In a meeting room on the western outskirts of Chicago, a half dozen people gathered in April to talk to the media about the Farm Bill.
They worked under the umbrella of the Agricultural and Wildlife Working Group and represented an array of conservation organizations with a special interest in the legislation that was being shaped in Washington, D.C.
Ducks Unlimited was there. So were Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever, the National Wildlife Federation, the Izaak Walton League of America and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.
And so was Trout Unlimited.
Having a fish group – TU – engaged in this collective revealed, perhaps more than the presence of any other group, just how far reaching and complex Farm Bill programs are.
Reforming crop subsidies and food stamps may have garnered the most mainstream media coverage, but the Farm Bill goes beyond the price of tomatoes, corn and soybeans and whether food stamps are administered by the state or a private company.
“Few people realize just how much the Farm Bill matters to fish and wildlife,” said Barton James of Ducks Unlimited. “Its importance is huge.”
Consequently, these groups and others like them have been lobbying Congress to shape, or reshape, conservation aspects of the 2007 Farm Bill, which was approved by the House of Representatives on July 27.
As written, the five-year, multibillion-dollar bill has a long line of critics that leads all the way to the White House, and the threat of a presidential veto hangs in the D.C. air even before the Senate gets a turn to hammer away at it.
While others argue over what they don’t like in the Farm Bill, the aforementioned conservation groups are talking about what they do like, even if it falls short of their dreams.
“In a time of bad budgets, the House managed to produce a Farm Bill that would adequately fund many established programs while it initiates some key new ones,” James said.
The largest conservation program in the Farm Bill is the Conservation Reserve Program, which encourages farmers to convert highly erodible or environmentally sensitive land to vegetative cover. Both game and non-game wildlife species are the beneficiaries.
The House authorized enrollment of 39.2 million CRP acres through 2012, and avoided the temptation to recast the program in favor of biofuels production over landscape conservation.
Wetlands Reserve and Grasslands Reserve programs also fared well, and a new initiative – Open Fields – was authorized to create or enhance state-run programs designed to promote public hunting and fishing access to private lands.
“Overall, the bill makes a clear statement about the need to provide a strong national investment in the programs that help conserve our fish and wildlife resources,” said Pheasants Forever’s Dave Nomsen. “All eyes now turn to the Senate.”
