01:38I started off working for the city of New York, where we have a water supply that is
01:44upstate, and one of the challenges was keeping that enormous surface water supply clean.
01:51And I found that the environmental laws gave me a great tool, me in the city of New York,
01:58a powerful tool to prevent pollution from most human sources into our drinking water.
02:03But it was a real challenge to address the waste from, for example, a number of the dairies
02:08and other agricultural operations.
02:11I later worked and ran the Environmental Bureau for the New York State Attorney General's
02:16Office, and I saw the same thing statewide, that the environmental laws provide a really
02:22strong tool for addressing pollution from, for example, sewage treatment plants or industrial
02:28sources, but a much less powerful tool for addressing agricultural pollution.
02:36And later, when I was running NRDC, a national environmental group, we saw the same thing
02:42nationally.
02:43And each time, I saw the mismatch between the pollution caused by much of industrial
02:48agriculture and the challenges that environmental law faces in addressing that pollution.
02:57The key to all of this is the Farm Bill.
02:59The Farm Bill is the one bill that addresses agriculture in both its positive and its negative
03:05aspects, and that's why I turned to start focusing on that.
03:12Mike, could you share with us your environmental and agricultural law experience?
03:17Sure.
03:18I've sort of been on the other side of the table.
03:20I've worked with agricultural industry clients my whole career.
03:26These can run the range from pretty small family operations to quite large crop processors.
03:32And across that range, there's a great deal of variation in how much their operations
03:38are constrained and regulated by the traditional environmental laws.
03:42But nearly all of them have a very large stake in the Farm Bill, and indeed often structure
03:47their entire businesses around what the Farm Bill supports, subsidizes, disincentivizes,
03:54et cetera.
03:55So it really is a major gravitational force in their entire industry.
04:03And thank you both for being with us.
04:05Before we jump into unpacking the Farm Bill and its impact on environmental law, we really
04:10need to explore the environmental impact of agriculture here in the United States.
04:14Peter, can you provide some explanation?
04:17Sure.
04:18I think it's important first to recognize that agriculture in the U.S. is actually quite
04:24good at doing what it is largely designed to do, designed, as Mike said, by the Farm
04:28Bill, which is to say it produces tremendous quantities of food, fiber, and even fuel,
04:34bio corn for ethanol.
04:37And food is now cheaper than it's been in decades.
04:40We export a lot of food.
04:42And so it has been successful.
04:45It's doing exactly what it meant to do.
04:48However, that production has consequences.
04:50It uses a vast amount of land.
04:52There's about 800 million acres used for grazing, 400 million acres used for crops,
04:59only about half of which are actually eaten by humans.
05:01The others are used for animal feed.
05:03That's about 62% of the contiguous U.S. is used for agriculture.
05:09It also uses about 80% of our water, as you can probably imagine.
05:14And on the other side, it actually is a major pollution source.
05:18As I mentioned earlier, the Clean Water Act, for example, has done a great job cleaning
05:22up industrial sources of pollution, but much less so from agricultural water pollution.
05:27So agriculture now is one of the dominant sources of water pollution, runoff from fields
05:33and animal operations, especially excess fertilizer and pesticides in manure, soil erosion.
05:41You've probably heard of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, eutrophication in Chesapeake
05:46Bay or drinking water contamination, algae blooms.
05:50All of these water pollution problems are significantly contributed to by agricultural
05:56runoff.
05:57There's also, in another way, you probably don't think of agriculture as a major source
06:02of air pollution, but actually that's also true.
06:05There are some toxic gases such as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia that come from animal
06:09operations, smog producing nitrogen oxides from fertilizers, fine dust, contaminating
06:17often local communities.
06:19And much of this often will carry the pathogens, the disease causing organisms, or even antibiotics
06:26from farms.
06:27Also, of course, all the truck emissions.
06:30So it's a major source of air pollution.
06:33And then because it uses all that land, it has changed a tremendous amount of habitat.
06:37It's the dominant reason why natural habitats, which says maybe wetlands or a forest or native
06:44grasslands have been converted into agricultural land, which causes tension with wild species,
06:51whether it be wolves or bears, where ranchers want to be, or aquatic creatures, whether
06:57it be salamanders or mussels, and all of these thriving from this enormous amount of land
07:05and water that agriculture uses.
07:08And finally, it's a major user of water, as I said earlier, which in some places, I'm
07:12in the fairly rainy Northeast where that's less of an issue.
