Budget Reductions for Conservation 'Shocking'

April 10, 2001

The American Farmland Trust says proposed reductions in some conservation and farm land protection programs in the USDA budget announced Monday gave farmers and ranchers "a nasty shock." Programs to be "zeroed out," AFT notes, include those that offer farmers incentives to protect water supplies, create wildlife habitat on farmland, and permanently protect their farmland from sprawling development.

Programs for which no funding is being requested include the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program, Farmland Protection Program and Wetlands Reserve Program. AFT says these total less than $5 of total farm spending of $32 billion in fiscal 2001. "That relatively modest amount of funding was overwhelmed by requests for assistance: For the program that encourages farmers to restore wetlands alone, known as WRP, three out of every four farmers requesting assistance were rejected," AFT added.

"At a time when the world is getting a much clearer view of the many links between good conservation practices, food, farmland and quality of life, funding these conservation programs is more important than ever," pointed out Ann Sorensen, head of research at AFT's Center for Agriculture in the Environment at Northern Illinois University. "America's farmers aim to be good stewards, but we cannot tell them that they must carry the entire burden of providing environmental benefits for us all."

For the WRP, the budget noted that the acreage cap was increased to 1.075 million acres from 975,000 by the 2001 appropriations act. This year, about 140,000 acres will be enrolled, and the program will reach it maximum allowable acreage. All three programs are administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The state and local impact will be even more extreme for some programs, said AFT. The Farmland Protection Program, for example, provides up to a 50% match for state and local efforts to permanently protect farmland. A combination of funding streams allocated $17.5 million to FPP for this federal fiscal year. However, from January through March of this year alone the FPP received requests for more than $116 million in matching funds from farmers and ranchers willing to protect their land, according to AFT.

"If fully funded, this year's requests would have leveraged $186 million dollars of state and local money and protected more than 770 farms. A total elimination of funding, as proposed in next year's budget, shuts the door on the opportunity to leverage funding from states and localities to meet national goals," said AFT.

"These cuts will hamstring local, state and federal agencies working with landowners to protect critical farm and ranch lands from development," explained Ralph Grossi, president of American Farmland Trust. "While the administration claims to want to help protect private property rights, they are essentially stripping landowners of the right to protect their land from development."

"I find it hard to believe that the administration doesn't realize how powerful an economic and environmental tool they have in these conservation programs," said Grossi. "Americans have made it clear they want to get more environmental benefits from farmland and control over sprawling development and its spiraling costs for communities -- and these are federal programs that can deliver on that demand."

AFT is a private, nonprofit farmland conservation organization founded in 1980 to stop the loss of productive farmland and to promote farming practices that lead to a healthy environment, Its programs include public education, technical assistance in policy development and demonstration farmland protection projects.