Environmental legislation keeping farmers underwater

Michigan City, IN, on the shore of 20% of the world's fresh water

Much has been made of environmental legislation that keeps farmers from farming their land. raftercm himself recently wrote of the horrors of California's CEQA. Generally, I'm cool with environmental legislation, particularly in California. I've lived in the Midwest for long enough to really treasure the natural bounty that can be found in California, and I'd rather go overboard with environmental legislation and keep California beautiful than run the risk of turning Pacific Beach into the south shore of Lake Michigan for the sake of a few jobs here or there.

There are occasionally cases, however, where flaws in environmental policy are so egregious that even the tree-hugger in me is disgusted by both the lack of foresight and the inflexibility of environmental legislation. Today's example of this comes from  Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota, where

"USDA's Risk Management Agency is changing a rule that would exclude a farmer from buying prevented planting coverage in Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota or South Dakota if a farmer hasn't been able to plant and harvest a crop on the ground in at least one of the last four years." (KFGO)

The reason for the rule change has to do with the fact that farmers are increasingly having to file crop insurance claims due to "prevented planting," meaning they are unable to access their land to plant crops. USDA rules previously stated that farmers who have made a prevented planting claim once in the past four years was ineligible to make the claim again.

Such a condition is normally of little concern. However, with an extremely wet spring in the Upper Midwest and Great Plains, farmers are increasingly finding themselves -- both literally and figuratively -- underwater.

A reasonable observer may question why a farmer doesn't just drain the water themselves, obviating the need for a crop insurance claim. Here's where the inflexible environmental policymaking comes in. In the 1980s, the USDA included the "Swampbuster" policy in a Farm Bill. This policy states that any farmer who drains wetlands to plant crops must forfeit farm payments, which generally form a large portion of a grain producer's income. The USDA considers many of the flooded farm fields to be wetlands, so if a farmer drains them to produce crops, thereby avoiding the need to file a prevented planting claim, they lose their price supports. Talk about a rock and a wet place.

To the USDA's credit, they are changing the rules that state that farmers can't make prevented planting claims more than once every four years. This case does a great job of exemplifying the need for greater coordination between government agencies. Reasonable environmental policy should not be so unforgiving as to trap producers, forcing them to make the choice between environmental quality and the survival of their business. Of course, in this case, the rules involve an overly strict definition of what constitutes a wetland. But either way, it's important that environmental policy work with agricultural producers rather than against them.

Image source: http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/funmiles/acrossstates-06/1155009180/tpod.html#pbrowser/funmiles/acrossstates-06/1155009180/filename=lake_michiganx_gary_indiana_02.jpg