[Fox] It is getting harder and harder, and in legal terms more dangerous, to be an American farmer these days, thanks to the aggressive behavior of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
This did not happen overnight by the way. It's been an on-going effort for at least 50 - 60 years.
I know, because I’m paid as a consultant to advise farmers in California on how best to comply with federal regulations under the Clean Water Act (CWA).
Increasingly, those regulations are changing at the arbitrary say-so of the Corps regulators who implement the EPA’s regulations on the ground, even though most practices followed by American farmers have been exempted from CWA prohibitions since it was written in 1977.
In the past few years, those regulators--many of whom admit that they know very little about farming or agricultural practices--are radically reinterpreting the rules to limit what farmers do, even on land where they have done similar things for decades.
The eerie thing is that there have been no amendments to the CWA to make these changes in oversight possible.
In many places, for example, Corps regulators now send threatening letters to farmers who switch from one crop to another, such as rice to orchards, or perform routine plowing. The Corps says the farmers can be performing a "land-use" change that suddenly puts a farm under Corps jurisdiction. |