Conservation: A Critical Part of a Sustainable Vision for Agriculture

State Conservationist Ed Burton was recently invited to speak before the California State Board of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) where CDFA Secretary A.G. Kawamura had recently launched a strategic planning effort to guide California agriculture for the next 20 years.

Thank you for the invitation to be here with you today and to be asked for input as you work on the important business of crafting a vision to sustain California agriculture into the future.

I commend you for tackling an important, if daunting task. Any institution as rich, diverse and vital as California agriculture requires and deserves our utmost attention, studied wisdom and collaboration as we shape a vision for agriculture into the coming decades. I thank you again for allowing us to be part of your process.

Our role at NRCS, as you know, is conservation. It is our mission and our passion. We appreciate your understanding and support of the critical role that conservation plays and will continue to play in a sustainable future vision. I am here as a conservationist and I will speak to that component of the vision, focusing my remarks on three key points:

1. The necessity that voluntary conservation in all its complexity is a critical part of any sustainable vision for agriculture; this may seem simple and general at first glance but we believe it will have a profound impact in agriculture’s future
2. Challenges to achieving conservation, specifically from the regulatory permitting process
3. Partnering and leveraging as means to overcoming barriers and ensure we achieve our vision

1. We believe that the productive use of privately owned cropland, rangeland and forestland is essential to the Nation’s security and the health and the well-being of its citizens. These lands form the foundation of a substantial and vibrant agricultural economy that provides food, fiber, forest products and energy for the Nation.
   Additionally, these lands do and must be able to provide environmental benefits that are also the basis for the health and well being of its citizens—Benefits such as clean and abundant water, air, and healthy ecosystems. In California our agricultural lands—especially when you include range and forestland—account for over half of the Golden State’s land mass: a land mass that captures its significant portion of raindrops and sunshine; holds unique soils and minerals; and an abundance of fish and wildlife species.
2. As we plan for the future vision of agriculture we recognize and support the need to address vital issues such as productivity, economic viability, food safety, farm labor, trade, development etc.– we believe we need to include conservation of natural resources on the same level.
3. Some of the key conservation needs we see are:
• Water Quality and Quantity—a persistent challenge for over a century that will continue to demand center stage in our vision
• Air Quality—a newer challenge where the entire Nation is looking to California for models and guidance
• Soil Health—we stand upon it, build upon it and plant our crops in it and we need to plan for its continued health and ability to sustain our demands
• Wildlife habitat and Fisheries—species cannot exist as islands in parks and reserves and agriculture will continue to play a vital role in their health
• Plant communities—healthy diverse plant and forest communities that are not overrun with invasive species. This is as important to the rancher as it is to the botanist; and as important to the farmer as it is to the environmentalist.
• Climate change, carbon credits, energy production

4. I have glimpsed the diversity and breadth of these natural resources in my short two years in this beautiful state. I have traveled the mountains and valleys, the coasts and the deserts and I know California is rightfully proud of this landscape—I am in awe of this rich mix of cropland, rangeland, and private forestland that continues to lead the Nation in agricultural bounty. I have a long way to go to fully comprehend and understand this unique gift of resources.
5. We must keep conservation and the environment front and center in our discussion of a future vision—both long term and project by project.
6. I know you know this. There are many fine examples of conservation occurring all around the state, everywhere I go—examples that we have documented, that others have documented, and that would make Aldo Leopold proud ("if we take care of the land, the land will take care of us"). We need to expand upon this rich compendium of successes and reshape our infrastructure to accelerate our successes in the future.

To successfully realize a vision that includes conservation we must grapple with challenges that threaten to obscure that vision. There are many challenges to staying in business in agriculture and many challenges to conservation including continuing technical and financial resources. I believe one barrier to getting conservation on the ground is the time-consuming approach typically found in our regulatory permitting processes.

We all recognize that California’s agricultural industry is probably the most regulated one in the Nation. Each of the regulatory laws affecting agriculture has roots in important protections for resources and for citizens. However the maze of environmental regulatory requirements—at the federal, state and local level—taken together can erect substantial roadblocks to conservation—often making it difficult to do work that is intended to benefit the very resources that the regulations also seek to benefit.

Investing hard-earned dollars in plans, prework and permits and then waiting for weeks, months—or even years—to get local, state, or federal approval to do the work can dampen the zeal of even the most dedicated and most conservation-minded landowner.

