It can’t be easy fighting off government’s attempt at implementing environmental regulations with one hand while grabbing fist loads of government cash with the other hand.
One of the most hotly debated set of bills this current
Maryland legislative session are the ones being introduced by several Eastern
Shore legislators all attempting to delay the implementation of a new tool
being proposed to address the over-application of manure on farms in the state.
The Phosphorus Management Tool (PMT) was developed as a replacement for the
current phosphorus application standard that hasn’t worked to keep excess
phosphorus from pouring off farms fields and into the Bay.
Much of this problem
in Maryland is caused by the massive amounts of chicken manure produced by the
three big chicken companies who operate in the state, but who refuse to take
any responsibility for the waste from their production systems. According to
some recent estimates, agricultural operations account for 64% of the
phosphorus entering the Chesapeake Bay, contributing significantly to the
summer dead zones every year.
The plan to update the state’s phosphorus application
standards has met with all the typical ag industry-generated doomsday predictions
that greet every attempt to get the industry, the largest nutrient and sediment
polluters of our waterways, to clean up their operations. Last fall’s efforts
to implement the PMT were met with threats of busloads of farmers descending on
Annapolis in protest. These threats resulted in agribusiness, the
administration and the environmental community striking a deal to implement the
PMT over the coming 2 years, a deal that industry promptly reneged on as soon
as they left the meeting and arrived back down on the Eastern Shore.
Now, the
Eastern Shore ag industry has sent their delegates to Annapolis to demand that before
the PMT gets implemented there must be a study of its economic impact on
farmers who will no longer be allowed to dump manure on fields to wash into the
Bay and the rest of Maryland’s waterways.
Interestingly, these same elected officials have chosen not to balance
that study with another, of the economic impacts from phosphorus polluted
waterways, fish kills, dead zones, and a failed tourism economy on the Eastern
Shore.
Last week, the ag industry dispatched Kevin Anderson,
president of the Maryland Grain Producers Association and a Somerset County
farmer, to testify before the House Environmental Matters committee. He stated,
without any support, that compliance with the protective standards of the PMT
would cost him about $150,000. He also did the math and claimed that the 20
farms in Somerset County would be out $3 million if they could no longer dump
manure on their phosphorus-saturated fields.
Anderson’s testimony was meant to impress on the Committee
the tremendous “economic tsunami” that the government was going to create for
him and his fellow farmers should the PMT be implemented to protect the
Chesapeake Bay. What he didn’t testify to, though, was the even more impressive
economic subsidies he’s received from the government to run his farm. It can’t
be easy fighting off the government’s attempt to implement environmental
regulations with one hand while grabbing fist loads of government cash with
your other hand.
According to the Environmental Working Group’s online
database of subsidies to the ag industry, Anderson’s Wimberly Farms
received $977,753 in taxpayer-funding from 2000 to 2012. And his fellow
Somerset County farmers aren’t doing too badly either when it comes to
government subsidies. From 1995 to 2012 Somerset County farms have received $17,641,357
in payments. In fact, since 1995 the federal government has pumped over $1 billion dollars of taxpayer
money into Maryland agribusiness. Add to that the tens of millions of dollars
in state funding that is handed to the industry annually for cover crops,
storage sheds and manure transport programs to help control its waste, and Anderson
got it right - we really are talking about an economic tsunami, but one which
carries green waves of money to Maryland farms.
Farm subsidies are an important part of our country’s food
system; America’s farmers deserve financial help to grow the food we all rely
on. Struggling farmers, like anyone else struggling to survive in the United
States, need a helping hand. But there’s more than a bit of hypocrisy involved
when people complain about government interference in their affairs when our
federal and state agencies try to implement protective environmental standards,
yet sit quietly as government “interferes” with their bank account with hundreds
of thousands of dollars in corn, soy and wheat subsidies.
Government-provided farm subsidies can be good for everyone when
managed and implemented properly. Likewise, government-provided
environmental regulations are beneficial to the nation as a whole, especially
when they’re being implemented to help save a national treasure like the
Chesapeake Bay from extinction. When Mr. Anderson returns the almost $1 million
taxpayer dollars he’s received in financial support from the government, maybe
then he can complain about the economic burden of protective environmental
standards like the PMT. Until then, he and all the ag industry – the most
heavily subsidized industry in the country - should be thankful for the
significant governmental support that sustains their operations and be the
first to stand up for good, sound environmental practices like the PMT.