07:16But in dry California, the use of water by agriculture puts a real stress on, for example,
07:23municipal water supply needs.
07:25And in the Midwest, agriculture is often draining some of the important aquifers.
07:31So we've got agriculture that, on the one hand, produces a tremendous amount of food
07:36very cheaply, and on the other hand, has these environmental consequences that haven't fully
07:41been addressed.
07:42Unfortunately, many of these impacts particularly affect communities of color.
07:47For example, pesticides obviously affect farm workers, two-thirds of whom are people of
07:52color.
07:53And in North Carolina, another example, which is one of the top pork-producing states, almost
07:59all of the major swine facilities are located in communities of color.
08:05And I would just add to that, that among those enormous numbers that Peter was just referring
08:10to, you have a tremendous diversity of practices and companies, everything from very small
08:19operations to quite large operations, all of which have very disparate impacts.
08:26And also within that range of operations, you also have a tremendous degree of sophistication
08:33and technical resources in terms of people's ability to be sensitive and to be responsive
08:41to the environmental issues that may be causing.
08:44I don't know of anybody in the industry who is looking to cause environmental impacts,
08:49but these are operations that are often functioning on razor-thin margins.
08:55Their dominant objective is to produce food that they can then earn a living from.
09:01And if there are environmental consequences associated with that that are allowed, either
09:05because they're not regulated or they are expressly permitted, that's going to happen
09:12to a certain degree.
09:13So this isn't a situation of bad actors or evil intent or anything like that.
09:21It's simply consequences of the system we have set up.
09:26We also need to raise the issue of climate change.
09:30How does agriculture and our food system contribute to climate change?
09:34And what risks are there for our food system in a changing climate?
09:37Peter?
09:38Well, let me address the risks first, which is, I think, something that every farmer or
09:44rancher is seeing more now.
09:47Climate is changing.
09:48And whether it be more floods and more droughts, more extreme storms, increased range of pests
09:54and heat waves, which are terrifically damaging to both animals and, of course, workers, wildfires,
10:01all of these probably affect agriculture more than almost any other form of sector of our
10:07economy because agriculture is so dependent on the weather.
10:10And it's not just extreme events, it's regular patterns.
10:14Climate change really depends on regular patterns, which are changing.
10:18In terms of agriculture's contribution to climate change, it's tricky because most people
10:23think about climate change as caused by the burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon
10:28dioxide.
10:29And agriculture's primary contribution to climate change is really not so much carbon
10:35dioxide, although there is some carbon dioxide from all the farm equipment and energy used
10:39on farms.
10:40One of the main ways agriculture contributes to climate change is through emissions of
10:44methane.
10:46Methane come from emissions from manure and from cattle themselves, that every time they
10:52breathe out, they breathe a significant amount of methane.
10:54So the cattle industry, the agricultural industry, produces about as much methane in the U.S.
11:00as the oil and gas industry.
11:02But we rarely think of that.
11:04And methane, as you probably know, is a potent greenhouse gas over 20 years.
11:11It's more than 80 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
11:16The other major way that agriculture contributes to climate change is through emissions of
11:20nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas that's about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
11:28And that largely comes from excess fertilizers.
11:31American farmers, for a variety of reasons, tend to put more fertilizer on their plants
11:36than the plants can actually take up.
11:39Some of that fertilizer runs off, as I mentioned earlier, and creates nutrient pollution.
11:44But other of it is converted by bacterial mechanisms into nitrous oxide, which also,
11:52which as I said, is a potent greenhouse gas.
11:55And finally, the last contribution of agriculture to climate change is through the conversion
12:00of land itself.
12:02Healthy lands, forests or grasslands, for example, have a tremendous amount of carbon
12:07in the soil.
12:09When that land is converted into agriculture and plowed every year and tilled every year,
12:14all of that carbon or much of that carbon is lost to the atmosphere, mixes with oxygen
12:19in the atmosphere and is lost as carbon dioxide.
12:22So the soils are depleted and less fertile, and it's lost a lot of carbon dioxide.
12:28So those are the three or four main ways that agriculture contributes to climate change.
12:35Yeah, and I, you know, the other thing that's important about the climate change impact
12:39of agriculture is how recent and rapidly evolving our understanding of these impacts are.
12:46I mean, most of the environmental laws that we'll be talking about a little bit later
12:51date from the 1970s, when climate change wasn't really on the radar at all.
