Despite the landscape’s signature flatness, his land “rolls a little bit,” he said. So, 30 years ago, he decided to plant 60- to 100-foot strips of tall grasses within and along the edges of fields to prevent erosion. To pay for it, he enrolled a total of 14 acres, made up of those strips, in the federal government’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).

Through CRP, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) pays farmers not to farm on less-productive parcels of land, often in areas that are corn and soy fields as far as the eye can see, to be left alone to reduce runoff, improve biodiversity, and hold carbon. “It’s a great program, and a lot of these farms have some marginal ground on them that would be better off in CRP than growing crops,” Andrews said.

As of March 2024, the most recent month for which data is available, more than 301,000 farms had close to 25 million acres enrolled in CRP; that’s a lot of acreage, but it represents less than 3 percent of U.S. farmland.

Project 2025, a conservative Republican presidential transition blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, proposes eliminating CRP. The Republican Study Committee (RSC), an influential caucus of House conservatives, proposes ending enrollments in the program, as well.

It’s just one of several cuts to federal programs serving commodity farmers that Republican operatives and lawmakers have recently proposed in policy documents. Project 2025 also proposes reducing crop insurance subsidies and “ideally” eliminating commodity payments altogether. The RSC’s budget, meanwhile, proposes putting new limits on commodity payments, reducing crop insurance subsidies, and ending enrollment in another popular conservation program called the Conservation Stewardship Program.

While cutting government spending may seem like a run-of-the-mill party goal, many of these programs have long been politically sacred in farm states. If implemented, the plans could transform the nation’s safety net for farmers growing corn, soy, and other row crops.

Most Washington insiders say that’s unlikely to happen and point to the RSC-heavy House Agriculture Committee’s recent farm bill draft, which puts more money than ever into commodity programs and leaves crop insurance intact. Plus, the most powerful groups representing commodity crop interests—the American Farm Bureau and the National Farmers Union—both typically lobby hard to keep farm payments flowing.

But while conservative advocacy groups and far-right Republicans have unsuccessfully proposed similar cuts in the past, Republican politics have shifted further right in the age of Trump, and fiscal conservatives wield increasing power within the party. More than 83 percent of House Republicans are now members of the RSC, compared to about 70 percent in 2015. Former RSC chair Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) is still a member—and is now the Speaker of the House. On a 2018 panel, he said the RSC is “now mainstream.”

In early July, Trump attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but many of its architects are former Trump administration officials and have worked on the party’s 2024 platform. The Heritage Foundation claims that during Trump’s last term, he embraced two-thirds of their policy proposals within his first year in office. A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation declined a request for an interview on Project 2025.

“I think it’s more likely that [elected Republicans will] just do what the commodity groups and Farm Bureau want,” said Ferd Hoefner, a policy expert who has worked on nine previous farm bills and is now a consultant for farm groups. “I don’t think we’re going to go to a ‘no government intervention in agriculture’ approach. It’s just not likely, but it’s certainly the dream of every conservative agriculture prognosticator.”

With so many competing interests at play, the party’s true plans for agriculture are as muddy as an unplanted field in spring. And with Trump leading in the polls after a shocking few weeks of politics, anything now seems possible.

Cuts to Conservation Programs

“He put it all in corn and soybeans, which is natural. That’s what everybody does nowadays,” Andrews said. But CRP had worked so well for him in creating the erosion control strips, he decided to enroll nearly all of his acres for a time. “When I moved back to the area, I told him that I thought the farm needed a rest, because continuous corn and soybeans is very hard on the organic matter. I told him I was going to put it in CRP, and he said he didn’t blame me. That’s what I ended up doing.”

CRP enabled Andrews to preserve the land, restore its fertility, and sequester carbon, because instead of a farmer paying him to rent the cropland, the government paid him—less, but enough—to fallow it.  But the program has long been a target of conservatives as an example of wasteful spending. Project 2025 proposes eliminating it entirely, while the RSC would prohibit new enrollments in both CRP and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP).

CSP pays farmers to implement conservation practices on land they are actively farming. The program is so popular that even after the Biden administration added money to the pot through the Inflation Reduction Act, only 40 percent of applications were funded in 2022.

Jonathan Coppess, the director of the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at University of Illinois, said that while he doubted Republican lawmakers would be able to eliminate CRP altogether, they could slowly gut the program in the same way that some have weakened CSP over the last decade. Initially, CSP was capped based on acres, and lawmakers began cutting the acreage cap. Then, they changed the structure to a funding cap, which further shrank enrollment. The changes effectively cut funding for the program in half between 2008 and 2023.

