Agriculture's role in protecting water quality

Excerpt

AGRICULTURE is the remaining, major unregulated source of environmental, primarily water, pollutants. The nation's water resources include underground aquifers as well as lakes, rivers, and the oceans. As a significant nonpoint source of groundwater contamination, agriculture presents a thorny problem for the design of public measures to prevent pollution. Environmental policies tackled point-source pollution of surface waters first because cause-and-effect was easily observable; solutions were, therefore, easily found; and enforcement was possible. Groundwater problems, in contrast, are hard to detect and individual sources of pollution hard to identify.

The administration initiative

With the budget for fiscal year 1990, President Bush launched a federal government initiative to protect water resources from contamination by fertilizers and pesticides without jeopardizing the economic vitality of U.S. agriculture. Federal agencies will design water quality programs to accommodate both the immediate need to halt contamination, particularly of ground-water, and the future need to alter farming practices that may threaten the environment. The President explicitly made the point that farmers ultimately must be responsible for changing production practices to avoid contaminating groundwater and surface waters. Federal and state resources will be available, however, to provide information and technical assistance to …