In modern agriculture, there is a considerable array of practices that crop and livestock farmers can adopt that help to reduce runoff of agricultural chemicals, manure, and/or soil erosion, which can impair the water quality of bodies of surface water as well as groundwater that impacts their neighbors near and far.
In its reporting from the National Water Quality Initiative in 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that “agricultural runoff is the leading cause of water quality impacts to rivers and streams, the third leading source for lakes, and the second largest source of impairments to wetlands”.
In recent decades, water quality has declined so seriously in certain bodies of water that federal courts have ordered local and state jurisdictions to take concrete actions to address the problem, using authority provided under the Clean Water Act, first enacted in 1948 as the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. These orders contain restrictions on the maximum amount of one or more pollutants allowed to enter a specific waterbody, known as Total Maximum Daily Load or TMDL, with the specific levels typically developed by the state or local agency with jurisdiction over water quality in that area, including development of plans to reduce those levels over time, which then have to be approved by EPA. Recent estimates indicate that more than 700,000 miles of U.S. waterways, about 51 percent of assessed river and stream miles, are impaired by pollution.
For example, the Chesapeake Bay watershed, which covers portions of six Northern Atlantic states from Virginia up to central New York, has 276 distinct TMDL’s covering the various segments of the watershed, and many of them stem from excessive nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment entering the water from agricultural operations. Pollutants and sediments running off of agricultural operations are known as ‘non-point sources”, to distinguish them from pollutants flowing from identifiable commercial sources such as processing or manufacturing facilities through discharge pipes or ditches.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) currently operates two distinct types of conservation programs which provide financial and technical assistance to help farmers put practices that address water quality into place. The single largest program in annual expenditure terms, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), pays farmers an annual rental payment to retire farmland from active cropping operations for between 10 and 15 years. The land that is enrolled in this program is considered to be environmentally sensitive and the CRP contracts are awarded on the basis of which proposed plots of land to be retired offer the best environmental outcome. At the end of 2023, there were 24.8 million acres enrolled in this program, at a cost of $1.86 billion for that year, not including cost share assistance to help farmers install their conserving use practices such as trees, perennial grasses, or pollinator habitat.
The current version of the CRP was established in the 1985 Food Security Act (1985 farm bill) after an earlier incarnation was created as part of the Soil Bank program in the 1950’s. Today’s CRP retires three types of farmland–enrollment of whole fields previously devoted to crop production, enrollment of partial fields for the creation of conservation buffers and similar practices, called Continuous CRP or CCRP, and enrollment of grasslands, which prior to the 2018 farm bill was an entirely separate program. Retiring all of these categories of land helps with water quality by reducing soil erosion, but the partial field enrollment portion, allowing farmers to install the following types of ‘edge of field’ practices–riparian buffers, filter strips, field windbreaks, contour strips, prairie strips, and grass waterways, all of which help filter out pollutants and sediment that otherwise might enter nearby bodies of water. The target in the 2018 farm bill for such contracts was 8.6 million acres by the end of 2023. Farmers enrolling land in these practices are entitled to receive bonus payments over and above rental payments.
Farmers can also receive payments to install similar ‘edge of field’ practices under the other type of USDA conservation program known as ‘working land’ programs, primarily the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). Under the provisions of the 2018 farm bill, which were extended in December of 2023 through the end of September, EQIP will have more than $2 billion in funding for FY25 and CSP will have $1 billion in funding for the same year. A significant number of edge of field practices, such as saturated buffers and grassed waterways, are also eligible for funding under the conservation provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which provided an additional $4 billion for EQIP and CSP for FY25. In FY24, farmers contracted to implement more than 2500 edge of field or riparian practices under EQIP, accounting for less than 2.5 percent of all practices implemented in that year.
There are also some non-profit entities which are helping farmers install these types of practices, such as the Wetlands Initiative based in Illinois and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, dedicated to “ to protecting and restoring our nation’s fish, wildlife, plants and habitats for current and future generations.”
Most farmers seeking to implement new conservation practices under these two programs receive 75 percent of the funding for the practice under their contract, a process known as cost-share assistance. Farmers from underserved populations, such as African-American, Hispanic, or Native American tribe members, can receive up to 90 percent as their cost share assistance.
Economic analyses suggest that farmers adopting new in-field conservation practices such as cover cropping or no-till can offset some of the remaining cost due to reduced input costs or modestly higher yields, but few such opportunities arise from installation of edge of field practices, the benefits of which accrue largely to the general public and not the farmers themselves. As Congressional lawmakers strive to end the stalemate in the current farm bill process, they might consider whether a higher cost share might be justified for farmers implementing the latter type of practices.