12:57And even as recently as a couple of farm bills ago, there wasn't that, the kind of understanding
13:02of the impacts of agriculture and the climate that we have today, even by year by year,
13:09we learn more about the interaction of soils and carbon, the carbon cycle, how different
13:17practices may increase emissions or reduce them or modify them.
13:24And so not only do we have a sector that has a large impact, but it's sort of the least
13:28understood in many ways of the big sectors.
13:31We've kind of known about the power industries impacts for quite some time, and those are
13:36pretty straightforward.
13:37Same for the transportation sector.
13:40But agricultural sector is, again, very diverse with very diverse impacts, and only recently
13:46and understood and with a very growing understanding.
13:51So that's another very important component to this whole issue.
13:55And I would just add, to be fair, it's also tougher to measure.
13:59We may have a couple of hundred power plants, and you can know exactly what's going on in
14:04the power plant and figure out the carbon dioxide emissions.
14:07It's pretty hard to both model and measure what's coming off of hundreds of millions
14:12of acres of land.
14:14And for example, I mentioned nitrous oxide.
14:16The amount of nitrous oxide can depend on a lot of factors, whether it rains shortly
14:21after fertilizer application, how close, the time of year, the crop, the region.
14:27So our understanding, as Mike said, is changing, and biological systems are frankly more complicated
14:33than burning a hunk of rock, like coal.
14:38This paints a dark picture for us.
14:41What structural issues are there that have allowed these problems to develop to this extent?
14:46Mike, could you explain a little bit about the structure of agriculture today and why
14:50it's hard to regulate for these types of environmental problems?
14:54Sure.
14:55I think there's a few factors at play here.
14:59One is, as we mentioned before, the sector is extremely diverse.
15:03There are a tremendous number and type of different operations that have tremendous
15:08variability in the types of impacts that they have.
15:11That means you can't adopt one-size-fits-all solutions, at least not as much as you can
15:16for some other sectors.
15:18Another thing that's very important is, while there still is a tremendous amount of diversity
15:23and there are many very small operations, in recent, the past couple of decades in particular,
15:30the industry has gotten much more concentrated.
15:33A much higher percentage of agricultural products are produced by very large operations and
15:41a very small number of operations.
15:43That tends to make the impacts and the emissions more concentrated and more impactful than
15:50when we think back to our older vision of agriculture as just a bunch of tiny farms
15:57scattered across the landscape.
16:01Then finally, on certain issues like climate change, agriculture and agriculture's impacts
16:07have simply not been a regulatory or technological priority up until very recently.
16:13As we were just talking about, the impacts of the sector have only recently been understood
16:18and that understanding is changing pretty rapidly.
16:21In that context, it makes sense that it has not been much of a focus of our regulators
16:27and our technological innovators on how to deal with it.
16:31All these things contribute to making it a uniquely difficult area to regulate.
16:36I want to emphasize, though, that at the same time that what makes it difficult, what Mike
16:42just said also provides a bit of hope, which is that even though there are a couple million
16:48farmers in the U.S. and even though maybe half of those are really not commercial farmers
16:54there for tax or lifestyle or other benefits, that's still a lot of farmers.
16:59It's a relatively small number of farmers, though, that cause or form operations, I should
17:05say, that cause the bulk of the pollution, that produce most of the product and produce
17:11most of the pollution.
17:13And that smaller number actually, I think, provides us a ray of hope.
17:18You don't have to work with hundreds of thousands or millions of operators.
17:22There's a much smaller number.
17:24For example, the top 10% of dairies produce 70% of the milk product.
17:29Those will be the ones you want to work with, not the other 90% and from a number of different
17:35perspectives.
17:36One other thing I would add to that, too, that I think it's important to consider is
17:40that while many of these are very large operations, many of the people who are the owners and
17:45operators are one or at most two generations removed from being the person on a small family
17:54farm.
17:55And so they come from a perspective where they don't often see the impacts that they
18:00have or are accustomed to the kind of regulations that other industries are.
18:06And that very much affects their willingness to engage in more environmentally sustainable
18:13practices, their receptiveness to new regulation, and their perception of their role in the
18:20overall environmental context.
18:22Well, what kind of agricultural practices or systems could we incorporate to resolve
18:30some of those problems and to lessen the carbon footprint of agriculture and better protect
18:35our food system?
18:36Peter, do you have some good news for us on that?
18:40I do.
18:41And the good news is really due to the work of many farmers around the country who have
18:49used sometimes relatively old approaches and then modernized them, but have refined a whole
18:58suite of what are sometimes known as agroecological practices that have a tremendous number of
19:04benefits.
