I’m Dave Peters, and I direct Ground Level. We explore topics around Minnesota that play out at the community level. We’re particularly interested in covering issues and places that involve people taking up challenges in front of them and learning things that others might benefit from. More here -- minnesota.publicradio.org

Farming and how it’s practiced has increasingly entered that conversation, and that’s what we’re talking about here today. Nutrients from crop fertilizers and other sources result in a depletion of oxygen in waters flowing to the Gulf of Mexico, for example. At the same time, some farmers have taken steps to clean the water leaving their land – using buffers, tilling differently, trying new drainage systems, for example. Is that helping? Is it enough? There’s a lot of conversation going on around this issue.

Bruce Tiffany is a longtime corn and soybeans farmer near Redwood Falls in western Minnesota. He has instituted a number of practices to slow runoff and improve the quality of the water that leaves his land on its way toward the Minnesota River. He also thinks some criticism of farmers has been misdirected and counterproductive. I owe Bruce special thanks for taking a break today from harvesting soybeans to participate.

Thanks for having us join

Here’s my first question to you both. No matter what you think about who bears ultimate responsibility for water quality or how to proceed on this issue, are farming practices changing quickly enough in Minnesota? In other words, is there agreement on some level that something more should be done to improve water quality?

I believe there is room for improvement of surface water quality in Minnesota. The issue is extremely complex so proceeding needs to be carefully calculated .

Bruce, can enough farmers be convinced to do some of the things you’ve done to make a real difference?

And Kris, doesn’t a more regulatory approach risk imposing too much cost, both to farmers and consumers?

The short answer is yes. The momentum is gaining as discussions become more frequent and we have more data to base our decisions on.

We have been working for 20 years advocating for changes to farming practices to clean up the river. There has been progress -- most of it driven by the adpation of tillage practices to emerging chemicals for weed and pest control. We sense a shift in awareness but it is a nieghborhood by neighborhood kind of thing. When you think of how fast conservaqtion widespread practices were adapted in the 30's after the dust bowl with the establishment of the federal Soil Conservation Service it does seem slow -- but back then the movement was was driven by farmers themselves, working in conert with the reseracgers and the agencies. If feels like we are missing that cooperative spirit ,.

Minnesota is not actually strong on regulating farmers--but clearly, current efforts are not enough because we have many streams, lakes and rivers that are impacted by agriculture.

It feels like the central point of discussion might be whether things are moving fast enough.

On the voluntary side, are there specific things that can be done to encourage more improved farming practices?

Kris, on the regulatory side, what's the best idea out there for how to proceed?

How would they work?

Typically, they represent expectations of runoff levels, nutrient management practices, etc.

Bruce, what do you think of the idea Pat raises -- tying strings of some sort to the crop subsidies?

I think its important to understand the distinction between the insurance program and many of the other subsidy programs - and with that a question: what are the biggest obstacles to making that connection between insurance for farmers and a benefit to the tax payer through improved practices?

I think there’s a problem of scale here. There are a lot of organizations and farmers out there that are doing good things for land and waters. Brian Devore wrote about some of them just last week. But the scale of the problem requires solutions of appropriate scope. And that would be at the landscape or watershed level.

But that’s a big part of the problem — there’s not a whole lot of that landscape thinking into traditional solutions. For the most part farm conservation programs and incentives take a piecemeal approach. They’re aimed at individual farms and individual farmers. And that’s certainly understandable since it is at the property level that changes on the land are going to occur. And the strategy seems eminently reasonable, too — the cumulative effects of good stewardship practiced by many individuals will produce the landscape effects that are needed. But it clearly isn’t working.

So I would think that an extremely important component in all this is the passage of policies that reward landowners for improving the ecological and hydrological health of not only their landscape, but the surrounding landscape of which their acres are a part. This requires both farmers and policy makers to think in landscape scale terms.

I'd be interested in hearing from Bruce or Patrick Moore on whether it would work to get farmers in a given watershed to voluntarily come up with a plan to improve water quality.

I wonder if Bruce is having connection issue...