Exploring the Farm Bill, with Ann M. Bartuska

Top of the Stack

References and recommendations made during the podcast:

• "Burger King is testing out an Impossible Whopper. This is why," by Danielle Wiener-Bronner, CNN Business
• USGS Current Water Data for the Nation

Notable Quotes

• “This most recent [farm bill] is authorized at 428.3 billion dollars over five years. And so, it's huge, it's a huge investment. But 80% of that is the nutrition programs and so I think that just get tells you that the whole notion behind the farm bill is as a safety net. It's to provide stability, and it's to be able to maintain a healthy food economy for the United States first and foremost.” (7:19)
• “In addition, one of the newer programs—called the Regional Conservation Partnership program—enables farmers or producers to work with other private landowners and public land managers so that you have a much more integrated approach to conservation strategies at a watershed scale. And for those of us who deal with environmental issues, that kind of a scale gives you a much greater opportunity to affect change than if you're just dealing with a small plot or an individual farm field.” (11:38)
• “What's not known so much about the farm bill is there's actually a forestry title. So, it's not just about agricultural lands, but also about the opportunities to bring forests into the equation. . . So to be able to have a more integrated approach to a forest practices and conservation practices is again, one of the changes that have taken place." (12:18)

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. This week, we talk with Dr. Ann Bartuska. RFF Vice President for land, water and nature about the 2018 farm bill.

The farm bill is a massive piece of legislation, and we'll ask to focus in on some key topics related to land conservation and agricultural research. She'll share her expertise on those topics along with the connection between the farm bill and forest management, climate change, meatless hamburgers and more. Stay with us.

Ann Bartuska, it is great to have you here on Resources Radio.

Ann Bartuska: Well, I'm glad to be here, Daniel.

Daniel Raimi: So Ann, we're going to talk today about the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018, better known as the farm bill. But before we get into our main subject for today, we always like to learn how people ended up where they are in their careers when we're speaking with them.

So, we're interested in how you got interested in environmental policy and how you ended up working at USDA, which is where you were before joining us here at RFF.

Ann Bartuska: Well, I was thinking about this and of course periodically asked, "Well, what's your career path?" And it really goes back to discovering ecology as an undergraduate. I was actually a biology pre-med major, and by taking this ecology course, just really made me recognize that this was just the perfect subject area for the kinds of things I was interested in, which is the connectedness of things. Actually, became an ecosystem ecologist partly because of that.

My graduate degrees, all my research, all my interest really revolved around environmental issues associated with coal mining, and strip mining in particular. And so, that got me on the path for environmental policy, just because you're dealing with such an important topic that is regulated, and a lot of overlying laws both at the state and federal level, but I also knew I didn't want to go the academic track when I finished my degrees.

And it got me into being a manager for what, at that time, was called the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program or NAPAP, as we affectionately know it, which was designed to do acid rain research to lead up to a reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, and that was 1982. I basically left the actual research practice world into the world of environmental policy and management of research, and that's really got me started in my career.

I did that at NC state but I became a forest service employee late in the 80s, and forest service is part of USDA. Going on further, ended up at USDA in Washington DC with the forest service, and did a whole bunch of different jobs there, including my, as I like to call it, the years of managing the Timber program and the Grazing program and all the issues associated with that. A very contentious time including spotted owl, but then I was asked to, after leading the research branch of the forest service, was asked during the Obama administration to move over to the department in the research education and economics part of the USDA.

And I guess this note, right here, pointing out, and I'll talk about it later when we talk about the farm bill is, there are 16 agencies at USDA. It is a very large organization.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah.

Ann Bartuska: And the Research Education and Economics Branch missionary, we call it, is very diverse, but it's really focused on research and statistics that support the rest of USDA programs. And that's what I did for almost seven years as a deputy under secretary, as a career civil servant still. I was not an appointee, but that really gave me a breadth of knowledge and understanding about what the scope of USDA programs were. And so, it's been a really interesting arc of my career over the last, and I'm not going to count the decades, but it's been a few.

