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Coalition tells Congress: stop treating conservation programs like piggy banks

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition is asking Congress to stop using conservation funds to pay for other programs.

Coalition policy specialist Alyssa Charney says the 2014 Farm Bill marked the first time lawmakers significantly reversed investment in conservation research and support to the tune of a $4 billion dollar reduction.

She tells Brownfield annual appropriations cuts to the Conservation Stewardship and Environmental Quality Incentives Programs go back even further.

“We’ve been really pleased that the last two fiscal years we did not see those same attacks on conservation.  We’re hopeful that we are kind of moving away from the bad habit of using conservation programs as a piggy bank to pay for other things.”

Charney says conservation programs recently dodged a bullet when the Senate voted down a rescissions package that would’ve cut $550 million from the farm bill and $15 million from the Valued Added Producer Grants program.

“The way the bill packaged these spending cuts was that they were unnecessary funds.  But when we actually turned to understand what would be the implication of these (cuts), we learned that had this moved forward and been passed into law, it would’ve prohibited USDA from providing critical conservation assistance.”

Charney says the Coalition prefers the Senate farm bill over the House version because it maintains more working lands conservation funding.