Farm Bureau Insists USDA's New Conservation Rules Must Protect Both Farmland and Wetland

As the Agriculture Department moves forward with Highly Erodible Land and Wetland Conservation regulations, the department must ensure its new Interim Rule balances the benefits for both farmland and wetland, as Congress intended, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. As it was written, the Interim Rule makes program participation much more difficult and fails to give famers the opportunity they should have to participate in the process. 

 

“Because conservation compliance programs operate fundamentally as regulatory programs they should operate with all the duties and rights that such a regulatory program entails. Equally important, all guidance, policy and interim rules must match up with the statute,” Farm Bureau wrote in comments submitted to USDA on Tuesday. 

 

For too long USDA had been making regulatory determinations based primarily on guidance and policy that was not put through the required public process—an error that Farm Bureau said permeates the wetland identification and appeals processes. “USDA holds all the cards, leaving farmers without the necessary tools to protect their property and due process rights,” the group wrote.

 

In keeping with the statute, USDA must recognize that prior-converted cropland is not only not farmed wetland, it is no longer wetland and should never be treated as wetland under the Food Security Act or any rule implementing the Food Security Act. 

 

Also at odds with the law is the department’s newly added discretion in determining that a decades-old map is of insufficient quality to uphold a certified determination. 

 

“Determinations certified prior to USDA’s adoption of new mapping conventions should be exempt from invalidation due to changes that only new imaging technology can detect. To that end, USDA’s regulations should expressly recognize that pre-1990 certifications are valid unless the producer raises the issue that they were never provided with appeal rights after passage of the 1990 farm bill (and thus, were not able to appeal the determination to become certified),” Farm Bureau said.