Excerpt
IT has become almost trite to refer to the Food Security Act of 1985 and its innovative Conservation Title as a watershed piece of federal agricultural legislation. Everyone associated with natural resources management realizes that for the first time in this nation's history the 1985 farm bill leveraged soil and water conservation behavior by agricultural producers against a wide range of farm price support, credit, and insurance benefits. Traditionally, federal resource management agencies had relied on education, incentives, technical assistance, and moral suasion to achieve conservation by voluntary action on privately owned agricultural land. Wherever regulation had been imposed, it generally was the result of initiatives by individual states or their legal subdivisions.
Conservation compliance, sodbuster, and swampbuster have now been in effect since December 23, 1985. Conservation compliance requires that producers who farm highly erodible land obtain a conservation plan for that land by January 1, 1990, and fully implement that plan by 1995. As pointed out elsewhere in this JSWC issue, compliance remains voluntary, but failure to comply eliminates participation in many farm income support programs—programs that have become life-sustaining systems for a high percentage …
Footnotes
Tony Vrana is executive vice-president of the Soil and Water Conservation Society, 7515 N.E. Ankeny Road, Ankeny, Iowa 50021.
- Copyright 1989 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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