Daniel Raimi: Right, right. Well, that's fascinating and so interesting to have to have worked on so many of these issues. You're the second or third person on the podcast that mentioned the spotted owl issue, and it's actually a history that I know very little about. So, we'll have to do an episode on spotted owl at some point. And we'll also have to share knowledge about Raleigh, North Carolina, where I spend plenty of time as well.

So thanks again for joining us, and there's so many things we could ask you about, Ann, but we wanted to talk to you about the farm bill today, partly because the USDA hosted a number of listening sessions on the farm bill to gather public input on developing rules to implement the most recent version of the farm bill, just last month in March. And so, we want it to learn from you about some of the important provisions of the farm bill that you've focused on in your career.

And there's way too much to cover in one episode, again, on this. So, we're going to focus in on sort of conservation and research elements of the bill. So keeping that in mind, can you give us a kind of broad overview of the key components that have historically been a part of the farm bill, and how much they cost and how that might have changed over time?

Ann Bartuska: Sure. Actually, in preparation for this podcast, I went back a little in history because I realized I was not sure myself how this all started. And it goes back to 1933 and FDR as part of the New Deal to help stabilize farmers. And you know, as fundamental to what the farm bill is, is how do you sustain, what are the mechanisms, what are the programs you need to maintain foreign production, which is food production for the United States, and all the ramifications with that?

So, the bare bones of the original farm bill was really looking at farm products and conservation and how keeping farmers on the land. It expanded into adding what we used to be called, Food Stamps, which was to provide a buffer for really low income and struggling American people during the end of the depression into the beginning of World War II, and to really create a safety net for food and nutritional policy.

The Food Stamp program was terminated, but the Farm programs continued. Full authorization of the farm bill started in 1938, but the Food Stamp program came back in 1964 under Johnson. So, the whole idea, and if you think about the farm bill as being a five years cyclical farm to table bill, that's probably close to what it is. Any aspect of food and food production, food use, consumer activities, and at large part, farm farming practices themselves are included in some aspect of the farm bill.

And it's now up to this most recent one is authorized at the at $428.3 billion over five years. And so, it's huge. It's a huge investment, but 80% of that is the nutrition programs and, and so I think that just get tells you that the whole notion behind the farm bill is as a safety net. It's to provide stability, and it's to be able to maintain and healthy food economy for the United States first and foremost.

Daniel Raimi: Right. That's really helpful context. And what used to be called the Food Stamp program is now called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. And as you say, it counts for about 80% of the spending in the bill. So, we're not going to focus on that component of it today though, we're going to focus on sort of conservation programs as well as research.

And when we think about rationales behind policy interventions that the government might take, it's pretty easy to imagine why something like SNAP is justified and necessary as a safety net program. But can you provide a little bit more of the rationale behind why the government in the United States intervenes in the agricultural sector, and particularly, when it comes to conservation? What's the rationale for intervention there?

Ann Bartuska: Well, let me go back to this whole notion of stabilization and the original establishment language around the farm bill itself. And the context is in part because every a farmer or producer actually works at a very narrow margin. There is very little opportunity to build big savings, if you will, from the farm production itself. And so, every time that you have a impact on annual production cycle, could be flooding, could be extreme droughts, it could be a seed crop fails, it could be pests.

There's almost no way to recover with that from that in a given season. And so behind the lot of the farm bill programs themselves are to be able to provide sustainability over time so that you maintain farmers on the land through the bad times, so that we continue to have good agricultural production across the United States. And so, that's sort of the basic tenants around around it. And so, the idea of providing incentives to farmers to take on sustainability practice really started growing several years ago, probably several decades even now, on recognizing that water quality issues could be managed if you could tweak farm practices.

Because of this narrow margin that farmers operate in, they don't usually have the cash reserves to be able to make an investment. It could be as simple as putting in a culvert so that you've reduced erosion from a road system. So, the idea around the conservation titles, in particular, have grown, but it really started with this idea of how can we help incentivize a farmer to take action that is actually for the greater good?

