It may not surprise you to learn that much of the pork, chicken, beef and milk that you buy at the grocery store comes from huge, industrial-size operations that bear little resemblance to the quaint family farms that adorn many food packages.
But you may be surprised to learn that US tax dollars have helped pave the way for the growth of these megafarms by paying farmers to deal with the mountains of excrement that their farms generate. All of this is carried out under the rubric of "conservation."
The US Congress is about to renew the program -- and possibly even expand it -- as part of a new farm bill wending its way through the Capitol.
It's called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) -- a name that suggests an initiative to encourage farmers to improve environmental standards.
And, in fact, when the program was created as part of the 1996 farm bill, that's exactly what it was. At the time, the government agreed to pay a share -- up to 75 percent -- of a conservation project, and the payments were limited to US$10,000 a year. Farmers used the money for small-scale projects that had environmental benefits, like planting cover crops to prevent erosion and soak up excess nitrogen or installing fencing to better manage grazing cattle.
But in the 2002 farm bill, the program was changed at the livestock industry's behest, and funding for the program was raised from US$200 million a year to, eventually, US$1.3 billion. Yearly payment limits were scratched, replaced by a provision that farmers could get no more than US$450,000 during the bill's life.
Another change: Large-scale livestock facilities that once were not eligible for EQIP money were encouraged to participate under the 2002 bill.
As a result, many farmers are using their EQIP money for animal waste management practices, which include helping to pay for lagoons to store manure. The lagoons are lined ponds that are used to keep the waste until it can be pumped out for some other use, usually as fertilizer on nearby fields. In some instances, manure lagoons have leaked or overflowed into the groundwater or into neighboring streams.
They don't smell very nice, either. So I'm sure families living downwind of the lagoons would be pleased to learn their tax dollars helped to finance them.
For the 2006 fiscal year, for instance, the Department of Agriculture paid farmers about US$179 million for animal waste management practices, with Iowa, Wisconsin and North Carolina getting the most money. Later data was not available, nor were individual payments.
That compares with US$125 million for soil erosion and sediment control, US$139 million for irrigation water management and US$74 million for grazing land practices, according to Department of Agriculture records.
Livestock industry officials argue that farmers should be allowed to use EQIP money for animal waste to help comply with environmental regulations for air and water quality.
Christopher Galen, spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation, argues that bigger livestock farms should be eligible for more EQIP money, not less, because they are the focus of the strictest regulations. (Farms with more than 1,000 animal units, equal to 700 dairy cows, face tougher regulations.)
"If larger farms are going to be viewed -- accurately or not -- as part of the problem, then the resources necessary to implement the solution also need to be available to those farms," Galen said in a statement.
Others maintain that EQIP money has helped to stop runoff from farms that was polluting local and regional waterways.
Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, says that while he doesn't believe conservation funds should be spent on industrial livestock farms, the money is a relatively small share of the EQIP total. He says that most of it is spent on valuable environmental initiatives.
The questions, then, remain: Why should taxpayers foot the bill for manure lagoons, particularly under the flag of environmental conservation? Why should taxpayers subsidize expansion of livestock farms? And if livestock farms have created environmental problems, shouldn't the polluters have to pay for the mess that they created, rather than the taxpayers?
"Having a lagoon that doesn't leak into groundwater, that's the cost of doing business," said Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. "You shouldn't be justifying that as a conservation payment. You are building things that have been proven time and time again to cause severe environmental damage when they misfunction."
Much criticism of the proposed farm bill has focused on subsidy payments to farmers, particularly when they are receiving sky-high prices for corn, soybeans and wheat. EQIP doesn't get nearly the same level of scrutiny, in part because environmentalists are split on the merits of using EQIP money to manage manure on big farms.
The Senate passed a version of the farm bill that includes about the same amount for EQIP in coming years. A proposal to scale back individual payments to a US$240,000 maximum was squelched in part by Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who maintains that construction costs are higher in the Northeast and that EQIP money is helping to clean up Lake Champlain.
Industrial dairies and manure lagoons in Vermont? Guess I'll rent a cabin in New Hampshire next summer.
The House version of the farm bill would expand EQIP by taking money from another conservation program. The House and Senate will work out their differences in conference committee. But I doubt that they will change the payment formula for EQIP.
So if Congress is to keep sending taxpayer money to farmers to build manure lagoons, it may want to consider a more honest name for the program.
How about "Factory Farm Incentive Program"?
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