Paying the nonpoint pollution control bill

Excerpt

AGRICULTURAL nonpoint pollution is that aspect of soil erosion that everyone agrees is a policy problem. It happens off the farm and imposes on people who have no part in the actions that cause it. While reasonable people still argue the validity of using tax dollars to protect a farmer's soil productivity (the on-farm result of erosion), they generally agree that pollution damages from erosion call for public action.

Even within the pollution control community, the nonpoint problem has currency. Nearly all regional offices of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identify nonpoint pollution as their most difficult pollution problem. Nonpoint pollution involves far more than agriculture, of course. Pollutants from diffuse sources include various minerals, nutrients, toxic chemicals and pathogens only partially attributable to agriculture. But farms are a major source of nonpoint pollution.

There is no real mystery about the causes of agricultural nonpoint pollution. It happens because of what farmers and other land users do or fail to do on the land. And it stands to reason that if society wants less pollution from farms, farmers must do something differently.

Soil erosion and runoff occur because farmers are behaving in a reasonably …