By LINDA McGURK
Indiana Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After an April 16 White House Conference on America’s Great Outdoors, conservation groups praised President Obama for his commitment to conserving American working lands. But, they also voiced concerns about proposed cuts in funding for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP).

“This is a very popular program and farmer demand routinely outstrips available funding,” said Sara Hopper, director of agricultural policy for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

The 2008 farm bill called for a $3.4 billion increase in EQIP funding over the next 10 years, but a child nutrition bill introduced by Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Blanche Lincoln (D-La.) would strip more than $2 billion from the conservation program. The child nutrition bill would specifically target the childhood obesity epidemic and increase access to healthy foods for children from low-income families.

The bill also calls for the agriculture secretary to establish national nutrition standards for all food sold on school campuses.
“Everybody understands that this is a necessary increase (in child nutrition funding) and I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fund that, but there are better ways to pay for it,” Hopper said.

EQIP is administered by USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and provides landowners with cost-share agreements to improve the management of agricultural land to benefit the environment. According to figures the EDF obtained from NRCS, 21 percent of all EQIP applications in Indiana went unfunded in 2008.

In Illinois, the figure was 25 percent; in Idaho and Tennessee 41 percent, Michigan 31 percent, Iowa 46 percent and Ohio 38 percent. Kentucky had the highest amount of unfunded applications of all states, at 78 percent.

Hopper said EQIP gives farmers a chance to deal with environmental challenges in a proactive way; for example, by preventing nutrient runoff to improve water quality in certain watersheds or providing habitats for threatened species, sometimes before lawmakers deem it necessary to regulate them. She noted the program also creates jobs and provides opportunities for hunters, anglers and tourism.

“But the overall larger point here is that EQIP funds some great initiatives and does it by working with the producers, so let’s not take these resources away when they’re needed to solve the environmental issues that are associated with production agriculture,” she added.

The EDF has joined 14 other conservation groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists and the American Farmland Trust, in opposition to the proposed cuts in EQIP funding.

“Applied conservation provides clean water, energy conservation, erosion reduction, carbon sinks, improved wildlife habitat, wetland protection and other important public benefits that should not be lost,” the group wrote in a letter to Lincoln last month.
“We urge you to modify the current proposal to craft a fairer offset package to provide the funding needed for child nutrition reauthorization.”

According to the conservation groups, the funding cut “clearly violates the carefully negotiated compromise” that Lincoln supported in the 2008 farm bill, and puts future programs in jeopardy, since it lowers the baseline for conservation funding for the next farm bill.

Next, the bill is heading for a vote on the Senate floor.
“We hope Senate leadership will find a way to pay for the child nutrition bill without going into the farm bill at all,” Hopper said. “Producers who are concerned may want to contact their senators.”