Washington-It’s high time for Congress to require more environmental protection from soil erosion and fertilizer and pesticide runoff in exchange for costly farm subsidies, according to a report from the Environmental Working Group. As nearly 75 percent of farmer requests for voluntary conservation assistance go unfunded and soil erosion rules for subsidy recipients are barely enforced, EWG charges, 1.7 billion tons of topsoil erodes off agricultural fields nationwide, polluting America’s waters and fisheries with sediment and millions of pounds of fertilizer and pesticides. While USDA estimates soil erosion is down 40 percent since 1985, due partly to conservation compliance, the report Trouble Downstream: Upgrading Conservation Compliance singles out a number of factors – including poor enforcement and woefully inadequate conservation compliance – that must be updated to solve the nation’s water quality problems. EWG attributes the massive and chronic water pollution “Dead Zone” problem in the Gulf of Mexico to lavish subsidies for large farmers, combined with slack compliance enforcement and significant under-funding of voluntary cost-share conservation programs. Even more disturbing, EWG charges, taxpayer dollars in the form of federal farm subsidies to commodity crop producers that are heavy users of fertilizer are contributing to this environmental catastrophe. The problem could worsen with the rapidly expanding production of corn and other crops as a result of the biofuels boom. Furthermore, conservation compliance singularly focuses on soil erosion, while much of today’s agricultural-environmental challenges involve fertilizer pollution, which is not managed by conservation compliance. “It makes sense to expect that taxpayer dollars spent supporting crop production does not result in soil erosion or fertilizer pollution of our nation’s waters. It’s high time for Congress to require more environmental protection in exchange for farm subsidies, especially now, when budgets are tight, and there isn’t enough money to solve problems with the conventional voluntary cost-share approach,” says Michelle Perez, senior analyst and primary author of the EWG report. Responding on behalf of the industry, TFI cited its strong advocacy of farmers having a written nutrient management plan that takes into account both fertilizer use and the nutrient content of any animal manure used. “There is a national network of Certified Crop Advisers (https://www.agronomy.org/cca/) available to help farmers in these efforts, and we encourage the use of these trained individuals for this purpose,” reported spokeswoman Kathy Mathers.
Transparency Across the Fertilizer Value-Chain