Conservation Compliance: The Once and Future Farm Environmental Policy Tool

Despite being an entitlement criterion that farmers must meet in order to qualify for farm program payments, Conservation Compliance has largely disappeared as an issue during recent farm bill debates. The focus has been on using cost-share and incentive payments to encourage the adoption of environmentally friendly farming practices. Conservation Compliance, in contrast, denies certain farm program benefits (including income support payments) to farmers who convert a wetland into cropland or who farm highly erodible land without an approved conservation plan. Thus, Conservation Compliance uses the denial of government benefits to encourage environmentally friendly farming practices. Thanks to sizeable federal deficits, Conservation Compliance may again become a major farm policy issue. The Office of Management and Budget recently forecast a 58% increase in gross federal debt by the end of fiscal year 2008, driven largely by cumulative federal deficits of $1.9 trillion over fiscal years 2003–2008. Deficits of this size may make Congress more willing to achieve farm environmental improvements by adding new requirements to Conservation Compliance. Doing so would allow them to reduce outlays for environmental cost-share and incentive payments to farmers. But will farmers—key farm policy actors— overwhelmingly oppose new compliance requirements? Opposition is expected due to the costs of meeting new requirements, including possible loss of farm program benefits. Farmers’ views about Conservation Compliance requirements come from the 2001 National Agricultural, Food and Public Policy Preference Survey (Lubben, Simons, Bills, Meyer, & Novak, 2001). The specific question was: “Should farmers be required to do the following in order to receive farm program benefits: (a) plant 20-foot buffer strips along waterways; (b) plant cover crops after harvest; (c) use reduced-tillage cropping systems; or (d) use no-tillage cropping systems?” Before briefly discussing the survey methodology and presenting results, Conservation Compliance is discussed in greater detail. Conclusions and implications are drawn in the last section of the article. HEL program success has two indicators: high acreage enrollment—in 1985, 86 of 91 million acres not in the CRP had NCRS approved plans— and reductions in erosion totaling about 791 million acres per year. Although not all this reduction is directly due to HEL Conservation Compliance, its size resembles the 1993 record high of nearly 700 tons of erosion reduction from the CRP. As a benchmark, total erosion from U.S. cropland was estimated in 1982 at 3.07 billion tons per year, implying that HEL compliance has reduced erosion by about 25%.