Farm Bill Fight Shaping Up Over Wetlands

The skirmish is building over critical changes proposed in in the forthcoming Farm Bill, which dictates agricultural policies that impact farm-based wildlife.

Several proposals have arisen in the new Congress to attack established wetlands protections and reduce or eliminate millions of taxpayer-supported Conservation Reserve Program acres. But none has grabbed the spotlight as has Senate Bill 1373, whose sponsors include such powerful Republicans as Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas and Indiana’s Richard Lugar, who heads the Senate Agriculture Committee.

Their proposal would gut Swampbuster provisions of earlier farm bills by excluding wetlands that had been cropped in six of the previous 10 years, any wetlands that had been mechanically altered and any wetlands of one acre or less. It also would remove the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Corps of Engineers from reviewing (and often halting) proposed wetlands destruction while giving that oversight to the Department of Agriculture..

According to the non-partisan Wildlife Management Institute in Washington, D.C., the Dole-Lugar proposals potentially would have a devastating impact upon waterfowl, particularly ducks.

By exempting wetlands of one acre or less, a total of 78 percent of wetlands in the prairie pothole duck factory of the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota and Iowa would be exposed to agricultural destruction, according to institute president Rollin D. Sparrowe.

Sparrowe, a former head of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s migratory bird office, predicted the duckcarrying capacity of the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota and Iowa would be reduced by 50 percent, with a short-term loss of more than 9 percent of the nation’s duck population. That would result in severely restricted waterfowling seasons with a potential loss of 630,000 hunter-days worth an estimated $22.2 million to several states, including Illinois, he said.

One of the Dole-Lugar provisions would continue CRP soil conservation subsidies until 2002, but would change the emphasis from wind and soil erosion to water quality. According to several sources, this would switch CRP priorities from typical rolling midwestern farmlands and western ranches to coastal areas in the South and Southeast.