Some of this is for good reason, to slow down and do the work right. But we cannot afford to indulge any tendency to become dispirited or frustrated or to say, "that’s the way it is in California." Fortunately, there are examples of grass roots efforts where the local people have worked together with regulatory organizations to secure coordinated agreements among permitting agencies. Calleguas Creek in Ventura County and Elkhorn Slough in Monterey County are just two examples. The model, which most of you probably know, is to get regulatory agencies and resource agencies—together with partners such as RCDs, Sustainable Conservation and others who help facilitate the process, to sit down together. Together they determine a list of conservation practices that they concur—when conducted properly—are beneficial for the landscape and that landowners can undertake with regulatory blessing. This can greatly reduce the time and complexity of securing permits to do conservation work on private working lands.

These are wonderful examples of local people working together to get common sense agreement on ways to protect resources, secure permits and still allow conservation to go forward in a timely manner and show that permit streamlining can be done.

But here’s the challenge: It can take the full time work of at least one or two professionals working almost non-stop for a year or more to craft these agreements in a single county and then they may be good for only a few years. In many counties the will and/or the resources simply cannot be found. We need to do better. Farmers and ranchers and the environment need us to do better. Ranchers and farmers are willing to do needed conservation and resource treatment but they need to do it in a timely and effective manner.

Those of us at the statewide level really ought to get together, inspired by the examples of our grass-roots level colleagues. We need to find as much common agreement as we can to provide and facilitate state-level streamlined permitting in a way that does not need to be repeated in each county or region. We need to do this NOT to override or bypass resource protection but precisely because such protection is vital and challenges with the current system slows resource protection.

Finally, I would like to discuss the role of partnering and leveraging, which I believe is key in making conservation efforts integral in our future vision and their success part of our legacy.

If we are to achieve this vision no one is going to do it alone. We will need all of our collective resources to achieve what none of us can do alone.

As an example of how this can work let us consider air quality.

A few years ago California was the first State in the nation where farmers faced regulatory constraints for air quality. But to California’s credit, this unenviable position was used as a catalyst to form new partnerships and combine resources. NRCS, RCDs, State Agencies, the Carl Moyer Program, the Almond and Cotton Industry, Coop Extension, Nisei Farmers League, Farm Bureau and others joined together to tackle the issue.

Together we worked with producers to develop 4,000 air quality conservation plans, in a manner that satisfied Air Quality Control Board requirements. $28 million in EQIP funds—were matched dollar for dollar by individual producers. The State Carl Moyer Program added its share of funds.

In less than a decade the Valley was able to come into compliance with PM-10 laws by the combined talents and resources of all these people working together. Not one of the groups could have done it alone. Of course the work isn’t done. We must replicate and expand these efforts as we grapple with NOxs and PM-2.5. But we have a model of partnering and leveraging that we know will work.

Another example of partnering for a common cause that I would like to bring forth is the California Rangeland Resolution, which represents many of the qualities I believe we MUST see more of in California’s future if we are to achieve that state we call sustainability.

Through their differences the 61+ disparate groups in the Resolution recognize a common cherished value: the future of California Valley rangelands and the ranchers and the wildlife that call them home. Together they are trying to find ways to transcend distinctions like rural vs. urban, agriculturalist vs. environmentalist. With a united approach they are aiming to find the right policies and the resources to realize their vision.

This is a neat opportunity to partner, to find a way to achieve their vision and to get total resource conservation achieved and keep agriculture sustainable. US Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Cattlemen are to be commended for funding the first full time position to make the effort succeed. NRCS has doubled technical assistance in rangeland conservation and launched a $1 million commitment to wildlife habitat. Yet I feel a sense of urgency (my passion for good partnering and conservation) that we need to do more faster, if we are to achieve our future vision for agriculture and the environment and do it voluntarily.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate that conservation must be part of our long-term vision of California agriculture, I commend and appreciate California’s commitment to conservation.

We must also find a way to integrate our regulatory permitting process at the state level to facilitate conservation.

And we must partner and leverage our commitment to partnership with resources to bring forth the vision we all share.

We have done and are doing so much and yet I believe we have barely scratched the surface relative to what we can do as partners if we sat down and looked at the resources we have responsibility for. Resources we could harness as a State, as an Industry and as Federal partners working together however, whenever and wherever we could to achieve agricultural sustainability.

I applaud the effort you are undertaking. We at NRCS and I greatly appreciate the invitation to share our thoughts with you today. We pledge our support to assisting in any way we can with this effort.

Thank you.

< Back to Speeches