Sustaining Cultivation 505Reserve Program, a government programme for keeping the most erodible land
out of row crops. They got about $1000 in annual subsidies for that. And they do
grow a few acres of corn, plus some wheat and sorghum, both unusual crops for
Iowa. They got about $5000 a year for that. But they missed out on an additional
$14,837 a year of support that a more conventional operation of their size would
have got.
Given that they favour big farms and not agronomic efficiency; given that they
encourage overproduction and not soil conservation and environmental protec-
tion, in most circumstances; given that they total an awful lot of money devoted
to at best dubious outcomes for the public good; given all this, many have long
proposed the restructuring of farm subsidies. At the time of this writing, there is
considerable hope among those concerned about sustainability that we may have
just taken a large step in the right direction with the passage in 2002 (and the
partial funding in 2003) of the Conservation Security Program (CSP). This hotly
contested title in the 2002 Farm Bill would pay farmers for a whole series of green
enhancements to their operations, from building soil-control structures to encour-
aging wildlife. It’s a manifestation of what some observers of agriculture call ‘multi-
functionality’ – the idea that the purpose of agriculture should go beyond the
single-minded one of ever-increasing food production. Rather than paying farmers
to do only that, through our food expenditures and through the structure of sub-
sidies, we should pay farmers to do some important things that are not directly
included in the price of food – things like conserving soil and providing wildlife
habitat. The CSP program would pay individual farms up to $45,000 a year to
green their operations, based on a tiered system with three levels of enhancements.
The CSP, many people hope, is the breakthrough in farm structure that sustainable
farmers have been waiting for.^7
But others are not so optimistic. The CSP’s structure turns out to be very com-
plex. Many of the small farmers who have looked into it have despaired of keeping
up with the paperwork necessary to sign up for the programme and to document
compliance with it. Larger farms are more likely to be able to hire outside help to
sort through its tangle of rules. Also, at this writing it is not clear that the pro-
gramme will receive anything like the level of funding that was originally envi-
sioned for it. Although a farm could conceivably get as much as $45,000 a year in
support, on a per-acre basis the programme would pay no more than $22.25 an
acre, with full implementation at the level of the third tier – considerably less than
farmers have been receiving recently for leaving their land in corn. There is also
concern about how green some of the practices the CSP will pay for really are, in
part because the rules are still up in the air. Although it will probably on the whole
encourage greener practices on the farms that are able to cope with its paperwork
requirements, it is too soon to say if the CSP will significantly increase survival
rates among sustainable farms.
Another factor that may depress sustainable farm survival rates comes, para-
doxically, from a strength of PFI’s get-along-but-don’t-go-along approach. A farmer
who has tried to seat his or her self on the tractor seat of the Big Ag monologue is