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Congress is debating the 2018 farm bill, which will set rules for everything from research budgets to hunger programs. It will also decide how much the government spends on incentives for farmers to practice conservation to protect soil and water.
Ben Schole has a huge pile of pig manure on his farm and he couldn’t be happier about it. Schole, who is partially retired, farms 160 acres where he grew up near Hooper in eastern Nebraska. He raises corn, soybeans and wheat and also cares for a few hundred hogs with his son, who has a farm of his own.
The manure pile is well on its way to becoming compost that Schole will spread on his now harvested fields of wheat.
“It takes care of the odor problems, and manure that was once a waste product turns into, how do you say, 'black gold' in some cases they call it,” Schole said.
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It’s called black gold, Schole said, because the compost is great fertilizer. And, he said, it’s less likely to leach harmful levels of nutrients into the groundwater or nearby streams.
Schole’s compost pile is one practice he’s adopted under a contract through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). Some farm bill programs, like the Conservation Reserve Program, pay farmers to stop farming land that is vulnerable to erosion. But the CSP has grown in popularity since it was created in 2002, in part because it allows farmers to work their land while paying them to do it differently.
In 2017, a total of about 87 million acres were enrolled in the program. The contracts pay an average of about $18 per acre.
The Center for Rural Affairs, a nonprofit that supports farm bill conservation programs, surveyed more than 800 farmers in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota. Eighty-six percent said the CSP should be a priority in the next farm bill.
But Congress could be preparing to make cuts to the CSP.
“The house is definitely cutting money out,” said NPR food and agriculture reporter Dan Charles who has been looking into what the next farm bill means for conservation programs. “People should understand that there are billions of dollars in the USDA budget, authorized by the farm bill, that basically pay farmers to do things that by one measure or another sort of benefit the environment. The House bill would basically cut a billion dollars out of that account.”
The two competing versions of the farm bill in the House and Senate do treat conservation programs differently.
The House bill would remove $795 million over 10 years from conservation funding, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That includes repealing the CSP program favored by Ben Schole. Critics in the House say other programs do more for the money.
The Senate by comparison would keep conservation spending at current levels, although some money from CSP would move to other programs. Charles said the Senate bill also prioritizes conservation funding for projects that do the most good for soil and water quality.
“That's something that's been sort of politically touchy because everybody wants to have their share of the pot,” Charles said. "But a lot of environmentalists have been pushing for this kind of thing.”
According to Ben Schole, farmers often want to give water, soil and wildlife more thought, but many younger farmers in particular have high levels of debt and their minds are racing thinking about how to pay it off with a trade war brewing and crop prices dropping.
Schole thinks incentives like those in the Conservation Stewardship Program make it more affordable for farmers to think about the long term.
“The land remembers,” Schole said. “We might forget, but when it’s producing good crops and wildlife and the air is fresh and clean, the land remembers.”