WASHINGTON -- The Agriculture Department has reached final agreement with the Office of Management and Budget on the rules for the Conservation Stewardship Program and will hold a signup for the program in August, a key USDA official said July 20.
USDA Natural Resources and Conservation Service Chief Dave White made the announcement to a National Association of Conservation Districts meeting in Washington, but did not provide details. The Conservation Stewardship Program, which was written into the 2008 farm bill by Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, will provide payments to farmers for increasing their level of conservation activities, for maintaining existing activities and for adopting resource-conserving crop rotations.
In what may be a signal of the themes of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's July 22 testimony to the Senate Agriculture Committee on climate change, Larry Elworth, Jackson's agriculture adviser, told the NACD that the Obama administration wants to make sure farmers know that climate change and dependence on foreign energy supplies, particularly for the production of fertilizer, will have "enormous" impacts on agriculture.
The NACD, which represents 3,000 county-level conservation districts that were established in the 1930s, does not have a position on the climate change bills or whether a cap and trade system for carbon emissions should be established, but supported the amendment that House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., added to the House-passed climate change bill, Earl Gruber, an NACD vice president, said in an interview.
