Common Ground

hen Paul Johnson, an Iowa farmer, former Democratic state legislator and folk hero of the sustainable agriculture movement, became chief of the Agriculture Department's Soil Conservation Service in 1993, he didn't have to travel far to learn why the once venerated agency was in deep trouble with the farmers it served.

All Johnson had to do was listen to his neighbors. They spoke reverently of how the "old" Soil Conservation Service, created in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, had provided farmers with the knowledge and resources to turn the Dust Bowl back into productive farmland. But the 1985 farm bill, they argued, transformed the agency's employees into "green police," threatening farmers with loss of their crop subsidies for not following environmental regulations to the letter.

Neither farming nor legislative experience could have prepared Johnson for the political roller coaster he has ridden over the last two years. The Agriculture Department's reorganization cut his staff and changed the name of his agency to the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). A newly powerful property rights movement helped elect a Republican-controlled Congress. And the 1995-96 farm bill debate dragged on for 14 months.

Against all odds, Johnson emerged as USDA's biggest winner in the new seven-year farm bill. On April 4, President Clinton signed the bill "with reservation," he said, because it destroyed the income safety net for farmers. But he praised the conservation section of the legislation. Conservation provisions loosened regulations objectionable to farmers but continued the Conservation Reserve Program, which idles 36 million acres of mostly fragile farmland at a cost of $1.8 billion per year. The bill also created new programs to help farmers and livestock operators clean up streams and save farmland endangered by urban development.

NRCS' fights with farmers and Capitol Hill have made much less news than Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's battles over public lands or Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner's struggle over clean water. But since NRCS' mandate is to assure the well-being of the nation's privately held land, the stakes are huge. Some 70 percent of the country's land is in private hands and fully 50 percent of the continental United States is farmland. NRCS has 11,000 employees with offices in nearly every county. In addition to helping farmers, NRCS work ranges from controlling salinity on the Colorado River and preserving New York City's watershed to helping Alaskans figure out how to dispose of the manure from dog sled teams.

Neither property rights advocates nor environmental activists are satisfied with the new farm law. But if Johnson, a classic man in the middle, can implement it without either farmers or environmentalists declaring war on him, his experience may offer a model for other federal regulators.

From its creation in 1935 through 1985, the key to SCS' popularity was its voluntary approach. A farmer simply called the local SCS office, explained his problem with soil erosion or drainage, and an SCS employee would visit the farm, give advice and often send a check to help solve the problem.

Then came the boom-and-bust grain cycle of the 1970s. When the Soviet Union and China began importing grain in large amounts, world grain prices skyrocketed, and Earl Butz, President Nixon's secretary of Agriculture, encouraged farmers to plant "fence row to fence row." Farmers in the Great Plains and the mountain states rushed to put pasture land into crop production.

Then the boom collapsed and environmentalists seized the moment to try to focus federal resources on preserving farmland. The 1985 Farm Security Act (FSA) required farmers, for the first time, to comply with government-determined conservation practices in order to get their crop subsidy payments. It also instituted severe penalties for farmers who were deemed "sodbusters" for plowing up highly erodible land or "swampbusters" for farming wetlands. Under the law, SCS was directed to write conservation plans on all farms with erodible land and to certify that farmers were not breaking the sodbuster or swampbuster laws.

The 1985 bill also created the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which eventually paid farmers $1.8 billion per year to take 36.4 million acres of the nation's 400 million acres of cropland out of production for a minimum of 10 years. The job of determining what land needed environmental protection was given to SCS.

Implementing Congress' Will

The agency wrote conservation plans for 1.7 million farms totaling 143 million acres by 1994 and monitored farmers' compliance. But SCS employees say it would be hard to overstate the trauma the agency has experienced in transforming itself from a helping agency to a semi-regulator.

Many longtime employees were horrified to find farmers avoiding them. Farmers feared SCS officials' reports could result in denial of farm program benefits or, even worse, that information in the reports would wind up in lawsuits filed by the Fish and Wildlife Service, Environmental Protection Agency or Army Corps of Engineers, which also claim jurisdiction over wetlands. A few farmers so resented the regulations that they physically attacked SCS personnel. The agency told its employees not to visit farms alone and instituted stress management training.

