The American Farmland Trust, Ag Subsidies, and Ecosystem Services

In a recent American Farmland Trust newsletter they report Washington State passed an AFT supported bill - “Promoting farm and forest land preservation and restoration through conservation markets”. According to AFT, this bill will result in new ecosystem services markets for farm and forest landowners while also potentially improving the performance of existing environmental mitigation and restoration programs.

This bill should serve as a model for other states to implement similar programs. Here in Minnesota, we are lucky to have programs such as Productive Conservation on Working Lands, which is working in parallel to what this new law in Washington proposes to address. Economic viability has long been the weak link in the conservation programs chain. The bottom line is we need to make conservation competitive with commodity crops in the most environmentally sensitive areas. While PCWL is being implemented on a relative small scale statewide in Minnesota, it is attempting to address the three legged stool that is this problem. Without coordinated development of market development, product supply, and agronomic knowledge productive conservation crops will not be competitive with row crops on marginal lands.

For decades we have subsidized the agricultural practices that have resulted in excessive nutrient and sediment loads in our nation’s rivers and streams. To expect farmers to bear the full cost of mitigating these problems is unrealistic. The hyper industrialization of agriculture did not evolve in a market devoid of influence outside of supply and demand. Our federal farm policy has played a profound role in the shaping of domestic and international commodity markets. As unfortunate as it is, we paid to cause the problem, now we need to pay to solve the problem.