Opinion: Land Conservation Is an Earth Day Imperative

(April 22) -- Last week, President Barack Obama said that "it's the right thing to do for our economy" to conserve American landscapes, including the working lands -- farms, ranches and private forest lands -- that make up two-thirds of the continental United States.

The president made his remarks just before he signed a presidential memorandum outlining his administration's conservation goals during Friday's White House Conference on America's Great Outdoors.

In honor of Earth Day, President Obama is right to focus on the urgent need for action to conserve America's working lands because they are essential pieces of the conservation puzzle. Without healthy, productive agricultural lands, efforts to protect wildlife, improve water quality and curb global warming are doomed to fail.

Unfortunately, the Senate Agriculture Committee last month passed a child nutrition reauthorization bill that would pay for necessary increases in funding for school meals by cutting $2.8 billion over 10 years from USDA's largest working lands conservation program, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP).

EQIP is one of several voluntary conservation programs administered by USDA and funded under the authority of the 2008 Farm Bill. These programs assist producers nationwide who sign up to spend their own time and money through cost-share agreements to improve the management of their land to benefit the environment.

Farm conservation programs are wildly popular. Farmer demand for assistance through EQIP and other conservation programs routinely outstrips available funding by a wide margin. So while expanding child nutrition efforts is a desirable goal, the Senate and House should reject cuts to critical conservation programs as a means of funding the expansion. Finding alternative funding sources for child nutrition is a first step toward ensuring that sufficient funding remains available to support the administration's bold land conservation vision.

How important are these conservation programs? In March, the administration announced a new initiative to use up to $16 billion in funds from EQIP and another USDA conservation program, the Wildlife Habitat Incentive Program, to protect sage grouse population and habitat in 11 western states (California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming).

This initiative received praise from conservation groups, oil and wind energy industry representatives, ranchers and other stakeholders as a critical tool in helping to recover the species. It will also help to avoid the bird's listing under the Endangered Species Act and the significant restrictions on land use in the West that would result from an Endangered Species Act listing.

Also in March, USDA issued a request for proposals from stakeholders in 12 Mississippi River Basin states. The new program is designed to engage farmers who live in high-priority watersheds in a cooperative $320 million, four-year initiative to improve the health of the Mississippi River by reducing farm water pollution runoff in the 12 states (Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee and Wisconsin).

In November, the Obama administration announced a "draft strategy" to require six states, the rivers and streams of which flow into the Chesapeake Bay watershed (Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia as well as Washington, D.C.), to set two-year milestones for reaching their pollution reduction goals to meet federal requirements to restore the Chesapeake Bay by 2025. The cost to implement the agricultural part of the Bay clean-up alone is $700 million.

These three initiatives represent important steps by the administration to address national and regional conservation priorities. However, those efforts and similar ones to engage private landowners in landscape-scale conservation efforts will fail without the funding to back them up.

That's why the Senate and House need to preserve funding for conservation and find alternative funds to expand child nutrition.

Fortunately, there's still time in the coming weeks for the Obama administration to work with members of Congress to find other ways to pay for the child nutrition legislation without dramatically reducing the funding needed to undertake voluntary, cost-shared conservation improvements on millions of acres of privately owned American land.

Sara Hopper is director of agricultural policy for Environmental Defense Fund