“It can be kind of a death spiral type thing, where fewer farmers can get the funds, so the Congressional Budget Office projects less spending, so the baseline shrinks,” said Coppess, who previously worked on federal farm policy as a Senate legislative assistant and as administrator of the Farm Service Agency at the USDA. “Eventually that becomes self-defeating for the program, because farmers are angry because they spend all this time signing up and they don’t get in. So, the farmers turn on it and you can slowly kill off the program over time that way, because it loses its political support.”

The current House draft of the farm bill includes some small tweaks to CRP, but it’s unclear what the impacts of those changes would be. Instead, most conversations about conservation funding right now are focused on Republicans’ efforts to strip the focus on climate-friendly practices from extra conservation money provided by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Changes to Commodity Programs

However, over the past few decades, progressive Democrats and farm groups such as the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Farm Action, and the Environmental Working Group (EWG) have called attention to the fact that the largest, wealthiest farms have received close to 80 percent of the nearly $500 billion paid out between 1995 and 2021. As a result, they’ve fought for payment caps within the programs as a way to limit spending and distribute funds more fairly.

Surprisingly, the RSC budget does something similar by proposing that only farms with an adjusted gross income below $500,000 receive payments. “This was a policy proposed in the FY 2021 Trump Budget and would ensure that commodity support payments are going to smaller farms that may struggle obtaining capital from private lenders,” the RSC budget reads. Project 2025 goes even further and proposes “ideally” eliminating commodity programs altogether.

But when House Republicans released their latest farm bill draft, it included increases to commodity payments, at a projected cost of an additional $50 billion. In other words, they veered in the exact opposite direction.

In response, the Heritage Foundation has been pushing back on the spending bump, in conjunction with other conservative think tanks, as well as the progressive EWG.

The unlikely policy alignment is politically convenient on this one point, but in the end, the two sides have differing goals. The progressive groups want policymakers to shift funding away from commodity programs into more funding for conservation, research, local food, and specialty crops; the conservative groups just want to cut spending, period.

“Every farm bill, hope springs eternal that there will be a left-right coalition that can win some major changes,” Hoefner said. “There have certainly been many tries at that,” he added—and they haven’t stuck yet.

Another issue that’s kept those groups far apart is ethanol, which many progressive groups see as a false climate solution. Traditional farm groups, on the other hand, fight like hell to keep in place the Renewable Fuel Standard—the policy that sets a minimum amount of ethanol required in gas and other fuels. The RSC budget proposes eliminating the standard altogether.

“There’s way more interest in that issue among commodity groups than what happens in the farm bill,” Hoefner said. It’s been a sticky issue for Republicans in the past. Florida Republican Ron DeSantis once supported eliminating the standard, until he tried to run for president. Trump boasts often of his support for ethanol, but his administration exempted more than 30 oil refineries from the standard, allowing them to avoid selling ethanol,  angering commodity groups.

Crop Insurance Complications

“There’s the cognitive dissonance kind of challenge that we see with any heavy focus on budget issues,” he said. “So, we wanna cut spending, we wanna balance the budget . . . and that always is easy to say and sounds good, but it is really difficult to do in practice, because every one of those items has a constituency. It is a difficult governing reality.”

As the weather has become more unpredictable due to climate change, for example, crop insurance has become a bigger political priority for farm groups and also the most expensive farm program, outpacing commodity spending.

Both Project 2025 and the RSC budget propose reducing the portion of premiums paid by the federal government so that farmers shoulder more of the cost, while the RSC budget proposes a crop insurance subsidy cap of $40,000 per farmer. Project 2025 says farmers should not be allowed to get commodity payments if they get crop insurance subsidies.

All of those cuts are at direct odds with the powerful National Farmers Union’s 2024 policy book.

And at a panel on the National Mall hosted by the Association of Equipment Manufacturers in May, House Ag Committee members Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) and David Rouzer (R-North Carolina) both seemed to be reading from that policy book, despite the fact that both are members of the RSC.

During farm visits, Johnson said, “the most common thing we heard from producers was, ‘Don’t screw up crop insurance.’” Rouzer described crop insurance as one piece of a strong farm safety net. “If you want to preserve green space and rural areas, [then you need to] have a good, strong, safety net in place so that our farm families can continue to make ends meet and continue to do what they do best, and that’s feed and clothe the world,” he said.

Neither Dusty Johnson nor David Rouzer’s offices responded to requests for interviews.

An Opaque Future for Farmers

Hoefner points out that in the 1980s and 1990s, Democrats and Republicans both represented many districts with commodity interests. Today, it’s nearly all Republicans. But rural areas are also being hollowed out as farms disappear or get bigger, which could one day shift power away from those farm states.

Consolidation in seeds, pesticides, grain trading, and meat (which most commodity crops funnel into) has also shifted power to commodity groups. These, in some ways, represent row-crop farmers, but they are also dominated by the ag industry. As a result, some conservative lawmakers from farm states have told Civil Eats they hear from industry, not farmers.

