February, 2018
Washington -- On Capitol Hill again this week, I attended a forum on soil health sponsored by another unusual combination of interests: producers and processors.* A farmer from Oklahoma and another from Minnesota shared the dais with a representative from General Mills. The session was moderated by an agronomy professor from a land-grant university. The common concern was the future of soil health.
The Minnesota farmer, Jon Jovaag, told us Minnesota's biggest export, by far, is topsoil, in the form of soil erosion. He is active in the Land Stewardship Project and an advocate of better farming practices.
The Oklahoma farmer, Jimmy Kinder, whose family farms 8,000 acres, called for an effort to "rebuild the nation's topsoil." He participates in USDA's Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and would like to see much more research on soils, including their capacity to sequester carbon dioxide.
This discussion took place against the backdrop of the release of President Trump's proposed 2019 budget, which disfavors all such efforts, and imminent House action on the 2108 Farm Bill, in which soil health and conservation are likely to get short shrift.
As usual, a lot of the best take-aways happened in individual conversations before and after the forum.
Meeting with a soil health advocate before the forum, I offered that it was hugely helpful that his organization published Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scoring of options in the upcoming Farm Bill. He said both House and Senate Agriculture committee staffs disapproved in no uncertain terms with his release of the information. I told him that when I worked in the Senate many years ago, staffs were often faced with such quandaries, but many of us felt that if the information was paid for by taxpayer dollars, and it was not classified for national security purposes, the public had a right to see it. In the current case, CBO's scoring of options on the federal crop insurance program are upsetting interest groups that do not want the public to see waste in the program. This is waste that could be cut and the savings re-directed to soil health and conservation efforts.
Meeting with the agronomy professor after the forum, I asked about his remark in open session about how a soil health event in his state will draw a hundred farmers, compared to the usual Extension Service event that might draw twenty. What does this say about the Extension Service? He offered a none-too-charitable account of Extension personnel, estimating that only about half are committed to dealing with soil health issues. Whereupon I went a step further and asked about the commitment of Home Extension agents to better nutrition. Again, he was not sanguine about the effort. The 2018 Farm Bill presents a good opportunity to get the Extension Service back on mission.**
I am part of a small group of citizens and taxpayers, volunteers with no attachments to interest groups, who are trying to advance the public interest in the always-parochial Farm Bill. Good luck with that, you may say, but we are not of the sort that gives up easily. We are advancing ideas that are getting good reviews; maybe some will even get into legislation.
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* Last week it was CAP and the R Street Institute. This time it was the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition; General Mills; the Soil Health Institute; and the Land Stewardship Project. We met in the Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing room in the Cannon Building, where the original GI Bill was written, according to the remarks of Congressman Tim Walz of Minnesota, a member of both the House Veterans' Affairs Committee and the House Agriculture Committee.
** In Nebraska, the Extension Service and the state Department of Agriculture are currently devoting much time and many resources to address Dicamba dangers. This should not be a taxpayer responsibility, in this taxpayer's opinion, but fully paid for by the producers of the product. A good amendment to the Farm Bill would prohibit the Extension Service from using taxpayer dollars to relieve responsibility for product liability.
