Sleight Of Hand Trick

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.