

Donald Virts tills one of his fields on his farm in Loudoun County, preparing to plant a cover crop. (Rich Lipski/The Washington Post)

In just a few weeks, we voters will make a very important decision, and the issues on which we base that decision have been the stuff of headlines for many months. Notably absent has been food. There hasn’t been much talk about how we go about improving agriculture to better attend to the health of the environment, livestock and humans — farmworkers, farmers and eaters.

It’s clear that food policy has a problem.

Actually, it has many problems, from the way subsidies are allocated to the way foods are labeled. But it has an overarching problem that makes solving any of those other problems much more difficult.

[10 things we should do to fix our food system]

Food policy’s biggest problem is that it’s boring.

Sure, lots of us are interested in the issues that food policy is supposed to affect. Let’s decrease erosion and greenhouse gases! Let’s increase transparency and food access! But start discussing how to go about turning those ideas into regulations, and we turn the page before you can say “price loss coverage.”

C’mon, you know you do. Even I do, and I’m an ag journalist. But the two words that strike spiritless resignation in the hearts of ag journalists everywhere are “farm bill.”



President Obama signs the farm bill at Michigan State University in 2014. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Most of us have limited interest in the wonky details of policy. Instead, concern about the important issues — protecting the environment, promoting human health, ensuring fairness for farmworkers — gets crystallized into simple, appealing prescriptions. Label GMOs. Ban glyphosate. Define “natural.” Tax soda. They capture the public imagination, and the public, its imagination engaged, pressures lawmakers to focus on those issues. Meanwhile, more complicated, policy-wonk-type ideas (crop-neutral insurance, just to pick an example at random) die on the vine.

[A rallying cry for a crop program that could change everything]

Don’t get me wrong; some of those simple ideas are good ones. I’m in favor of labeling GMOs and taxing soda. But the problems in our food system are wildly complex. If you do a Venn diagram of “ideas likely to improve food” and “ideas likely to engage the public,” you get precious little overlap.

There is, however, one group with a whole lot of patience for the ins and outs of ag policy: the people who are most invested, primarily farmers and the industries that supply and serve them. With the public disengaged, politicians are left alone in the room with those folks.

And that’s a problem.

Ricardo Salvador heads the Food and Environment program at the Union of Concerned Citizens, and he points out, in an email, that it’s “Policy 101” to “incentivize the things government (the public interest) needs to happen and penalize those things that are against public interest.”

[It’s the chemical Monsanto depends on. How dangerous is it?]

Ag policy exists for the benefit of the public, and farmers’ interests are not the same as public interest. What do we do when the farmer’s need to make a living clashes with those other public-interest goals: the health of farmworkers, the environment and livestock?

The good news is that there’s significant overlap between farm interest and public interest; it’s certainly in the public’s interest to have a safe, affordable, varied food supply, and it’s certainly in farmers’ interest to maintain the health and viability of their land. (Every farmer I speak with emphasizes that.) But if those two interests didn’t diverge, we wouldn’t be having those problems in the first place.



Mennonite farmers in the Shenendoah Valley area worked with USDA scientists to keep pollution from entering the Muddy Creek watershed. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

Let’s take, as an example, one of the most pressing issues in our food supply: reducing erosion and runoff. The problem contributes to water pollution, soil health degradation and the release of greenhouses gases. It’s a big, complex problem. There’s no easy answer.

[Is a soda tax the solution to our obesity problem?]

I asked some of the people and groups involved in lobbying for policy changes how we might go about addressing it. I checked in with environmental groups (Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Working Group), farmers’ representatives (American Farm Bureau, National Farmers Union) and policy groups (Union of Concerned Scientists, AGree, Food Policy Action) on how to handle divergent interests on the environment. (Full disclosure: My husband and I have a small oyster farm and have benefited from Farm Bill conservation provisions.)

The biggest area of disagreement was whether conservation programs should be voluntary (the farmer has incentives for implementing a particular conservation practice, but isn’t required to do it) or a requirement to qualify for subsidies. Scott Faber, Environmental Working Group vice president for government affairs, and Tom Colicchio, a board member of Food Policy Action, both call for at least some requirements.

“We have to admit that relying solely on voluntary incentives is not going to meet the big environmental challenge of agriculture,” says Faber. “We need to define a basic standard of care on a crop-by-crop basis,” and then demand that farmers adhere to it to qualify for subsidies.

Colicchio calls for subsidies only for farmers “who are protecting our streams, rivers or drinking water” and meeting “basic environmental and water conservation standards.”

The farm groups both prefer voluntary programs. Bob Young, chief economist at the Farm Bureau, contends that the current voluntary programs are doing “a pretty good job” providing incentives and recommends that they be given time to “continue to cook” to build on “decades of continuous improvement.”



Bob Young, chief economist at the American Farm Bureau , says voluntary programs are doing “a pretty good job.” (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

But the groups on both sides of that disagreement also had suggestions for specific regulatory changes that could help solve the problem. None of them have the charisma to become social-media sensations, but they could all help lessen farming’s environmental impact.

Here, then, are eight gloriously wonky ways to improve ag policy:

■ Make it easier for farmers to use cover crops, which can significantly reduce runoff, by allowing later planting of the crops that go in the field once the cover crop is killed. The current planting date ranges required by the USDA don’t always leave enough time for the cover crop to mature.

■ Make sure compensation and tax breaks are available for farmers who use cover crops and buffer strips (areas along waterways that aren’t planted with crops to help prevent runoff).

■ Bring conservation programs up to date with advances in precision agriculture. Current guidelines can encourage farmers to adopt older practices that can be less effective in reducing fertilizer runoff or improving soil.

■ Target federal funds to the areas where environmental issues are most pressing, such as the most polluted waters.



Tom Colicchio favors subsidies only for farmers meeting “basic environmental and water conservation standards” and protecting water sources. Here, he lobbies on Capitol Hill alongside chef José Andrés. (Mark Noble)

■ Because lender guidelines often haven’t kept up with conservation practices, make sure farmers whose business plans focus on soil health can get loans from the USDA’s Farm Service Agency. If the FSA leads the way on funding conservation-oriented farm practices, those changes could ripple through the lending industry.

■ Because insurers require farmers to adhere to a list of practices to insure their crops, make sure that what the USDA considers a good conservation practice is also considered a “Good Farming Practice” by those insurers. Conservation shouldn’t disqualify farmers for crop insurance.

■ Encourage longer-term leases so farmers have an incentive to use conservation practices on leased land.

■ Modernize the USDA’s data collection system, because good data showing how environmentally sound practices affect crops will be what persuades farmers to adopt them.

None of this is likely to fire the public’s imagination, and I don’t imagine the presidential debates will include questions such as, “How would you adjust insurance requirements to accommodate farmers’ use of cover crops?” But this, small step by small step, is the stuff that food policy reform is made of.