Farmers will change if politicians let them

By ART CULLEN

A dusting of snow and gusts up to 50 mph blew over Northwest Iowa Friday morning as bellows of political air abated over Glasgow.

Protests and promises. This by 2030 and that by 2050. Haven’t we seen that play before?

Out here, where the land lays bare and black exposed by the harvest of corn and soybeans, most folks know there’s a problem and believe there are practical solutions. Eventually politicians catch up.

Nobody watches the weather like a farmer. Their lives depend on it. They know things are getting weirder and wilder — mega-flooding one year and drought the next, straight line winds wiping out millions of crop acres from Iowa to Indiana, and water shortages for livestock from Texas to North Dakota.

They know they’re losing soil to the wind and rain. Erosion chokes the Gulf of Mexico and suffocates coastal wetlands. It causes massive toxic algae blooms on Lake Erie at Toledo. Most farmers would like to do more conservation, if only the landlord would agree. They would plant cover crops for winter to hold the soil and fertilizer in place, if they thought it would pay. Conservation programs that actually do pay are over-subscribed. Too many farmers for too few dollars.

Polls find that rural voters are concerned about environmental issues. It depends on how you ask the question. Most of us expect clean water, free of nitrate or phosphorous from fertilizer.

Voters support it. Twelve years ago, Iowans amended the constitution to provide a permanent sales tax stream for improved water quality and natural resources. The Republican-controlled legislature has refused to enact it.

A productive way to clean up the water is to plant a cover crop like rye over winter. It builds the soil’s capacity to store nutrients and water. It excites microbial activity that helps sequester carbon and feeds plant life, reducing fertilizer cost. Cover crops stunt weed growth, cutting the need for herbicides in the spring. Reduced tillage thwarts carbon’s release from soil to the air.

Yet less than 5% of Iowa’s acres are protected over winter. In Buena Vista County, cover crop usage actually dropped by 875 acres last year.

Talk is cheap. Rye seed is not.

Agriculture accounts for 10-15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Doing things like planting cover crops or permanent native grass strips in between row crops can radically reduce surface water pollution, build crop productivity and sequester carbon. With the right incentives, food production can be a net positive in battling rising temperatures.

The best that most farmers can do is get a cost-share to plant a grass buffer or winter rye. They focus on the cost, not the share.

The Biden Administration’s Build Back Better reconciliation bill would double agricultural conservation spending, according to Senate Agriculture Committee aide Patrick Delaney. It would offer $25 per acre (plus a $5 cut for the landlord) to pay the cost of seed for a cover crop, in addition to premiums offered through the federal crop insurance program. It would begin to clear the backlog of farmers wishing to enroll in the Conservation Stewardship Program for “climate-smart” practices on working farmland. If you pay them they will come to grow grass instead of over-producing industrial crops like corn, predicated on petrochemicals. As my 90-something-year-old farmer father-in-law Ernie Gales says, “If it’s green, I like it.”

But only the Good Lord and Sen. Joe Manchin apparently know how this reconciliation bill will turn out.

It doesn’t really matter to agriculture. Nature demands the change, and farmers get it. Some 80 farm groups from left to right are lined up with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on this “climate-smart” agricultural resiliency campaign. Corporate agriculture sees an opportunity to make money in the transition. Farmland investors are beginning to realize they can protect their asset’s long-term value by building soil health and productivity, which in turn cuts dangerous air and water pollution.

The Farm Bureau on the right and the Farmers Union on the left are on board. Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota, is working with Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., on cover crop incentives. Ag giant Cargill is evangelizing agricultural resiliency with the Practical Farmers of Iowa. They can see California, the top ag state, on fire. They all know that the Ogallala Aquifer underlying the great Kansas cattle feedlots is running dry. General Mills is going organic in the Dakotas. Archer Daniels Midlands is becoming more interested in making jet fuel than corn ethanol as cars go electric. Carbon trading markets are in the offing.

It’s already started. The economic interests are lined up. Farm bill deliberations that begin early next year will take a “climate-smart” tone. What is lost today will be picked up tomorrow. The change is underway.

Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of The Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, is streaming for free on the PBS Independent Lens website. Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2021

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