The American Farm Bureau Federation has filed a suit in Pennsylvania seeking to block an Environmental Protection Agency plan aimed reducing pollution and runoff in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
"This suit will seek to rein in EPA's latest and most aggressive effort to use the Clean Water Act to impose burdensome new regulations on agricultural production," AFBF President Bob Stallman told members of the organization at its annual meeting in Atlanta.
He stressed the effort by EPA relative to the Chesapeake Bay watershed "won't end" there, as he noted the agency appears poised to take similar actions in other watersheds like the Mississippi River watershed.
"This legal effort, led by AFBF, is essential to preserving the power of the states — not EPA — to decide whether and how to regulate farming practices," Stallman said.
EPA spokesman David Sternberg said that "it is important to note that clean water is our shared obligation to the watershed's 17 million residents and countless communities."
Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future (PennFuture) condemned the AFBF suit, saying it was "shortsighted and foolhardy, taking new funding and innovative strategies away from Pennsylvania's farmers."
"EPA's plan brings help to Pennsylvania's farmers, providing funding for cleanup and innovative ways to handle manure and other wastes," said Jan Jarrett, president and CEO of PennFuture. "Our farmers want and need this help, since they know that clean water is a necessity for farming."
Further, Jarrett said the EPA effort was the result of work with many stakeholders on the issue. "The proposed cleanup rules came from an extensive stakeholder process, in which all agreed that everyone must take action, farmers, developers, homeowners, fisheries, and local wastewater treatment facilities," said Jarrett. "It is unconscionable that the Farm Bureau is now attempting to blow up this cooperative plan, and send us all back to square one. The future of our state's top two industries –– agriculture and tourism –– depends on clean water, right here, right now."
Chesapeake Bay Foundation President Will Baker decried the Farm Bureau decision, saying in a written statement that the foundation is "extremely disappointed that the Farm Bureau has chosen to sue EPA rather than work together to help address pressing water pollution problems in the Chesapeake Bay."
Baker said many farmers in the watershed have "embraced practices that will address water pollution," improving local streams and their own well water, as well as the bay downstream. According to Baker, many of the conservation practices also improve farmers' bottom lines.
The intense focus on EPA regulations is not limited to groups like AFBF. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) has ordered subcommittees to outline aggressive and comprehensive oversight plans for EPA in particular.
Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) has already signaled his panel will be focused on EPA. "The EPA is the scariest agency in the federal government, an agency run amok," Simpson said recently. "Its bloated budget has allowed it to drastically expand its regulatory authority in a way that is hurting our economy and pushing an unwelcomed government further into the lives of Idahoans."
