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MORE HELP NEEDED: Chuck Epes, the foundation’s Virginia communications coordinator, stressed that agricultural runoff is a major contributor.
tices that improve Witter quality. Steps as simple as fencing cattle (and their feces) out of streams and planting vegetative buffers that filter rainwater along waterways can lead to vast improve*, ments in the bey’s health.
Siglin says state and local governments have put a lot of, money on the table to clean up the Chesapeake, but the federal
itq&iir share. .In
recent years, Si^in said, the federal government has, spent $15 billion to $20 billion a year to support agriculture in the United States, with most of that money going toward subsidies for five main crops: com, cotton, rice, soybeans and wheat.
The subsidy programs date back to the Great Depression years and have not charged much since then, he said.
“It’s surprising how little the farm bill conceptually has evolved in the last 70 or 75 years,” Siglin said. “We’re still doing roughly the same thing we were doing in the 1930s - we’re just doing it to a much, much larger magnitude.”
Across the bay watershed, Siglin said conservation programs need an extra $200 million - about 1 percent of the total cost of the farm bill.
Historically, the agriculture committees that write farm bills have been chock full of congressmen and senators from the Midwest and most of the funding has gone to the heartland.
The average state receives 9 cents for every dollar of food produced. The average for the six states in the bay watershed is 4 cents per dollar of farm producnot
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