19:06They dramatically reduce water pollution.
19:07They increase the carbon stored in the soil that I mentioned earlier can be released by
19:12agricultural operations.
19:14They can reduce the greenhouse gas emissions.
19:16They often reduce the need for chemicals and pesticides and thus significantly reducing
19:22costs.
19:24And they can also build resilience to climate change, resilience to the floods and droughts
19:29and heat waves.
19:30So these are great practices.
19:31Other things that you may have heard of, cover crops, making sure the ground isn't bare in
19:36the winter, rotating crops so that nature's diversity can build strength, not tilling
19:43the ground as much, adding trees to cropland or to grazing land, trees that have much bigger
19:48roots or other perennial crops, making sure you're rotating your cattle grazing rather
19:54than leaving them out there for a long time.
19:58All of these are well known at this point.
20:02They've been developed in many parts of the country, very often proven to be both terrific
20:08from an environmental perspective, but also much more profitable for the producer.
20:13Our challenge is that they're only used on a small portion of U.S. land, maybe two or
20:19three percent or a little more for some practices.
20:22So our goal should be to dramatically accelerate the adoption of these practices that have
20:28proven to be so effective.
20:31Yeah.
20:32And it's important also in terms of why many of these very creative practices are employed
20:38on such a small number of farms, is you have some really big obstacles to widespread implementation.
20:46And I would point to scaling, tailoring and financing.
20:50From a scaling perspective, it's how do we take something that's been demonstrated to
20:55be effective on a particular farm or particular pilot study or particular set of conditions
21:00and then scale that up to an industry that has very diverse practices around the country?
21:07Secondly, this question of tailoring, that where these innovative strategies are most
21:13effective is when they are very carefully structured and tailored to the particular
21:19operation.
21:20What does the contour of the land look like?
21:22Where is the drainage look like?
21:23What is the character of the soils?
21:26What are the particular crops and rotation of crops or other practices that are occurring?
21:30Having all that information together and factored into the design of a remedial measure is really
21:36important to making it work.
21:38But that requires a really deep understanding and consideration of the particulars of any
21:42specific farm.
21:44And then finally, financing.
21:46As I mentioned before, most agricultural operations, even some very large ones, operate
21:52on very small margins.
21:54And they are always vulnerable to the next bad crop cycle, the next downturn in the market,
22:02the next change in availability of credit, et cetera.
22:06And when push comes to shove, these operations are going to do what they need to do to survive.
22:10And if that means that they're going to plant some more on marginal land or they're going
22:14to apply fertilizers a little bit more aggressively than might be called for for environmental
22:19protection, they're going to do it if they're allowed to do it.
22:22And there's no way to make it economical for them to employ some more robust practices.
22:28So putting those three things together in a package that can then be used in a widespread
22:34way is a real, it's an opportunity, but it's a real difficult challenge.
22:41Well, as we work our way toward the Farm Bill and farm policy specifically, I think it's
22:48important to consider what major U.S. environmental laws we have and how these either apply to
22:54agriculture or don't apply to agriculture.
22:57Mike, could you start us off on this?
23:00Sure.
23:01Now, we don't really lack for environmental laws in this country, mostly stemming from
23:07the great burst of legislative activity that occurred in the 1970s.
23:11We have a wide array of environmental laws that cover a wide array of emissions and in
23:16many ways could cover most of the impacts of all agriculture.
23:19I'm going to throw up a slide here that sort of lists eight major environmental statutes.
23:25And as you can see from these, they go from sort of the traditional big hitters that we
23:29think of like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act to more sophisticated and tailored
23:36evidence-based laws like the Pesticide Acts and the Toxic Substances Acts.
23:42And if you add these all together, you really touch upon just about everything that agriculture
23:47could do.
23:49But as it turns out by both design and practice, agriculture gets off pretty lightly under
23:54these laws.
23:56First of all, from a design perspective, most of these statutes focus on what we call in
24:03the lingo point sources, pipes and stacks, define things through which pollutants come
24:10out of.
24:11And when these laws were passed, that was where most of the environmental pollution
24:16was coming from and most of the cleanup action could occur from.
24:21But as it turns out, most agricultural emissions don't come from pipes and stacks.
24:25They come from runoff from fields and very diverse and diffuse emissions from a whole
24:31variety of places that aren't pipes, aren't emission sources in that sense.
24:37In other cases, the law would seem to apply to certain emissions but have been interpreted
24:42by court decisions more narrowly.
