 On December 7, 1999, an historic summit on private land conservation was held in Ames, Iowa. The summit sparked serious discussion on conservation needs in this country for the 21st century. On this half-hour tape, you'll see a news story about the summit, about 15 minutes of excerpts from People Who Spoke, and an 8-minute program called America's Working Land. If the enthusiasm for private land conservation at the summit is any indication, we'll be off to a great start in the new millennium. Three out of every four acres in America is privately owned, and efforts to control problems like soil erosion and tree and wetland losses on that land are falling short. At the National Conservation Summit on the campus of Iowa State University, U.S. Department of Agriculture officials released the National Resources Inventory, a once every five years study by USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service. The NRI concludes that although we've been quite successful in conquering soil erosion on our most fragile lands, we are no longer making progress in overall erosion control. It finds that urban sprawl and development are swallowing up some of our best farm and forest land at an unprecedented rate. Wetland losses have accelerated, although we have been able to mitigate the impact on agricultural lands. The mixed news set the tone for a discussion of how to meet conservation challenges in a time of tight federal budgets and financial stress on the farm. A dollar spent on conservation is a dollar that's not available for purposes that may make the difference between farming next year or going out of business. If I can get more by selling it for development than I can to another neighbor to potentially farm it, I'm going to sell it for development. If there's any private land out there that's in as much jeopardy as the family farm, it's the family forest. Some said USDA conservation programs are being short changed while billions are paid out in disaster aid. Technical assistance programs, the farmers got cut while we were pushing dollars out the door. There's something wrong with the equation here. It's not an absolute lack of money, that's our problem. It's a consensus on how to direct it. A common theme was the need to enlighten lawmakers and their constituents about the public value of private land conservation. Conservation means a quality of life to the populace of this country. The clean air, the clean water, the wildlife, the aesthetics, it benefits all of us. At the beginning of the last century, President Theodore Roosevelt hosted a national governor's conference on public land conservation. As we enter the next century and begin a new millennium, it seems fitting that we do the same for private lands. It's my intention as the Vice Chair of the Natural Resources Committee of the National Governors Association to call upon the National Governors Association to convene a conference on private land stewardship and my hope, Mr. Secretary, is that we'll have the cooperation of your office and of the president in that effort. Future generations are not going to remember us for what was said here today but by the actions that we take from this day forward. So let's go out and get the job done. Pat O'Leary reporting for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It's my privilege to convene this summit and with this meeting the real work of laying out a national conservation strategy for the 21st century begins. The fact is that too often farm policy and agricultural policy in this country is viewed exclusively in terms of what the soybean program will be, what the wheat program will be, what the corn program will be, and those are critical obviously for farm income related issues. But the fact of the matter is that unless we look at agricultural policy as well in terms of what the land will be and will it be capable of sustaining and promoting the production of crops in the future, we're going to lose a lot of interest of people who are not involved in agriculture in this country, people from other parts of the country, people who live in urban areas, because you know less than 2% of the people in this country farm the land. So from a political perspective as well as from an environmental perspective we have got to create this tie between the land and all the people of this country in order to build on farm policy for the future. If we deplete our quality of our water supplies we create health risk for all of our people. And if we destroy habitats in the wildlife they support we lose critical elements of a quality of life, not to mention the building blocks that sustain our human species. In constant dollars, think about this, in constant dollars we spent more money during the depression on conservation than we're spending today. And that just doesn't make sense. We need more funding to support conservation practices and most certainly more money for NRCS technical assistance. Technical assistance that's needed so bad in these particular agencies are no longer there, funds need to be restored for that. Other type of incentive programs need to be developed for small farmers to get them, black farmers specifically to get involved. Many of them on car share and other kind of programs cannot afford to put up money up front. My view is that I think we should direct our responses to limited resource livestock producers. And I say that because if there is an economic benefit to get large, let the economic benefit pay then for implementation of the standards. Let us use our limited resource dollars to maintain the limited resource livestock producers and address the environmental concerns in a compatible manner. Let's not help the big get bigger and drive out the small independent producers. We have a program at the National Pork Producers Council which is called On Farm Odour Environmental Assessment Program. 67% of the challenges that we found on the farm so far have simply been management oriented. They have not taken big dollars to fix. It's just maybe a changing way we clean a fan or maybe it's a changeable way we handle something. And so it's something, it's a program that's for all producers and it's available to everyone. But like I said, it's a very good indication of how you can do if you partner together with producers and private industry as well as the government. We've seen our private lands programs and ducks limit to grow from a few thousand acres a year, 15 years ago, to over 500,000 acres that we're actually providing direct assistance to landowners on in the last year. We expect and we're challenging USDA to match us in terms of helping make some more of this happen. But we expect to have our private lands direct contact program being over a million acres of private land within two more years. That's a doubling in two years. That's because the private owner has the interest. Native Americans, of course, have had a lot of difficulty over the years as all of you know. And one of the drawbacks to progress in the agriculture field has been not having availability of the USDA programs that we now have. This has just happened in the last few years. So we're quite a ways behind as far as the non-Indian producer in programs that USDA has provided over the years. We're hoping to catch up, but we're going to need quite a bit of help to do that. Whenever you get on the regulatory side, it's a time-consuming, a money-consuming thing to do that takes the flexibility away from the local folks. And we strongly believe through the district movement that the local folks need to have a say in what goes on, on conservation on their own lands that they manage and own. There's not just one way to do whole farm planning. It's more of an attitude. And we'd like to see that kind of approach where the farmers in control, they have a flexible number of options to deal with their problems. We'd like that kind of