| Chapter 1: | Farm Bills, Interest Groups, and Policy Change |
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to see them eliminated. They advocated the creation of “farmer savings accounts” and additional supports for conservation, nutrition, and rural development to compensate for the changes and reductions they proposed in farm bill commodity supports. These groups saw commodity cuts as necessary for reducing the budget deficit, the taxpayer costs, and the environmental and social impacts of subsidizing industrial corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice production (Kondracke, 2007).
Sustainable Agriculture Groups
Sustainable agriculture groups (e.g., Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the Minnesota Project) advocate for agricultural systems that address “stewardship”—simultaneously promoting environmental protection, vibrant communities, consumer health, producer livelihoods, and equitable trading relations (Feenstra, Ingels, & Campbell, 1997). Although they generally favor government support of farmers, they argue that these support dollars should go to diversified farmers who protect the environment and rural communities rather than exclusively to commodity-oriented growers.
One common focus of sustainable agriculture groups’ efforts is shifting the emphasis of conservation programs from taking marginal lands out of production in set-asides like CRP to also protecting working croplands. For many in the sustainable agriculture movement, these efforts culminated in the 2002 Conservation Security Program (CSP), which paid farmers for improving water and soil quality, protecting wildlife habitat, and instituting other environmental stewardship practices on their farms. CSP addressed environmental and rural development concerns together by supporting farmers whose cropping practices explicitly protected the environment, legitimizing the idea that farms could be “green” and productive at the same time.
However, though CSP was designed as an open enrollment program, authorizations bills capped funding at a fraction of Congressional Budget Office cost estimates, and disaster assistance provisions tapped CSP funds 2 years in a row. Thus, in the end, a given farmer could only apply for CSP one out of every 8 to 14 years, limiting its impacts for promoting conservation on working farmlands (Freeman, 2004; Imhoff, 2007;