Testimony for the U.S. Senate Agriculture
Committee Hearing on Conservation on
Working Lands
July 31, 2001

Good morning. My name is Dave Serfling and I want to thank the Committee for the opportunity to speak with you today. I am testifying on behalf of the Land Stewardship Project, a Minnesota-based, non-profit farm organization committed to fostering a renewed ethic and practice of stewardship toward farmland and promoting a sustainable system of agriculture. LSP is a member of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture.

I appreciate this opportunity to share my perspectives with you. I would like to sincerely thank you for your generous support of my farm in southeast Minnesota over the past five years. Through the help of the AMTA, LDP, SHOP, EQIP and SARE programs, we have been able to average a little over $20,000 in government subsidies over the last five years on our 350 acre farm. It has really helped.

Our farm has beef, swine, and sheep enterprises. We try really hard to market all our crop production through the livestock. We have a six-year crop rotation of CCOMMM (corn, corn, oats, meadow, meadow, meadow) with the meadow either being hayed or grazed rotationally. Our farm is gently rolling, but is 85 percent classified as HEL (highly erodible land). It is good land but needs to be protected.

My area of southeast Minnesota is still populated by many family farmers similar to me. They too have benefited and survived in large part because of your generosity. Farmers have become adept at "farming" the government program to maximize their subsidies. The present strategy has become maximize yield, maximize LDP, and sell at higher prices that may come. This is the so-called "Redeem and Dream" strategy: redeem at high LDPs and dream about higher prices. Even though many marketing consultants caution farmers about the risk of this strategy, most farmers have found this strategy to be the most profitable, especially this year.

But many farmers have looked at the latest government subsidies and have decided that the easiest way to increase their government payments is to increase their acres. A neighbor of mine, who used to run a farrow-to-finish hog operation, has turned to contract hog production and increased crop acres because he said, "at least we know the government will help the crop farmer." Decisions like that have caused escalating rental rates and increasing land values even during this time of terribly low market prices. This has even made it tougher for young farmers to get started farming.

The popular corn and soybean rotation has made big inroads on our rolling hills as our farms are consolidated and enlarged. As a result, we have had the worst soil erosion that I have ever seen occur during the last two years. Even our most conservation-minded farmers using no-till and strip-till techniques have suffered severe erosion. Farmers are not responding to the market, they are responding to government subsidies. And taxpayers are paying twice: once when they support commodity payments and again when they pay for the environmental cleanup needed because of overly intensive row-crop production.

I am asking you today to consider a new program to give farmers an incentive other than producing surpluses of program crops. We need it for our farms and our farmers. This last April 5th we got an inch and a half of rain in less than one hour during our snowmelt. We had a lot of frost in the ground yet so it couldn't soak in. As I walked our farm after the rain I saw severe soil erosion on every cornfield. Even cornstalks that hadn't been touched except for a gleaning by our beef cows were ripped out by their roots and carried away. Draws that drained as little as three acres looked like river channels. The only fields on my farm that did not have any damage were the hayfields and pastures. The tight sod just let the water run over it. I'm a big believer in forages. They protect the land, spread out our labor, build soil, and fix nitrogen. But it is terribly hard for them to compete with program row crops economically.

We need stewardship incentives that help promote conservation on our working lands. We have spent 85 percent of our conservation dollars on land retirement and only 15 percent on working land. We need to achieve a better balance in our conservation spending. Resource-based land retirement programs have their place, but are expensive on a per-acre basis and need to be tightly targeted to achieve maximum environmental gain. But there is an even bigger role for support for working, productive farmland. I would challenge you to envision a future in which two-thirds of our conservation funding is for working land-we can produce similar benefits as CRP and help provide economic return for main street and for farmers. I urge you to adopt this two-thirds/one-third split as your goal in the next farm bill.

I am a big believer in farm ingenuity. In recent years we've seen tremendous growth in grass dairying, organic production, and direct marketing. You have over one million creative farmer minds out there in the country. If you tell them the environmental results that you want and give them financial incentive to achieve them, they will find a way to deliver.

This brings me to asking you for your support of the Conservation Security Act. Enactment of CSA would be a great start on getting strong conservation on our working lands. It consists of three levels of conservation. The farmer has the choice of which level to participate in.

The first level every farmer can achieve by using conservation tillage, nutrient management, integrated pest management, and other core conservation practices. The second level encourages farmers to incorporate a more complex crop rotation than for instance in my area, corn-soybeans. A forage or small grain crop must be included and if you are grazing you must have a planned rotational system. Installation of buffer practices is also included in the second level. This second level responds to the need for some shifts in land use to reach resource conservation goals.

The third level is where I hope the farmer's creativity really will come into play. This is where he can use such techniques as whole farm, total resource planning to work with local NRCS staff to individualize the conservation benefits on his or her farm through innovative practices. For example, in my area we have actually documented a benefit to streams by controlled grazing of stream banks. This was a farmer innovation that produced a narrower but deeper channel and provided better fish habitat and cleaner water.

A new Multiple Benefits of Agriculture Project study being released shortly by the Land Stewardship Project has hard numbers showing that innovative changes in farming systems would produce many "multiple benefits" in our rural areas-everything from reduced erosion and less chemical contamination to lower levels of greenhouse gases. I have attached a brief summary of project results to date to the back of my testimony.

The Conservation Security Act is a fundamental shift in farm policy. It isn't a land retirement program. It does reward farmers for solid conservation, wildlife habitat, and water protection. It does not affect the market or jeopardize trade agreements. Under CSA farmers would produce their products for the market, and receive a price for those products from the market. But the difference is this policy will provide incentives for farmers to produce other, non-market benefits. The CSA addresses all kinds of agriculture in all regions of the country, and it supports diversification and public benefits while moving the government away from supporting only program crop production. This will sell to your urban and suburban constituents and to your colleagues from regions with few program crop acres -- and we need their support to pass this farm bill.

CSA in my view needs to achieve a funding base that is substantial so that all farmers and ranchers who want to participate and develop solid conservation plans can in fact participate, and not be turned away due to lack of funding. CSA funding needs to be comparable to AMTA funding levels in the farm bill just ending.

I would also like to pass on a few comments about the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). We still need programs like EQIP to help farmers fix problems. Farmers can use EQIP funds to address specific obstacles creatively and effectively, and then be able to participate in the Conservation Security Program at the appropriate level. I oppose EQIP's limited dollars going to very large confined animal feeding operations. The largest operations must satisfy Clean Water Act requirements-it is a cost of doing business, and has been for 25 years. The taxpayer should not subsidize them with EQIP funds and the program should not be used to encourage further concentration. In addition, we should consider going to a 50 percent cost-share with EQIP funds. This will stretch the funds and give the farmer more ownership and input on his or her solutions.

I also urge you to extend conservation compliance into the new farm bill and to apply it to all federal subsidy programs, including crop insurance. I also urge you to remove loopholes in conservation compliance and make sure it gets enforced. We need a level playing field when it comes to compliance. Everyone should have to do at least a minimum amount of soil protection to even qualify for these programs. The new farm bill should also ensure that grasslands cannot be broken out and then qualify for program subsidies, increasing overproduction at the expense of the taxpayer and the environment.

Please don't tell the farmers how to farm. Just tell us what results you want to see on working land, give us meaningful financial incentives, and we American farmers will not let you down. Thank you.

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