tool to be at the center of a stewardship incentives program in the new Farm Bill. I'm one of the co-chairmen of the Congressional Sportsman's Caucus, and some of you may not know about us, but we have the largest group in the house. Since I took over, we signed up 90 new members. We have 290 members of the caucus now. CRP is kind of my thing. That's something I'm interested in primarily because when I was a kid, I used to go out and shoot my limited ducks in the morning and my limited pheasants in the afternoon right outside of the farm where I grew up. And today, the wetlands are all gone. There are no pheasants. We have farmed that land fence drill to fence drill. There is no cover for wildlife in that area, and we have that in a lot of places in this country, and we've got to figure out a way to get some of that back. We were finding that farmers were hearing an awful lot about conservation practices and initiatives from the government side, but they weren't hearing a lot from the industry side. And we thought that needed to be changed. And so for the last two and a half years, we, seven companies, have been doing as much as we can, being very aggressive on the private side as far as promoting buffers. Technical assistance is one of those things that with all of the debate about what's good and bad about the federal government, what they should do and what they shouldn't do, technical assistance is one of the things that there's always been very broad agreement on that the federal government does very well, does very appropriately and does very cost efficiently. Iowans are as concerned about the conservation matters included in a farm bill as they are about the economic matters. The CRP program, the buffer initiative, the wetland reserves program, and the technical assistance provided through NRCS are the foundation for our state and local conservation efforts. Now we've made progress over the years, the conservation is never and should never be done. Hypoxia in the Gulf, 159 impaired water bodies in this state, issues relating to animal and confined animal feeding operations are part of our concerns and part of what we will be discussing this year in our own Iowa legislature. We are trying to save the small farmer, but by handing out subsidies to produce things for which large farmers have a huge advantage over small farmers. Now what do small farmers have an advantage on? Producing conservation commodities. I see rank contrast at times in the sense of the stewardship of the land and thinking about tomorrow and the day after and you put a family independent farmer out there and they're going to love that land, that's just the way it is. I think we can have open space credits, we could have some tax incentives and just use cows, use sheep to manage the resource and we'll all live happily ever after. Thank you very much. We find a lot with certain communities we talk to, not this one, that there's a feeling that people in agriculture are only out to make money. Our work with people in the agriculture community has convinced me that people want to do the right thing and we mean to continue to forge ways to help them do that. If we can go out there and do the right thing on the land, we can avoid over-regulation and that to me is one of the biggest threats that conservation faces in this country is over-regulation, command and control telling us what to do as opposed to letting our scientists and our foresters and our farmers figure out for themselves how to solve the problems cooperatively. As I drive home very often, I look at a farm and I say that is fantastic and I say, should I stop in and say thank you? I don't even know how to do it. We've got to figure out how to say thank you to all those good stewards that are out there. If you look at the executive summary of the verbal content from the conservation forums, you'll see that that consensus exists in that document too and it's simply that people believe that we should commit ourselves to more significant funding, as Paul said, and more significant coupling of farm program spending to conservation objectives. If you have organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the Isaac Walton League and all the groups represented here, go to members of Congress together. It'll do two things. We're going to back arrest on behalf of some of the congressmen to see these people come in the door together, but I think it'll also really get the job done. This concept we were talking about all this morning is a wonderful framework because it would allow us to hang together all these different environmental needs and integrate them in a way that makes sense so they're not working against each other. We're struggling with how to commoditize the other values that flow off of agricultural land and develop markets for them in the marketplace so that the public can share the cost with the landowner of delivering those products, whether they're wildlife habitat or open space or bridging the gap, the generation gap, for the farmer who is faced with sale and $1,000 an acre for farmland or $40,000 an acre for development, preserving that land for future generations has real value to our society and yet we have only the beginning of programs to recognize that. Whether it's farmland protection with easements or buffer strips or CRP we're really all talking about the same issue. We're talking about how do we attach public value to private land and how do we develop mechanisms to share the cost between the producer and the beneficiary who is downstream. Farmers are probably much more literate than the folks in the cities where watershed, forestry, natural resource literacy is at near zero. That's dangerous because they're holding the votes. We've really got to commit resources from our budgets to get profound public education just like we're doing on the farms into the hands of the individual property owners, land owners, land users in the city. I would hate to see the federal government give up its long-term leadership in the conservation area when we get something like the last budget bill and a piece put in at the last minute which basically eliminates some of the key sod buster provisions late at night that doesn't give us the kind of leadership we need to keep focused on the importance of this area. If we have fallen behind in some areas I do think, as Tom Harkin said, one of the reasons is quite simply inadequate federal dollars. On a per acre basis we spend five dollars on management of public lands for every one dollar we spend on private conservation. Earlier this year, after much deliberation and investigation and hearings and input, I authored and introduced a new bill called the Conservation Security Act. This legislation would establish a conservation security program, CSP for short, which would be a new incentive program for farm and ranch conservation practices. Totally voluntary, not regulatory, but voluntary. And here's one major distinction from some of our past approaches. The farmer or rancher who is already doing a good job is eligible to receive compensation for continuing practices they already have in place. I strongly believe that the reward should not all go just to supporting new conservation efforts. For my part I will do what I can to support the national funding and technical support for conservation efforts and to do something to enact some form of legislation along the lines of the Conservation Security Act. And again, I ask all of you here today to take a look at it, give me the benefit of your wisdom and guidance and input on changing, modifying, or in any way improving that. Future generations are not going to remember us for what was said here today, but instead they will measure us for the actions that we take to preserve and improve the health of the land from this day forward. So let's go out and get the job done. Thank you all for being here.