It could be water quality, it could be maintaining soil on the ground, and of course we all have pictures of the Dust Bowl and how that that affected practices in the United States in the in all sorts of different aspects, but what has really been fascinating to watch is the evolution of these conservation programs to be much more integrated, to be looking at multiple practices on farm and more recently to be looking at a regional context.

One of the evolutions that I think is interesting to be seeing is that on farm itself, where you can be integrating practices that deal with habitat, that you can be looking at water quality practices, and then being able to integrate them in a way that actually address a stewardship of the overall farm system itself is being one of the really great changes that have taken place through the conservation titles.

In addition, one of the newer programs called the Regional Conservation Partnership program enables farmers or producers to work with other private landowners and public land managers so that you have much more integrated approach to conservation strategies at a watershed scale. And for those of us who deal with environmental issues, that kind of a scale gives you a much greater opportunity to affect change than if you're just dealing with a small plot or an individual farm field.

So, that's been one of the evolutions I think that's been very positive. Then probably what's not known so much about the farm bill is there's actually a forestry title. So, it's not just about agricultural lands, but also about the opportunities to bring forest into the equation. And lot of lot of farm managers also have woodlots. So to be able to have a more integrated approach to a forest practices and conservation practices is again, one of the changes that have taken place.

There's a lot of other things in that forestry title, but that being able to work across lands, foreign partnerships is really been a tremendous opportunity to achieve conservation at scale, rather than just limiting it to an individual farm.

Daniel Raimi: Right. So, it's interesting that there are these broad scale approaches being implemented increasingly under the farm bill. But for me, so I'm someone who works a lot on energy and climate and conservation activities on forestry land or farm land is something that is not at all intuitive to me. So, could you maybe give us an example or two of what kinds of on the ground activities these programs support and how they might play out at scale?

Ann Bartuska: Oh, absolutely. One of the programs that's called the Agricultural Conservation Easement program is designed to help support the establishment of conservation easements. That would then, put into a longer term protection, high valued parts of farmer's production, or productive area, or wetlands, which is one of the target areas. And so, this would enable then a farmer to get some reimbursement for putting that land into an easement that sustains the habitat characteristics, and basically enables them to the much more integrated environmental conservation approaches across land.

So, that's one that's been, I think very successful in building an easements. Some of the other practices that would might occur through the equip or environmental quality incentives program. I mentioned culvert replacement at one point earlier, but some of the activities that we're really fairly recent is putting in pollinator habitat.

If a farmer who is growing, as we call it a stream bank to string bank, because of the value of their crop for them to take out any part of that land from agriculture production reduces their actual profits for the year. If they could be incentivized through a program to put in a pollinator habitat, they not only then don't lose the economic value as much, but they also get the side benefits for that habitat.

And so, we've been able to put in quite a few acres and above, millions of acres in the United States through some of the Pollinator Habitat programs of the Conservation Reserve, program as well as the Conservation Stewardship program. One of the interesting ones that's maybe not obvious to people is this notion of cover crops. And that is in between planting may be corn or soy or wheat, you would put an Alfalfa, which is does a couple things.

One is very rich in nitrogen. It has a lot of organic matter. A farmer will put in the Alfalfa as a secondary crop and then turn that into the soil, so that you're basically getting, in some ways you could call it green fertilization, well the funds to support that type of activity could come from the Equip program or Environmental Quality Incentives program.

And so, these are very tangible activities. I think one of the two areas that most frequently the programs are used for are water quality and quantity. Quality does minimizing a runoff into our water bodies, et cetera. And that could be done through putting in buffers along creeks or streams. Riparian forest buffers have become very popular because you get added habitat value, but there's also quantity and that's where putting in stream side stabilization efforts, culverts, other kinds of mechanical systems really are helpful to improve the water quantity side of it.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that makes sense. And again, for those of us not expert on this topic, I remember learning about the word "riparian" when I was doing an internship, maybe 10 years ago or something like that. But can you just remind us what Riparian kind of refers to, and specifically, with riparian forest buffers?