24:44For example, combined or concentrated animal feeding units are a major source of emissions
24:50throughout the country and many of their emissions do come what would appear to be from pipes.
24:55But as the laws have been interpreted, in many cases they have been exempted.
25:00And so in that case, even though it would appear that the law covers a particular emission
25:04in practical reality and through judicial interpretation, it does not or does not as
25:08much as it could have.
25:11And finally, even where there is pretty clear statutory authority, oftentimes agriculture
25:16has gotten off lightly just as a practical and political matter.
25:21Both the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act have provisions that allow for the regulation
25:26of more diffuse non-point sources.
25:29But they're largely left to the states.
25:32And in general, agriculture has been lower profile in the targets for that kind of regulatory
25:38activity.
25:39That's for a variety of reasons.
25:41It's hard to do.
25:42The agricultural sector is well-motivated and politically powerful in most states.
25:48And so states have generally found it to their advantage to focus on other areas in lieu
25:53of agriculture.
25:54You add all these things up together, and even though we have an awful lot of regulatory
25:59authority to theoretically control agricultural emissions, in practice, it's not as great
26:06as one might imagine.
26:09I would simply add that one of the key factors of all of these environmental laws is some
26:14amount of transparency.
26:15An industrial source needs to have a permit and measure its emissions.
26:19And all of that is public.
26:21If you're not in the system, as most agriculture is not in the system, there's much less monitoring
26:28of the impacts.
26:29And whatever monitoring there is, is probably not publicly available.
26:33And so even though we know through EPA and other studies that as nationwide agriculture
26:40is having these tremendous environmental impacts, it's much tougher to get that down to a specific
26:46source or specific water body and get the type of evidence that, for example, I needed
26:51when I worked at the New York Attorney General's Office to enforce our pollution laws.
26:57So that secrecy or that lack of transparency, maybe better, puts a real barrier into addressing
27:06agricultural pollution through our environmental laws, as Mike pointed out.
27:13So clearly, we've got environmental problems associated with agricultural production.
27:19We've got an array of laws that, for one reason or another, are not applicable to the ag industry
27:25or are not being implemented in that way.
27:31And we've got transparency issues in terms of what's going on.
27:35What about the Farm Bill?
27:37How does the Farm Bill influence farming practices?
27:40And what impact does this have or can this have on environmental issues?
27:46So the Farm Bill, in many ways, sets the agenda for farming over the next five-year cycle.
27:55And while it has a number of titles and does quite a wide variety of things, I think it
28:01can be summarized as really three major, as it relates to the environment, three major
28:07activities.
28:09First, what the Farm Bill does is promote and support demand for agricultural products.
28:16That's through a variety of things, like food nutrition, food stamps, other things of this
28:21nature that try to get food on the table for Americans.
28:26And while that doesn't directly relate to environmental protection, it defines how we
28:33eat in a large measure, how a large percentage of this country eats.
28:37And what the Farm Bill, in doing so, does or does not do is define then what the emissions
28:43are going to be from that style of eating.
28:46To the extent the Farm Bill promotes the American diet, that means it's going to be promoting
28:51a diet that's rich in protein, that has a lot of animal products, and then has the emissions
28:57associated with animal products.
28:59Second thing that the Farm Bill does is promote and support the supply of agricultural products.
29:05The two big ways it does through that are things like crop insurance and price support
29:10programs.
29:11And what those do is those help farmers reliably and consistently get food to the market.
29:19That can be through protecting them through the adverse effects of weather and market
29:23cycles.
29:24It can be through giving a better price for their products so that production is higher
29:30than it would otherwise be.
29:32And then, of course, the crops that are supported, and there's really about 14 crops that are
29:37considered commodity crops that get the lion's share of the support, those are the ones that
29:41we're going to produce, and those are the ones that we're going to see impacts from.
29:45And the final and really important part of the Farm Bill that directly relates to environmental
29:49protection is the conservation programs.
29:52Peter will talk a little bit more about those, but there's a variety of programs that are
29:56expressly designed to reduce the environmental impact of the agricultural sector.
30:02Now, I'll throw up another slide here that sort of shows the relative balance of these
30:06three things.
30:07And what you can see here is that over this nine-year cycle of the last nine years or
30:12so of expenditures, or goes into 2023, that about 80% of all the money spent in the Farm
30:19Bill goes to that demand-side expenditure, the nutrition-type programs that define what
30:27we eat and therefore what we produce.
