Should Taxpayers Be Investing in the Working Lands Programs?

Key Points

• Federal expenditures on working lands programs, including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Stewardship Program, have grown steadily over the past 10 years and are currently the largest portion of federal conservation programs.
• Despite political support for many conservation programs, there are well-established concerns about many of these programs regarding slippage (lands removed from crop production being replaced by new low-quality lands brought into production) and additionality (whether taxpayers are just funding practices farmers have already adopted because they are profitable).
• The objectives achieved under the working lands programs may not support climate mitigation goals. Federal funds may be better targeted toward research and development of more efficient technologies.

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Introduction

The Biden administration’s priority of investing in climate-smart technologies has stimulated increased interest in public investments in agricultural conservation programs. For example, the president’s budget request for fiscal year 2023 looked to increase mandatory funding devoted to conservation programs, including increased funding for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). These programs generally have a good deal of public support because they sound like something the public would like to support in agriculture.

The current suite of working lands conservation programs has been developed over the past 25 years. (EQIP was established in 1996, and CSP was established in 2008.) Conservation programs, more broadly defined, have a much longer history originating in response to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. The impacts from overproduction that resulted during the Dust Bowl era were obvious. However, the ability of federal government programs to improve soil quality while maintaining farm incomes and limiting unintended consequences has been a challenge. The purposes and motivation behind developing most conservation programs were to provide incentives to farmers not to overproduce during times of high prices and to focus more attention to the longer-term soil health and productivity of farmland.

The assumption that farmers would overuse their soil may have been somewhat valid during the Dust Bowl, when farmers were unlikely to have attended college and operated without the benefit of the public research and extension programs currently dedicated to agriculture. However, today farmers in the United States tend to be highly educated and possess many tools to accurately manage long-term soil health. Furthermore, if farms are interested in preserving the value of their farmland for future land sales or passing the land on to future generations, they inherently have strong incentives for conserving the soils and productivity of their lands without any additional economic incentives from publicly funded initiatives. Many of the conservation programs examined in this report are focused on providing farmers with additional incentives to implement or sustain methods to improve the environmental amenities on farmland.

As a quick aside, it should not be lost on anyone that the Biden administration is focused on encouraging climate-smart agricultural practices while encouraging the counterbalancing practice of double cropping (as discussed in Joseph Glauber and Vincent Smith’s accompanying AEI report).¹ The current situation illustrates the consistent conflict between conservation and other government programs that together strive to balance consumption needs, in the form of high production and lower consumer prices for food, with less production and better conservation practices.

Regardless, there is a clear historical precedent for federally funded agricultural conservation programs, particularly with the renewed focus on combating climate change. In what follows, I investigate whether those investments are actually helping get the intended results.

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Notes

1. Joseph W. Glauber and Vincent H. Smith, “How Best (Not) to Address the Ukraine Crisis,” American Enterprise Institute, June 6, 2022, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/how-best-not-to-address-the-ukraine-crisis/.