That’s one reason both Coppess and Hoefner said what will likely happen is what usually happens: Lawmakers will put out budgets and proposals that bolster their fiscal conservative credentials but then will govern in a way that bucks those policies to keep the support of ag industry players with deep pockets. “They would never dream of saying any of those things when they’re meeting with their farm constituents,” Coppess said.

In Rep. Dusty Johnson’s case, when asked about conservation programs at the May equipment manufacturers’ panel, he answered with political dexterity, praising conservation programs but indicating he may in fact be on board with the RSC proposal to eliminate CRP.

“Conservation is critically important,” he said. “I think this farm bill is gonna acknowledge the importance of working lands conservation even more than past farm bills have. That’s not to say there’s never a role in idling acres, but, listen, we can do some incredible things with soil health, water quality, habitat, while working those lands.”

Back in the middle of Iowa, one of the outcomes Andrews is most excited about when it comes to how CRP has impacted his farm is that its effects didn’t end at the borders of his fallow fields. On his own farm, he’s reduced soil loss, built organic matter, and watched wildlife return. But it’s also improved the sustainability of the surrounding farm landscape, where most farmers are doing plenty of planting and harvesting.

“I’ve got two or three farms that their water drains onto my farm, and some of that water is carrying chemicals and nitrogen, and my land is really cleaning up their water,” he said. “I think it’s a great program . . . but there’s not as many CRP acres around as what there used to be.”

If the conservative budget hawks get their way, there could be even fewer.

The post Republican Plans for Ag Policy May Bring Big Changes to Farm Country appeared first on Civil Eats.

Tire-derived microplastics are a growing source of plastic pollution and a target of the United Nations International Plastic Treaty negotiations. Further, concern is growing about the hundreds of chemicals, up to 15 percent of the weight of the tire, that are shed into the environment via tire microplastics. “It is the additives that are the toxic compounds,” says Thilo Hofmann, an environmental scientist at the University of Vienna.

While scientists agree that tire particles contribute significantly to microplastic emissions in the environment, the numbers are difficult to quantify. Recent studies have found tire particles made up to 30 percent of microplastics in Germany, roughly 54 percent in China, 61 to 79 percent in Sweden, and a whopping 94 percent in Switzerland.

Researchers have already demonstrated that some crops, including lettuce and fruits, can take up microplastics, possibly putting human health at risk. But a new study has shown for the first time that store-bought lettuce contains chemical tire additives. It is an unexpected finding, according to study co-author Anya Sherman, a doctoral student working with Hofmann at the University of Vienna.

Sherman and colleagues found one or more of the 16 tire additives they looked for in 20 of 28 lettuce samples. The concentrations of tire additives in leafy vegetables were low overall, but two compounds were most common: benzothiazole, used to strengthen rubber, was detected in 12 of the 28 samples; and 6PPD, used to prevent its oxidation, was found in seven.

It’s hard to know the exact source of the pollutants. Leaching from tire-wear particles is a major source of benzothiazoles in the environment, but the compound is used in other applications, including agrochemicals and consumer products. Likewise, 6PPD can be found in sporting equipment and recreation facilities.

Sherman’s methodology, meanwhile, couldn’t target all of the tire additives, and therefore can’t provide the total chemical load in lettuces. “We don’t know the total chemical burden; that’s left out of the conversation,” she says. “Some compounds are toxic or mutagenic at trace levels.” Even less is known about the toxicity of the mixture of chemicals.

Still, the study highlights the increased dangers from our industrialized world. Scientists have documented microplastics in human breast milk, semen, placentas, and blood. These tiny particles can accumulate in organs including the lungs, heart, and brain. Microplastics can have a range of health impacts: They can cause oxidative stress, disrupt metabolism, interfere with gut microflora, disrupt immune systems, and alter reproductive health. Perhaps the biggest concern is cardiovascular distress caused by microplastics.

In March, scientists revealed that people who had microplastics in their carotid arteries had a four-fold higher risk of heart attack or stroke. Perhaps not surprisingly, researchers are urgently trying to determine the degree of microplastic risk from ingestion versus inhalation.

To that end, Sherman’s lettuce findings were a surprise in another regard: How did these chemicals get into lettuce fields in the first place? Of the three most likely suspects—biosolids, atmospheric deposition, and recycled irrigation water—none has emerged as the most likely offender.

Biosolids to Blame?

Sherman analyzed lettuce grown in four countries with very different policies for biosolids or recycled irrigation water—the two most direct avenues by which tire plastics could concentrate in farm fields. Switzerland, for example, has banned biosolids applications; Spain and Italy had the highest and lowest application rate, respectively, of biosolids; and Israel relies heavily on recycled irrigation water. But there was no discernable pattern related to waste application policies, suggesting that these particles may be more ubiquitous than anticipated.