30:29The next big chunk, which is quite a bit less, is the programs designed to support supply,
30:38the crop insurance and commodity programs.
30:40And then finally, smallest of all, are the conservation programs.
30:44That doesn't mean that the environmental effect and bang for the buck of each of these programs
30:48is exactly dollar-for-dollar equal, but it shows you the relative importance of these
30:53things.
30:55And altogether, these three things, by defining what we're eating, what we're producing, and
31:00related to what the effects are, all in a way that's as important as any direct environmental
31:07law influences the impact of the sector.
31:10Peter, you want to add something on the conservation programs and other points?
31:13Sure.
31:14Actually, I'll go back a bit and say it's helpful to remember that the Farm Bill really
31:19started during the Depression, after the Dust Bowl, and so there were two major goals.
31:25One was to address the environmental consequences of the Dust Bowl, and the other was to deal
31:31with the Depression, which had two parts.
31:34One was people were hungry and needed to be fed, and the other was that the prices that
31:40farmers were receiving for their crops was very, very low.
31:45So the early Farm Bill had some programs where they would limit the supply of food to keep
31:55the price high by either the government buying that food and providing it to the poor, or
32:01by just making sure farmers didn't plant.
32:04Those programs that originally stuck together a little bit now are separate programs, but
32:11politically they're still very necessary in order to get the Farm Bill, because very different
32:15constituencies tend to focus on the feeding programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
32:20Program, and the Farm Program.
32:23In order to get this through, and it has to get through every five years, you need these
32:28broad constituency.
32:30I think it's helpful to look at some of these programs in a little more detail, like Mike
32:35mentioned, the commodity programs, which farmers get paid just based on historical plantings.
32:42It's not crop insurance, they don't have to pay a premium for about 14 or 15 commodity
32:49crops, and they get paid if the price drops a certain amount, or if the yields drop a
32:53certain amount.
32:56Because it's based on historical plantings, of course, it essentially creates a bit of
33:00a break on changing what you do, whether a farmer is going to plant something new.
33:08Because it's based on historical plantings also, you want to have a lot of historical
33:12plantings, which has been encouraging, as Mike said, planting perhaps on marginal lands.
33:18That program gives out about $6.5 billion every year.
33:23Crop insurance is similar, but farmers have to pay some, the premium like insurance, although
33:28actually the taxpayer subsidizes about two-thirds of that premium.
33:33Right now, that's about $7.5 billion every year.
33:37This covers, unlike commodity, which covers only 14 or 15 crops, this covers about 130
33:42crops, but still 80% of the payments go to corn and soybean.
33:49So it covers other crops, but still the vast majority goes to these major commodity crops.
33:56And now let's turn to the conservation programs, because all of them have, you will see, some
34:01history.
34:04One is the, and perhaps the best known, is the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays
34:09farmers usually in 10-year contracts to take land out of production.
34:15That program is about $2 billion a year.
34:19And of course, when the land is out of production, it has these, it doesn't produce as much water
34:25pollution or air pollution and provides some habitat.
34:29So on the one hand, that's great.
34:30On the other hand, sometimes they don't pay farmers enough, so it's not, it doesn't make
34:35sense for them to take the land out of production.
34:39Sometimes the land is not the most ecologically valuable land.
34:44And perhaps most importantly, very often after the 10-year contract is up, the land
34:48goes back into production.
34:50So if you, for example, have stored more soil in the carbon during that 10-year period,
34:55it can be lost when the land is put back into production.
34:59Another of the major conservation programs is called the Conservation Stewardship Program.
35:05This gets about a billion a year.
35:07And this is more for practices where usually five-year contracts, the government will assist,
35:14pay a portion of a shift to better, more ecologically sound practices.
35:21And this is generally gets favorable reviews, although not all the practices supported as
35:27we know more are necessarily that good for the environment.
35:33Another of the major conservation programs is called EQIP, the Environmental Quality
35:38Improvement Program.
35:40And this is for capital projects, really, for infrastructure, where the government will
35:44pay a significant portion, usually 70% or more, of costs of infrastructure upgrades.
35:54And those, it sounds good, but actually the Natural Resource Conservation Service, which
36:00implements the program, has itself found that many of the programs that EQIP supports actually
36:06are not really beneficial for the environment.
36:09And yet they're still significantly supported.
36:11So there's a tremendous opportunity to take this good idea and tailor it much better.
36:18And finally, there's a couple programs that will pay really for permanent easements, agricultural
36:26conservation easements.
36:28That only gets about a half a billion dollars a year.