Ann Bartuska: Oh, we all speak in and our own tongues, don't we?

Daniel Raimi: Yeah.

Ann Bartuska: Riparian is just the edges of a stream or waterway. And usually, it's considered dimensionally, it might be from 3 feet to 10 feet, could be larger, but it would be just that area right along a string bank, where you can do some kind of vegetative treatment that would enable, again, water quality issues management and being able to stabilize the stream banks.

Daniel Raimi: Got it. Yeah. It's so interesting to learn about these kind of specific activities that take place on the farm. So, if we look ahead a little bit and imagine out to the next farm bill, or maybe farm bill two cycles from now, which would be 10 years roughly from now. Are there major reforms that you think might be coming down the line in future years or reforms that you think would be particularly valuable to these types of programs that we've been talking about?

Ann Bartuska: I don't know if these would be reforms per se, but clearly, there's been a lot of discussion around the Supplemental Nutrition Program, the Food Stamp Program, and the viability of that in the long run, and you have two things working at play there. One is increasingly a number of American households are dropping below the poverty line. And so, this is really a Nutritional Stabilization program and that's working across purposes with those who feel like there's too much government funding being spent.

And so, how we address that and what does the management of that program in the long run, I think that will continue to play out. And actually even though the farm bill is authorized for 10 years, it's every five years that there's actually a new farm bill plus or minus. Depends on how the congress acts but, we would be actually coming up for the next one in 2022. and I will tell you, my friends at USDA have already started working on on pieces of that.

So the other one I think we'll continue to be a challenge and raise a lot of conversation is about the farm subsidies. What does that actually look like? How do you manage that? There's a good reason for, again, farm stabilization across the years that we have established the subsidy program for, but that I think will continue.

So, those two could have had debates almost every farm bill, and I think they will continue to have them. Coming up, I think where you will see a lot more action is about food labeling. Not only the demand by consumers to know what the nutrition is of the products that they're consuming, and this is where you have to work with the food production people, companies obviously in particular, but also things that are being called a particular name that is not really, well let me just get some speak to it, meat.

We have obviously meat has from beef, from livestock, from other animals is something that we all recognize by that word. Now, there are new types of meat, protein being produced in laboratories or the famous non-animal bleeding hamburger, which is—

Daniel Raimi: Impossible Burger, I think it's called.

Ann Bartuska: Right. And and so what should that be called? And so, this notion of traditionally labeling something by a term that is well understood by consumers, but it isn't really what is traditionally considered that product, I think we're going to have to be able to address that.

And dairy is another one where the proliferation of almond milk and coconut milk, and other kinds of of milk products that are from non-cattle, non-dairy cows, has already caused consumer confusion. And so, that is obviously an evolutionarily change that's taking place too.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. Oh, that'll be so interesting to watch. And that actually plays into the next question I wanted to ask you, which was related to climate change. So, some, not all, of the motivation behind entrepreneurs developing these sort of non-meat, meat alternatives are motivated in part by the desire to reduce climate impacts, as well as other types of environmental impacts from grazing or inter-fermentation from cattle. We talked about methane and on one of our recent episodes.

And so, are there other elements of climate change that are likely to have major effects on farmers that would in turn, affect provisions in the farm bill, regarding conservation or perhaps you know some of the subsidies that were talking about? I can imagine some potential impacts, but I'm curious what your thoughts are on that topic.

Ann Bartuska: One the areas that I haven't talked about is research. And I think in terms of responding to climate change, that's one of the the most part more positive areas where our research activities supported through USDA, either Agricultural Research Service or through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture is funding research, and areas of being able to anticipate more extreme events, and how you have new cropping systems that respond to that. What are the new genomic, or basically, what kind of seed material do you have that can be grown under these more stress conditions?