Farmers felt "we were reporting on them rather than working with them," says Pearlie Reed, NRCS' associate chief and highest ranking career civil servant. Most of the agency's employees still believe that a voluntary approach is the best way to encourage conservation, he says.

SCS went through wrenching personnel changes only partly related to its new status as a regulator. The agency moved conservation officers to the Great Plains. The moves created resentment inside and outside the agency that environmental problems in the middle of the country were receiving more attention than equally deserving ones in California and Florida. SCS also hired a new generation of employees who became known as "FSA babies," since they were recruited after the 1985 act. SCS had been dominated from its inception by male graduates of agricultural colleges who, until 1970, had to prove they grew up on farms. The new recruits were more likely to be women, and many had degrees in wildlife biology and environmental science.

NRCS studies show that conservation compliance and the swampbuster and sodbuster laws have reduced soil erosion by 50 percent nationwide since 1985. Over the years, many farmers could see the improvements in their land, says Shirley Frederiksen, an NRCS district conservation officer in Shelby County, Iowa.

But many farmers say they see inconsistency on the government's part. Don Etler, an Emmetsburg, Iowa, engineer who represents farmers on technical issues in their legal battles with NRCS, says one of the biggest complaints about the agency is that conservationists in different counties interpret the laws in different ways.

The swampbuster provision, which became the biggest bone of contention between farmers and the government, illustrates the problem. The 1985 Act said farmers could not receive farm subsidies if they converted wetlands to farmland after 1985, but left in limbo those lands that had been converted earlier-often with SCS assistance. The law said farmers could continue to farm wetlands that had been drained prior to 1985, but could not "improve" the drainage. Determining the difference between improvement and regular maintenance sparked major legal battles.

Enter Johnson

When Johnson arrived in Washington in 1993, he already knew that SCS would have to assuage farmers' anger. Johnson, a University of Michigan forestry graduate and former Peace Corps volunteer, chose to raise his family on a northeast Iowa farm that raised corn, hay, Christmas trees, cows and sheep. But he had joined an administration that seemed bent on increased environmental regulation.

During his first months on the job, Johnson downsized the agency from 12,600 to 11,000 employees and restructured it to give the regions and states more autonomy. In response to complaints that farmers were beset by a multitude of agencies coming onto their lands to examine wetlands, Johnson negotiated an interagency agreement with EPA, the Corps of Engineers and the Fish and Wildlife Service that made NRCS the lead agency in wetlands delineation on agricultural land. Johnson sent Congress legislation to allow his agency to look at an entire watershed rather than insisting problems be resolved by turning a particular "spot" back to an area that holds water.

In the summer of 1994, six months before the anticipated beginning of the 1995 farm bill debate, Johnson and the Soil and Water Conservation Society, a professional association of engineers, conducted a series of eight forums in agricultural areas around the country and eight focus groups in four cities to identify voters' environmental concerns.The results of the "listening project," as Johnson called it, showed that the agency's reputation among farmers was not nearly as bad as property rights groups had said and that both farmers and urbanites supported agricultural conservation programs despite their cost.

But the forums in rural areas also confirmed that farmers were angriest over wetlands protection. "Wetland delineation is hypocrisy," said one Illinois forum participant. "We get brochures showing water, cattails and ducks, but some wetlands have none of these."

Johnson's hope that a soft approach could work ended when the Republicans won control of Congress. Of the 73 freshmen Republicans elected in 1994, 33 came from farm districts. Polls showed that farmers' anger with federal land regulatory agencies was a prime reason for the growth of the property-rights movement that helped fuel the Republican takeover.

As part of the farm bill debate, which began in January 1955, congressional Republicans were proposing measures that, as Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, put it, would put NRCS "back in the position of working with farmers instead of against them." Grassley and other Senators proposed giving the Agriculture Department detailed instructions on how to manage the Conservation Reserve Program acreage and weakening the swampbuster law. Senators also proposed to end the government's ability to buy permanent easements on wetlands. Without purchasing ability, USDA and taxpayers would have to pay farmers indefinitely for land taken out of production.