36:32And that will essentially buy the agricultural rights of the land is put longer term or permanently
36:39into perhaps more ecologically beneficial purposes.
36:44I think it is important in all of this to note that that is very often the environmental
36:50community has focused almost entirely in the Farm Bill debates on the conservation programs.
36:57And I think that's something that we hope this program will alert more people to the
37:01importance of all the programs, because all the programs have a real impact on what happens
37:06in the environment.
37:07And so all the programs are important.
37:09I should mention just quickly at the end that Farm Bill, as Mike mentioned at the beginning,
37:14has a whole series of other titles, including trade promotion.
37:20Much of our food is exported to other countries, and the U.S. does a lot to promote trade.
37:25So we can export grain, feed grains and meats.
37:30There are provisions dealing with credit.
37:32Farmers need both long term and short term credit.
37:35Every year you need some working capital to plant, and you may need longer term credit
37:40in order to be able to expand or build a new operation.
37:44There's research titles.
37:46There's titles dealing with rural energy.
37:49There's titles dealing with bioenergy, organic agriculture and horticulture.
37:54So there's a lot in this bill.
37:55Last bill was over 800 pages long.
37:58An additional problem with all these programs, both the supply and the conservation programs,
38:03is that they were implemented for decades in a highly discriminatory fashion.
38:09This has led to a terrible loss of farmland by Black and Indigenous farmers and other
38:14farmers of color.
38:16And moreover, when we think about all of these programs as providing a farm safety net, there's
38:21virtually no part of the Farm Bill that provides a safety net to farm workers, again, who are
38:26mostly people of color and who do most of the work on our farms.
38:30As we look forward to the next Farm Bill, and as I mentioned in the introduction, we're
38:37already beginning some negotiation on that.
38:40Are there some of the provisions that come out to you that we should be looking at for
38:45additional environmental protections and an additional environmental impact?
38:50Sure.
38:51I'll offer a couple quick thoughts.
38:55As Mike mentioned earlier, one of the challenges to scale up these agricultural, agroecological,
39:03more sustainable practices is we don't know that much about them.
39:08They've been used successfully, but only in some areas.
39:14Agricultural research has been starved in the last couple of decades.
39:18It is now less than half of what it used to be.
39:20The U.S. used to be a leader in agricultural research, and now we are not.
39:24And private agricultural research does not take the place of public agricultural research.
39:30It looks into different things.
39:32And even when there was agricultural research, very little of it went into issues relating
39:37to sustainability or climate change.
39:39It largely went into productivity.
39:41So there's a great opportunity to significantly increase the research into sustainable agriculture
39:48practices so we just frankly know much more about them and have a much bigger arsenal.
39:56Another opportunity is in the outreach programs.
39:59I mentioned these conservation programs.
40:02All of those are to some extent accompanied by outreach.
40:06The Natural Resource Conservation Service has thousands of employees in virtually every
40:11county in the country.
40:14And they can provide much more technical assistance, outreach, and education on these more sustainable
40:22practices.
40:23And as Mike said earlier, the second challenge to scaling up is tailoring.
40:28What works in Georgia will not work in New York, will not work in Illinois or Washington.
40:34And so it's really important that we have this extraordinary opportunity of technical
40:40specialists in every county.
40:42That's very regional, that's very specific, who can help farmers figure out what are the
40:47cover crops that work for my soil in my region.
40:51And that is an opportunity just with the existing program to dramatically scale up.
40:56Mike, you want to mention some others?
40:59Yeah, and I would add that I wouldn't look away from some of the big ticket items as
41:04well too.
41:05So to give you a concrete example of kind of how a lot of this plays together, I do
41:09a lot of legal work for a sugar beet cooperative in northern Minnesota.
41:13Minnesota, believe it or not, produces a lot of sugar.
41:16And that entire operation is structured around the farm bill.
41:22Sugar is one of the commodity crops.
41:24It's a price-supported crop.
41:27The entire facility and the entire array of farmers who are participants in that facility
41:33is defined around how much price-supported sugar they can produce.
41:39So if that were adjusted in one fashion, up or down, that would affect how much sugar
41:46is produced and the impacts of that sugar.
41:49They've also been very reliant on crop insurance.
41:52They had a freeze a number of years ago that would have devastated the operation were it
41:56not available for crop insurance.
41:58And so were there terms and conditions associated with crop insurance provisions that were related
42:03to environmental practices, that would have an influence on their behavior.