And for example, we're really interested at looking at heat tolerant, particular seed lines of commonly used crops that could then be planted out in areas where we're increasingly getting heat stress or those that are more drought tolerant. And the wonderful thing is, there's an incredible array of of variability and plants. And so, the notion to be able to move that into production still maintain productive systems, but even under those extreme events.

We're looking at the same thing in terms of our water systems and how we manage the irrigation water where appropriate, or access to water. The flooding issues clearly are a dominant concern in certain areas; so that, climate impacts on the system are being researched and new products are being developed for that.

One area that might unravel, and we're really trying to sort this out, is the disconnection between the population dynamics of pollinators and pests, and the population dynamics of a plant.

And there's two situations going on there. In some cases, insects and diseases are responding very favorably to some of these environmental changes caused by climate change; and therefore, are disrupting the production system in a way that we had not predicted. And so, you might be getting more populations of a particular nasty insect per year, which increases the pressure on a plant to respond to it.

On the other side, from the pollinators standpoint, there is an offsetting of, in some research that's been done, there's an offsetting of the population cycle of the pollinator that is now off when a plant needs the pollinator. So, it's from a point perspective of time.

If all of a sudden, the pollinator is out doing its thing in April, but the plants not opening its flowers for pollination 'til May, then you're going to have this real disconnect. And so, how that plays out as something that is a great deal of concern, especially for the many fruits and vegetables that require pollination for their production.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Well, yeah. So many areas to watch that. I know so little about, it's really fascinating to learn just a little thumbnail sketch about these things.

Ann Bartuska: Well, that's the nature of food and agriculture. I mean, there's just something going on all the time.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us and helping us learn about at least a couple of these fascinating topics, and giving us tools to move deeper into them in the future. And so, we're going to go now to our final question, our top of the stack question.

So, what's at the top of your literal or metaphorical reading stack? And I'll offer a quick, a factoid that I learned recently related to these meatless burgers. The Impossible Burger yesterday. We're taping on April 2, and yesterday was April Fool's Day. And it was the ironically, maybe the day that Burger King announced that they were going to be carrying this Impossible Burger in the future, which I thought maybe it was an April Fool's joke, but I don't think it actually is.

So, I don't go to Burger King often. I can't remember the last time I did, but I will look forward to sampling an Impossible Burger at some in the future, if it's not an April Fool's joke.

So, that's my recommendation or thought for the day. And now, I'll turn to you, Ann. What's at the top of your stack?

Ann Bartuska: Well, I've been thinking a lot about wildfires and about water. And obviously, there's some connections between the two of those. And so actually, because I was just involved in a a water conference, I was looking at the USGS water data for the nation site and playing around with some of the data there.

And it's actually kind of fun because you can zero in on your own locality and you can look at at water quality issues and water quantity. And so, because I've been sort of concerned about the whole water issue and where it's coming from, I have to say, USGS's water sites been very popular on my laptop.

Daniel Raimi: Great. Well, yeah. Plenty of data to play around with. That'll be great. And we'll provide a link to that site on our show page so listeners can can check it out for themselves and see what they want to visualize.

Well, it's been really great to talk to you once again, Ann Bartuska, from Resources for the Future, our Vice President for land, water, and nature. We really appreciate you joining us.

Ann Bartuska: Well, I had a great time, and thank you Daniel for giving me this opportunity. I love talking about agriculture.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, well, we'll look forward to next time. Thanks again.

Ann Bartuska: Okay, take care.

Daniel Raimi: Thank you so much for joining us on Resources Radio. We'd love to hear what you think, so please rate us on iTunes and leave us a review. It helps us spread the word. Also, feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes. Resources Radio is a podcast from Resources for the future.

RFF is an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington DC. Our mission is to improve environmental energy and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. Learn more about us at rff.org. The views expressed on this podcast are solely those in the participants. They do not necessarily represent the views of Resources for the Future, which does not take institutional positions on public policies.

Resources Radio is produced by Kate Peterson with music by Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.