8/06/02

By MARK POWELL

Charles County, Md., attorney James Farmer has played a leading role on Maryland’s CREP (Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program) Advisory Committee.
He also orchestrated private dollars paying for an educational trip on CREP for an employee of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. And, Farmer is a major recipient of CREP funds.
An active member of Maryland’s chapter of Quail Unlimited, Farmer said he successfully pushed the committee to increase the buffer widths on CREP land to the current 300 feet. He also said he successfully pushed to increase reimbursement rates for the farmland put into the conservation program. And, he said, he wants to increase buffer widths to 500 feet — a move bound to anger many in the agriculture community, who say the program is taking productive farmland out of production.
In June, Farmer’s Quail Unlimited paid for a Department of Natural Resources employee to travel to a Peoria, Ill., meeting on the CREP program. Although the exact amount Quail Unlimited paid the state to send Jeff Horan to the conservation meeting was unknown at presstime, both Horan and Farmer confirmed the trip.
Farmer said, “I went to the secretary of DNR.” He said he urged DNR secretary Charles Fox to send a DNR representative to the conference. Farmer said he considered it unconscionable for DNR not to send someone to conference, which is designed to disseminate information on the CREP program.
Officials at DNR said the agency often accepts such financial assistance from organizations that include Quail Unlimited, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Humane Society.
“We all have a common goal, so we work together,” said DNR spokeswoman Renee Samuels.
She said DNR did not see the financial support of Farmer and Quail Unlimited as an issue. The CREP advisory panel simply “advises” she said. They don’t make any final decisions on CREP.
Robert Hahn, staff counsel for the State Ethics Commission, would not comment on the specifics of this issue. However, he did say he would not solicit funds to send an ethics commission staff member to a conference. On the other hand, the state does allow agencies to accept donations on some occasions. If an invidividual was concerned about the ethics of this particular issue on the CREP advisory panel, Hahn said a complaint could be lodged with the Ethics Commission and it would be investigated.
The increasing of buffers and increased CREP rental rates — as much a $150 an acre — promoted by Farmer have increased interest in the program, and increased the acreage in the program. Enrollments in CREP are about 50,000 acres, half way to the goal of 100,000 acres. The current CREP enrollment includes about 3 percent of the state’s total farmland.
Farmer — who has contributed to the gubernatorial campaign of Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D) — has been a member of the advisory committee since it started.
The state agencies failed to promote the program successfully in the beginning, he said. “MDA has never supported the program,” Farmer said.
Through aggressive selling of his concepts, Farmer said he successfully convinced the state to increase payments on CREP land and to increase the size of the buffers.
CREP is a joint effort of the USDA and the State of Maryland to reward landowners for putting buffers along waterways and on steep slopes to improve water quality and develop wildlife habitat. However, the increasing of buffer sizes is opposed by leading farm organizations and many farmers.
Maryland Farm Bureau’s board of directors, for example, has voted to push for a reduction of the 300 foot buffer as USDA and the state renegotiate their memorandum of understanding on CREP.
Farmer, in a telephone interview, said: “Maryland Farm Bureau and the Maryland Department of Agriculture are controlled by the lunatic fringe of agriculture. They are concerned about their vested interest in this program.”
He said he appealed to the “rational” farmers in the state to understand that CREP is a terrific program, one which helps the environment and agriculture.
Farmer said his interest, in serving on the CREP advisory committee, is to represent the rest of the millions of Marylanders. He said he wants to preserve water quality and develop habitat for quail, songbirds, squirrels and other upland game.
“There are only 10 large tenant farmers on the Eastern Shore concerned about CREP,” Farmer said. He said the farmers he has dealt with in Southern Maryland are not opposed to CREP.
Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Royden Powell III took exception to Farmer’s characterization of MDA as being run by the “lunatic fringe.”
“MDA is an executive agency,” Powell said. MDA works to promote all of agriculture in the state. Part of the agency works with organic farmers, other parts work with farmers to improve the environment, other sections address food quality and other issues of concern to the state.
Powell said, “Clearly, CREP is an opportunity for farmers.” Farmers can benefit from the program as can the environment. But, he added, there are a number of issues surrounding it, including the concerns of tenant farmers.
Powell also said MDA has supported CREP and helps with it, as the agency does with other environmental quality programs.
Farmer, by his own assessment, is an influential member of the advisory committee.
That power comes, he said, by the considerable work he does to promote conservation in the state. Considering how well paid he is as a partner in one of Southern Maryland’s largest law firms, Farmer said he is donating valuable time in serving on the CREP Advisory Committee to make the program work.
Farmer also is a recipient of CREP dollars. The Environmental Working Group Web site lists Farmer as receiving $67,295 from 1996 to 2001 in federal Conservation Reserve Program payments. The EWG, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental organization, got its information from the USDA through a Freedom of Information Act request.