“There are so many different pathways by which contaminants can reach fields,” Sherman says. “We are nowhere close to understanding the full picture yet.”

Amid nutrient scarcities, many countries around the world, including the U.S., are dramatically increasing the application of biosolids to farmlands. But because pollutants can concentrate in biosolids, some scientists are concerned that soil biosolid applications could exceed the high concentrations have been found in marine environments. “The solutions are an attempt to be sustainable, but they could be introducing more contaminants to the agricultural environment,” Sherman says.

Roughly 56 percent of biosolids are applied to the land in California and across the U.S.—but state and county policies are sharply divided on their use. “The percentage of biosolids application varies by state,” says Scott Coffin, a research scientist at California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. Some states are near 0 percent; others are near 80 percent.

Atmospheric Microplastics and Chemicals

“Microplastics are very light,” Leonard says. They also don’t like water, and therefore they are less bound to the soil, which makes them loft into the air at windspeeds far lower than expected for bare soils. As a result, Leonard says, the current dust emission models may underestimate the microplastic component of dust from biosolid-amended soil. It may also help explain why microplastics are able to travel thousands of miles and contribute an estimated 6.6 million U.S. tons of tire particles globally per year, equivalent to approximately 5 percent of airborne ambient particulate matter concentrations.

That includes microplastics from tires, which tend to be overlooked, due to the technological challenges in identifying them. The biggest problem? Black microplastics, including tire wear particles, absorb (rather than reflect) radiation from the instrumentation used to find them.

An alternate approach exists to detect tire microplastics, one that involves heating up a sample to measure its composite chemicals via gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. But few laboratories have this equipment, Coffin says. “That’s why the tire particle aspect of microplastics wasn’t really considered until quite recently; they were just simply not detected.”

Biosolids are complex mixtures of nutrients and pollutants from disparate sources, and they present difficult challenges when trying to separate out microplastics. Scientists have to know which compounds they are searching for, as well as their breakdown products. Given there are thousands of chemicals in tires, it’s literally impossible to trace the environmental fate of all of them.

Furthermore, tire producers do not disclose what additives are used in tires because they’re considered a trade secret. “[Tire additives] are not regulated, which may change in the coming years,” Hofmann says.

Microplastics and Chemicals in Irrigation Water

Given that water is easier to work with than solids, the scientific community has begun to develop a methodology to quantify microplastics in aquatic environments.

“We were strategically using our very limited resources dedicated to microplastics on what we think that we can make the most progress on in the short term; pretty much all of our effort is focused on the marine environment,” Coffin says. Environmental researchers have so far developed hazard thresholds in marine environments, to be adopted by the California State Water Board, to evaluate water body impairment. For a long time, Coffin adds, “the conversation about water has detracted from what’s happening on land.”

Water is also far easier to monitor—and treat—than biosolids, Coffin says. “Treating biosolids is effectively out of the equation,” he says. “Even if we do determine this is a huge problem, we’re basically left trying to find solutions upstream,” he adds, meaning preventing microplastics from getting into biosolids to begin with. There’s also little incentive to challenge the use of biosolids in agriculture, as it’s been touted as an example of sustainable return of nutrients to the soil.

In response to a lawsuit by the Yurok, Port Gamble S’Klallam, and Puyallup tribes, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently reviewing 6PPD as tire makers scramble to come up with alternatives. California’s Department of Toxic Substance Control, which is also part of the state EPA, has a consumer products section that is evaluating safer chemical alternatives to replace 6PPD in tires as well.

Forging Ahead with Research

“We’re not even close to developing standardized methods for detecting microplastics in biosolids or soils or terrestrial samples,” says Susanne Brander, who studies microplastics at Oregon State University in Corvallis.  “Gathering data on [microplastics in] food systems is where [research] needs to go next.”

That research is starting to get underway. Funding to study plastics in agriculture is limited, but Brander says that the USDA is prioritizing microplastics research going forward. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley is sponsoring a Research for Healthy Soils Act to fund studies on microplastics in land-applied biosolids.

Although this is a move in the right direction, it sidesteps the main problem. “Those of us who are concerned and have been doing research for a decade are pushing for source reduction and waste management approaches that don’t create more problems,” Brander says. She says the singular focus on 6PPD in recent years risks overlooking the impacts of all the other tire chemicals that are leaching into the environment.

“We know enough to act—that’s the feeling and opinion of most of the other scientists in the [U.N.] global plastics treaty,” Brander says. “We need to push for chemical reduction and a reduction in the production of virgin plastics.”

Reporting for this piece was supported by the Nova Institute for Health.

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