BALTIMORE (AP) — A farm bill passed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday retains funding to restore the Chesapeake Bay, even though conservation programs as a whole were cut, lawmakers and environmentalists said.
The bill consolidates bay conservation with similar conservation programs into a new Regional Conservation Partnership Program, said Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. Cardin added that he has received written assurances from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that bay conservation will continue to be adequately supported under the new funding system.
Sen. Barbara Mikuslki, D-Md., said the new program “will sustain jobs and support Maryland’s farmers with the tools and resources they need.”
The five-year, half-trillion-dollar farm bill, which consolidates 23 conservation programs into 13, has not been passed by the House of Representatives. House conservatives are expected to resist costs in the bill, particularly for food stamp spending.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, meanwhile, said it was encouraged by the bill. The Senate had originally eliminated $50 million a year in cost-share programs for farmers, which senators from bay states were able to save, the foundation said.
Doug Siglin, the foundation’s federal affairs director, said conservation funding was cut about 10 percent overall in the bill, dropping $6 billion to about $49 billion. However, lawmakers also managed to save funding for the program to help farmers control runoff of fertilizer, manure and sediment.
Those pollutants can cloud bay waters, threatening bay grasses that provide habitat for many species and fueling algae blooms that lower oxygen levels in bay waters, creating dead zones where oysters, fish crabs and other creatures can’t survive.
“So, overall, the picture is nationally funding is going to go down,” Siglin said. “But the program that was the most important to us, we kept the money.”