According to information The Delmarva Farmer obtained from the Maryland Department of Agriculture through a Freedom of Information Act request, Farmer received more than $32,000 from the state for bonus payments on CREP projects he has on farms he owns in St. Mary’s, Calvert and Charles counties. One project resulted in a Nov. 26, 2001 check to Farmer for $13,320 on 133.2 acres of a St. Mary’s County farm enrolled into CREP.
The CREP advisory committee was created as a requirement of the Memorandum of Agreement between the federal government and the state of Maryland. The committee was established in 1997 by the secretaries of agriculture and natural resources in Maryland.
Members include Royden Powell III, assistant secretary of agriculture; Carolyn Watson of DNR; Josh Sandt of DNR; Steve Connelly of the USDA Farm Service Agency; Al Rizzo of the U.S.Fish & Wildlife Service; and representatives of Farm Bureau, Maryland Association of Soil Conservation Districts, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and other agencies. The state is in the process of expanding the membership of the committee to broaden farmer representation in an attempt to address the concerns of the agriculture community.
David Doss, head of Maryland’s USDA -Natural Resource Conservation Service, serves on the CREP Advisory Committee with Farmer. He said Farmer has been a strong advocate for the program.
Many farmers in the region have expressed concerns with the CREP program.
Although Farmer says there are a few tenant farmers who have concerns with the program, Talbot County farmer John Swaine III said he thinks there are many.
Swaine has been nominated by both Maryland Farm Bureau and the Maryland Association of Soil Conservation Districts to serve on the CREP advisory committee. Swaine said he has personally lost 50 acres of farmland to CREP. And, although he participates in the conservation program on his land, he said the 300-foot buffers are too large and eat up productive farmland in Talbot, where tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay snake throughout the fields.
“It’s a great program for landowners,” Swaine said. “I just can’t compete with it as a farmer.” Farmers typically pay much less than the $100 plus that CREP brings, he said.
Development used to take his farmland out of production. Now, he said, the pendulum has swung the other way and farmland is being taken out of production by environmental programs, such as CREP.
Donnie Tennyson, a St. Mary’s County farmer also has concerns that CREP is taking farmland out of production in Southern Maryland.
“With the increase in the buffer size, the CREP program is a classic example of a good conservation program that has gone bad,” Tennyson said. “The purpose of the program was to improve the quality of the water runoff going into our bays and rivers. We now have a wildlife program with water quality being further down the list.”
Tennyson said of Farmer, “When you have people taking advantage of their position on the advisory committee to establish a ‘premier hunting preserve’ on the East Coast because of expanded buffers, then something has gone terribly wrong with the committee process.”
Charles Rice, ag land planner for Charles County, has worked with Farmer on Quail Unlimited projects. He credits Farmer with making CREP much more attractive for landowners in Southern Maryland. Rice said, “the CREP program was not all that attractive until the buffers were expanded and the rental rates were increased.”
Rice said a lot of tobacco farmers taking the state buyout program put marginal land into CREP as a result of the changes pushed by Farmer.
“If we were going to lose land to CREP or to development, I’d rather have it go into CREP.”
Bobby Wilson, a Queen Anne’s County farmer who is president of the Maryland Association of Soil Conservation Districts, serves on the CREP advisory board.
He said Farmer has too much power within the committee. “I’m one of the few farmers on the committee,” Wilson said. Although he sees CREP as a good program for the environment, Wilson said the larger buffers promoted by Farmer and others are taking farmland out of production and are not getting the water quality benefits they were designed to achieve.
Both MDA’s Powell and NRCS’s Doss said that water quality benefits extend only about 120 to 150 feet. MDA’s cost-share program on CREP extends only that far on the buffers for that reason.
Swaine and many Maryland farmers recently learned of existing USDA policy which states: “Landlords shall provide tenants, who have an interest in the acreage being offered at the times of sign-up, an opportunity to participate in CRP, and not reduce the number of tenants on the farm as a result of or in anticipation of enrollment in CRP.”
Landlords who violate these provisions, according to the FSA, are ineligible for payments.
When there is a dispute between a landlord and a tenant, according to the FSA, and there is insufficient evidence to make a determination, the CREP contract cannot be approved. The tenant farmer may sign a statement voluntarily relinquishing his or her right to farm or CRP (or CREP) benefits, allowing the landlord to offer land for CRP if that has a history of a tenant and if it’s decided that the landlord has the necessary means to conduct farming.
Farmer wants to contest this regulation in court.
He says it violates the guarantee of private property rights. To take the matter to court, he will need a case in which a landowner and a tenant get into a disagreement over the issue.