Act Immediately to Support Family Farms and the Environment! Call Your Senators to Support the Grassley EQIP Payment Limitations Amendment The Issue in Brief: The Senate will take up the agricultural appropriations bill for 2004 on the floor the week of July 21, quite possibly fairly early in the week. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa will introduce an amendment to scale back the per farm payment limitation for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) from $450,000 to $300,000, and apply the limit to all the farming sites that are part of a single operation, regardless of the number of partners investing in the operation. The Grassley amendment will put some brakes on the use of EQIP to subsidize expansion of industrial livestock confinement facilities, while allowing for a wider, fairer distribution of EQIP funds to a larger number of farmers. The amendment will redirect funding to help family farms and improve the environmental outcomes of the EQIP program. Act Now: The Senate could start debate on the agriculture appropriations bill at any moment. Please call both of your Senators offices right now. Don't hesitate! Time is very short! You can reach your Senators via the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and asking for their office by name. Tell them you are a constituent and urge them to support the Grassley EQIP Amendment to the Agriculture Appropriations bill. Leave that message with the receptionist who answers the phone and/or ask to speak with the staff person who covers agriculture and give them the same message. Background: The EQIP program was enacted as part of the 1996 farm bill as a major, positive reform of previous conservation cost-share programs. Payments were limited to $10,000 a year, with a cap of not more than $50,000 over five years. Animal waste storage structures for large-scale confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) were ineligible for EQIP funding. The program worked reasonably well in support of farm conservation efforts, with a special emphasis on cost-effective land management practices. In the 2002 farm bill, however, Congress reversed course in response to a massive lobbying campaign by corporate livestock interests and their allies. Large-scale confinement operations were made eligible for EQIP funding, the yearly payment limit was eliminated, and the overall payment limitation mushroomed nine-fold to $450,000 over the six-year span of the farm bill. Proponents of these changes spoke openly about converting EQIP from a conservation program to a commodity program for livestock groups. Despite a five-fold increase in annual overall funding for EQIP provided in the 2002 farm bill, the total number of farms and ranches benefiting from EQIP has not increased because the payments per farm have become so much larger. The primary beneficiaries of these changes have been large livestock confinement operations and other large farms and ranches investing in capital-intensive structures and equipment with public cost-share dollars. These taxpayer expenditures probably do far more to increase production (and thus lower the prices farmers receive for their products) than to achieve any benefits to natural resources and the environment. The Grassley amendment, while not going as far as we would like, would be a very big step in the right direction of restoring some sanity to the once-proud program. The amendment would allow more farmers to participate in EQIP by reducing the high-end payments to the largest operations. The amendment would also rectify a further problem created by USDA in the rulemaking process, namely allowing the already extreme $450,000 payment limit to be multiplied by the number of partners in a single farming operation ? this from the same USDA team that invented commodity program payment limitation loopholes that provide million dollar payments to large grain and cotton operations! The Grassley amendment tries to nip this slide toward more handouts for the powerful in the bud. Please note -- the Grassley amendment does not change the total funding for the EQIP program ($1 billion in 2004). It only addresses the payment limitation and thus the distribution of dollars internally within the program. This amendment is a great opportunity to start correcting one of the biggest mistakes of the 2002 farm bill. Thank you for making those calls today! Let's take back our program! Erin E. Jordahl Director, Iowa Chapter Sierra Club 3839 Merle Hay Road, Suite 280 Des Moines, IA 50310 515-277-8868 [log in to unmask] www.iowa.sierraclub.org - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - To get off the IOWA-TOPICS list, send any message to: [log in to unmask]