Source: NATIONAL SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE COALITION, 10/9/20

The Trump Administration published its first 2018 Farm Bill conservation title program final rule in today’s Federal Register.  The Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) rule, which directly contradicts decisions made by Congress in key places, will harm farmers and set back their conservation efforts.  Among its worst features are provisions:
• Penalizing CSP farmers who cannot renew their contracts due to shortage of available federal funds by denying them a chance to try to get back into the program for two full years.
• Reversing Congress’ decision to streamline CSP ranking and payments to provide equal weight to farmers’ active management of ongoing and new conservation activities on their farms.
• Illegally doubling payment limits in order to funnel money to some of the largest farms in the country, reducing payments to the rest of agriculture by nearly 10 percent according to USDA’s own estimates.
• Denying payments to farmers who meet the highest USDA conservation standards and have implemented all the relevant CSP-available conservation activities on one or more of their land uses, a denial not authorized by Congress.
• Failing to conform to the statute’s language on how to allocate CSP dollars to the States and doing so in a manner that could jeopardize funding for Western states.
• Suggesting in its comments on the rule that USDA may in the future retract the current minimum payment rate for farmers with small acreages, many of whom produce very high value fruits and vegetables.
• Failing to include separate ranking pools for beginning farmers and farmers of color in the rule and hinting that its current practice in that regard may be about to change.

For more of this story, click here.