The House Agriculture Resource Conservation, Research and Forestry Subcommittee, which oversees NRCS, proposed renaming the agency the Soil Conservation Service. The subcommittee also sought to prevent the agency from identifying as wetland any piece of ground under one acre or any land farmed six out of the previous ten years. Environmentalists and sportsmen contended the action would have reduced Great Plains wetlands by 50 percent.

Farm Bill Fracas

Johnson summoned the political skills that had helped him work with Republicans during his eight years in the Iowa legislature. There he wrote the state's Groundwater Protection Act, a model for research, education and voluntary approaches to water quality.

It helped that Johnson won a measure of support from his fellow Iowan, Sen. Grassley. Johnson "may be slightly a dreamer, but he is dedicated to what he wants to do," says Del Stromer, an Iowa-based Grassley aide who served with Johnson in the legislature.

Johnson began meeting with Members of Congress one on one about the farm bill. At the same time, he directed his special assistant, Soil and Water Conservation Society executive Max Schnepf, and Gary Markheim, another aide, to write an "ideal" conservation bill. The proposal they came up with called for consolidating all conservation cost-share efforts into one program and merging the Conservation Reserve Program and wetlands land retirement programs. The dream bill never got official administration approval, but Johnson got permission from higher-ups at the Agriculture Department to release it on the Internet.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Conservation Districts, hunting and fishing groups and even the National Rifle Association warned Congress that removing all one-acre plots from wetlands delineation would so reduce wildlife habitat that it would shorten hunting seasons. And, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., began championing the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to help farmers and animal producers with water-quality problems. Boehlert warned his fellow Republicans that polls showed that voters viewed Republican officeholders as weak on the environment and that gutting NRCS' wetlands programs, a part of the final bill, would prove unpopular with the voters in the 1996 elections.

Farmers' groups and property rights advocates were still angry about the swampbuster provisions, however. So Johnson worked with Rep. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., to write an amendment to the farm bill, which would appease farmers without eliminating one-acre wetlands. Rep. Johnson's amendment removed the requirement that NRCS consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service over wetlands delineation and made it more difficult for the government to declare a farmer out of "conservation compliance."

Implementing the Bill

The NRCS director says he is pleased with both the deregulatory aspects of the bill and new programs.

"As I farm every day, if someone can encourage me, I react more favorably than being told what to do," Johnson says. But he says, NRCS will take a "proactive, aggressive, voluntary approach," adding that no NRCS employee "should drive down a road and see a farmer abusing his land and not talk to him about it."

Johnson still faces a series of hurdles in implementing the farm bill.

NRCS' ultimate success or failure in solving environmental problems may depend on whether the general political atmosphere stays as contentious as it has been the last few years. Jeff Vonk, chief of the NRCS regional office in Lincoln, Neb., says he is enthusiastic about greater flexibility and more local control in working out solutions, but says he's finding that officials at every level of government are so distrustful of each other they are wary of forming alliances to concede any authority to an intermediary group. "It's pulling teeth to get other federal agencies or the states to do anything," Vonk says. "I don't know if people [in the agencies and state governments] feel under siege. They don't want to give anything up."

Both environmentalists and property rights advocates will continue to watch Johnson and NRCS carefully. Environmental groups such as the American Farmland Trust, the Environmental Working Group and the National Audubon Society wrote President Clinton before he signed the farm bill, asking him to express "strong concern about the conservation safety net" in his statement. Clinton did not do this, but the groups will monitor the results closely to see if wildlife habitat declines.

Bruce Knight, a lobbyist for the National Corn Growers Association, said his group is not satisfied with the swampbuster reforms, but Knight still believes that Congress' passage and Clinton's signature on a bill combining deregulation and new programs is "an open admission that command and control doesn't work for environmental protection within the agricultural community."

Johnson says the same thing, but with a twist. The 1996 farm bill may prove to be "a watershed, a real divide" in the Agriculture Department's attitude toward conservation policy, he says. But if farmers don't cooperate, Johnson warns, "command and control will be back."