42:07They've also done some really creative things with the state in terms of management of their
42:11wastewater, but that was through a state initiative.
42:16Similar kinds of initiatives could be done at the federal level, again, as part of the
42:21basic commodity support structure that could promote creative things more widely.
42:28So while there's a lot of, Peter identified a number of really great technical research-based
42:34stuff that could be done, there's also room for innovation on the basic structure of the
42:38bill that could have some very positive impacts going forward.
42:42Yeah, I want to really emphasize and agree with Mike on that.
42:46We mentioned earlier that commodity payments are based on historical plantings.
42:50Exactly how that is linked creates, as I mentioned, a barrier to innovation.
42:56That can be changed in a new farm bill.
42:58There's also an important provision called conservation compliance.
43:01For any farmer that accepts money from the commodity programs, the crop insurance of
43:07the conservation programs, they have to comply with a few conservation requirements.
43:13In reality, those conservation of compliance requirements are very, very modest.
43:17They only apply to about a quarter of cropland and not really to grazing land.
43:22They don't require much in terms of sustainability, but they do represent a deal that is really
43:29quite fair, that if the producer is going to get a lot of support from the government,
43:35which is appropriate because we are concerned about having a farm safety net, but we want
43:40to make sure that that producer isn't producing in a way that is harming their neighbors,
43:45whether downstream or downwind or their communities.
43:49There's a great opportunity, I think, to increase that conservation compliance program, increase
43:57its coverage, increase what is required, provide more outreach and support for oversight so
44:05it's implemented much better than it currently is.
44:09There's a conservation programs that can be better targeted.
44:11There's conservation compliance that can be expanded and better targeted.
44:15These core commodity programs that have hidden in them formulas that create disincentives
44:25for better practices often or incentives for practices that have impact, all of that can
44:31be adjusted in a new farm bill.
44:34In a way, I think that would be actually beneficial, not only to the environment and to people
44:40eating, but also to the producers themselves.
44:43We're almost out of time now, but I'd like to give each one of you a chance to provide
44:49a final comment about the issues that we've discussed and where we should go from here.
44:55Peter, could you start us off?
44:58Sure.
44:59I'm first going to mention one thing that some of the folks who are actually now in
45:03the USDA have suggested using the government's trade authority, what's called the Commodity
45:10Credit Corporation or something like that, essentially to pay farmers to implement climate-friendly
45:16practices.
45:18It's another version of what I was saying earlier, perhaps a deal that instead of just
45:22paying them, pay them to make sure their practices are more sustainable.
45:27I think there's great opportunity there.
45:29It takes a lot to change practices.
45:33We need our food and we should be willing to pay to assist that transition.
45:40In terms of my last comment, I would just say, as we've tried to emphasize, the farm
45:45bill affects all of us.
45:46It's the food we eat, it's the land we live on, it's the water we drink.
45:50Too often, environmental interests and others really don't pay much attention to it.
45:56We are hopeful through this program and through learning more about the farm bill, people
46:00will realize that the farm bill is really one of the most important environmental issues
46:05that they can get engaged with, and we will have a better result the more people that
46:10engage with it.
46:11As I noted, most of these US farm programs have been implemented for years in a highly
46:16discriminatory fashion.
46:18Fortunately, there's now a lot more attention to these issues and awareness of the need
46:23to address this, and it is going to be critical that all of these reforms we discuss are implemented
46:29in a way that benefit all farmers, and particularly those who have been historically excluded
46:35or disadvantaged by farm programs.
46:37Yeah, and I would end on a fairly hopeful note as well.
46:44It's the reality of our times that it's almost impossible to pass most legislation.
46:51As we saw, the major environmental laws date back from the 1970s.
46:55But the farm bill is an exception.
46:57It's a must-pass piece of legislation, and it will pass.
47:01No state can afford to not have its delegation work very hard to do the farm bill, and that
47:10gives a tremendous leverage to all entities, including environmental interests.
47:15So it's a rare and unique opportunity to employ some creative policy initiatives that both
47:21continue to put good, abundant food on the American table, and yet also lessen the impact
47:27of the sector of the landscape and the climate.
47:30It's really one of our current most important policy laboratories, and I echo Peter's call
47:35that people should be engaged and be involved as the next farm bill is developed.
47:45What a fascinating discussion.
47:47Thank you to Michael Drysdale from Dorsey & Whitney.
47:51Thank you to Peter Lehner from Earthjustice, and thank you for joining us today to learn
47:56more about this very important topic.