I am the fourth generation to farm our family farm — Idle Acres, a Minnesota Certified Clean Water Farm. I am also a veterinarian and rural developer. I also work on public policy as it relates to rural America. I am most proud to say I am a farmer.
I read the recent three part series on water quality ("Danger Downstream," Oct. 2-4). I have long felt the farmers are blamed for all of the pollution in our public waters. It must be because of all those mentioned in the articles. We are only 1 percent of the population and have little power to defend ourselves. Farm groups and commodity groups are not there to defend us — their mission is to defend their organizations, not the farmer.
If you are a taxpayer, in Minnesota or elsewhere in America, look in the mirror and you will see the real reason for water pollution. Except for the farmers, you are 99 percent of those who elect our elected officials. Ninety-nine to one always wins. You are electing people to the Minnesota Legislature and the U.S. Congress who pass laws that determine how farmers will farm.
I was around when the 1985 farm bill was passed creating Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acres. It was your elected officials who have allowed haying and grazing of these 1985 CRP acres in an effort to destroy the alfalfa and grass (perennial crop) farmers.
I wrote the outline of the 1995 farm bill (the Farmer Freedom Act) that originally would have paid the farmer a seven-year severance payment, and then the government would have given American farmers the "freedom to farm" in the best way.
Your elected officials couldn't stand not controlling the farmer, so they amended it to become the most expensive publicly controlled farm policy in history.
In an effort to correct the blunders of the last farm bill, I supported a "No Farm Bill" in 2014. Success was within reach, but your elected officials — Republicans and Democrats — could not stand letting the farmer do his job. In a hasty last-minute move, they passed a farm bill and spent the next year writing the details of the bill behind closed doors, according to the wishes of special-interest groups.
Elected officials have spent billions of dollars supporting ethanol. Corn for ethanol is the most inefficient use of land that could better produce food for starving people around the world and help develop better U.S. public policy. The corn acres your elected officials are supporting represent the most expensive crop I raise, environmentally. High land erosion, high energy requirements, high commercial fertilizer requirements, high pesticide requirements — with little or no public benefit. That's what contributes to polluted public waters.
