Farmers Will Air Their Grievances Today Importance Of Air Quality Was Ignored By Crp, They Believe

Eastern Washington farmers will have a message for Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman when he gets off the plane in Pasco today.

It’s written in the air.

It’s collecting on the cars and trucks, blowing through the streets and forming a gray-brown mantle that covers the region.

Dust, stirred by farming and blended with volcanic ash, is what farmers believe Glickman and his staff missed this spring when deciding who was in or out of a major farm program designed to protect the environment.

Washington finished last among the major states re-enrolling land in the Conservation Reserve Program. Now farmers are eager to ask the nation’s top agriculture official what went wrong in May. And what will prevent it from happening all over again in September, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture decides whether more fragile land will be placed in reserve?

Glickman is expected to bring assurances that they’ll probably fare better in the fall.

The CRP pays farmers to plant ground cover and leave portions of their land idle for 10 years in order to reduce erosion, improve water quality and enhance wildlife habitat.

The agency awards points for different factors - soil type, proximity to streams, danger of erosion - in assessing whether to accept land into the program.

Washington farmers get an average of $39 an acre under the program. After the most recent sign-up, completed in May, the state’s reserve land dropped from 1 million to 400,000 acres, a $30 million reduction in annual payments to the state.

Without their annual CRP payments, landowners will be forced to sell their land or plant crops on it, said Jerry Snyder, a fourth-generation Adams County wheat farmer.

“There is a lot of finger-pointing as to why Washington state did not raise higher points in the CRP,” he said.

Snyder had 600 acres in the program, which he tried to re-enroll in May. None of it was approved.

He believes that he and other Washington farmers played the wrong card. They emphasized wind erosion problems, soil conditions and air quality; the program was weighted to help with water erosion.

Oregon and Idaho farmers who put emphasis on water quality and wildlife issues fared much better, Snyder said.

The misdirection seems to have come from the USDA’s national headquarters.

“I believe that the people in the state offices did the best they could with what they had to work with,” said Snyder.

A jar for the secretary

Sitting at his desk in front of mirrored windows that look out on downtown Spokane, Larry Albin picked up a Kerr jar.

The state executive director of the Farm Service Agency shook the jar, nearly full of gray ash collected from a farm near Ritzville. He set it down and unscrewed the lid.

Fine dust poured like smoke over the lip of the jar.

“You kind of forget how fine this stuff is,” Albin said.

In June, Albin explained, he did the same demonstration for Glickman in Washington, D.C., hoping to drive home the point that dust and ash in Eastern Washington was enough of a problem to merit special consideration.

Ash wasn’t worth any points in the May sign-up for CRP, Albin said.

“We’re hoping that in the (next) sign-up it will be,” he said.

Albin said he was shocked that the state fared so poorly in the May signup.

Now that Glickman is coming to his turf, Albin will try to make the case that air quality is just as important as water and wildlife, and that the soil and ash in the Eastern Washington air will be reduced if the farmers are able to leave more of their land idle.

Freedom to farm, or to lose out?

A cut in the acres accepted into CRP was expected in the wake of last year’s major overhaul of the nation’s agriculture programs, known as Freedom to Farm.

The basic premise of that system was that the federal government would slowly remove itself from subsidy programs and allow farmers to make more decisions on what to plant.

Freedom to Farm had strong support from Western Republicans. But Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington initially opposed the shift in policy.

One of the reasons, she said recently, was a fear that Eastern Washington farmers would suffer in the 1997 sign-ups for conservation reserve.

Republicans sought votes from Midwestern and Eastern Democrats with a promise to shift the emphasis of CRP, she said. The program that had been aimed at soil conservation would give more emphasis to Eastern environmental concerns, particularly rain runoff that was silting up rivers, and protection of habitat for wildlife.

That put farmers in the drier Inland Northwest at a disadvantage, because their main erosion problem is from wind, not rain.

“We almost predicted we would be in the position we are in today,” Murray said. She eventually voted for Freedom to Farm after voicing “serious concerns” about CRP.

Rep. George Nethercutt, a strong supporter of Freedom to Farm, acknowledged this week that everyone expected Washington state to have fewer acres enrolled in CRP.

“The goal of Freedom to Farm was to make sure that we were putting highly erodable land into CRP, and not put good land into it,” the Spokane Republican said.

Congressional offices sent letters to the USDA, seeking clarification of new rules for the May sign-up, lobbying for the program to give more consideration for wind erosion and the presence of ash from the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

No one expected the shift to be so dramatic.

The state had nearly 785,000 acres that needed to be re-enrolled in the program in May. Farmers filed requests to place just under 820,000 into CRP.

The USDA accepted only 172,000 - about 22 percent of the amount that expired. It was the smallest percentage accepted in the region, and among the 16 largest states that have land in the program.

Murray, Nethercutt, and two other Washington Republicans, Sen. Slade Gorton and Rep. Doc Hastings, told Glickman that the drop was so precipitous - and the decisions seemed so arbitrary when compared to similar lands in Oregon and Idaho - that Eastern Washington farmers were losing faith in CRP.

Glickman promised to come to the state to explain the program and defend the way it was run.

Nethercutt continued to insist that USDA made a mistake in the way the Washington land applications were processed. From his seat on the House Appropriations Committee, he pushed through an amendment to the 1998 farm spending bill to cut the funding for two top USDA officials who oversee CRP.

Federal officials should be responsible for their mistakes, he said.

The amendment so angered Glickman that he considered canceling his planned visit to Eastern Washington, sources said. When he did announce the trip, the destination was not Spokane, as members of the congressional delegation had assumed, but the Tri-Cities.

The official reason for the change was that land affected by the volcanic ash is closer to the Tri-Cities’ airport, and thus a shorter trip in a busy schedule. But congressional sources from both parties suggest an unofficial reason: It’s not in Nethercutt’s district.

Murray worried that Nethercutt’s amendment would derail efforts to get more Washington land accepted into the program in the fall. Arguing whether mistakes were made in the spring was moving dramatically backwards, she said.

“The best thing for our growers is to move forward,” she said.

An agreement reached

Less than 24 hours before Glickman boarded a plane for Pasco and a tour of a Washington wheat farm, Nethercutt said he and the secretary had talked, and reached an agreement.

Nethercutt on Wednesday withdrew the amendment to cut funding for the two USDA officials’ salaries.

The state’s congressional delegation will be asked for “input” on rules for the fall sign-up, then monitor and work with the department “to make sure everybody’s clear” on the new rules, Nethercutt said.

The department will review the “unique character” of the state’s ashladen soil. The signup and payment schedule for land enrolled in the fall program will be moved up, to help farmers who were rejected in May but accepted in September.

The rhetoric will cool.

“There is no guarantee the secretary can give us that X amount of acres will be enrolled,” Nethercutt said. “But we will get greater consideration. His word is very good. He is an honorable person.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Graphic: Losing out in CRP