For many years, American conservation and hunting organizations were pioneers in protecting wildlife and natural landscapes — privately. The Nature Conservancy nurtured conservation easements, the National Audubon Society created natural preserves, and Ducks Unlimited protected Great Plains ducks by restoring wetlands and building islands for nesting.
Today, these organizations are full-fledged members of the farm lobby.
Congress is negotiating the 2026 Farm Bill. The biggest conflict is over the food stamp program known as SNAP, which dominates the budget of the Department of Agriculture (USDA). So the department’s conservation programs attract much less attention. Yet the department spends $5.3 billion a year on conservation, primarily through subsidies to farmers. And the subsidies are proliferating.
For many, this expansion into environmental concerns is a good thing — a sign that some of the taxpayer money that protects crop prices is also enhancing habitat for wildlife, reducing erosion, and improving the quality of the soil.
In a public choice view, however, the rise of the conservation-agriculture complex does not bode well for broader conservation efforts in the US. The biggest potential damage is the danger that voluntary efforts — which have typified America since before the 1830s, when Tocqueville heralded them — will begin to dry up. The government is unlikely to be imaginative in addressing environmental problems.
Environmental groups will have to devote more and more time and money to promote the Farm Bill’s provisions and to lobby for more. It’s started. Fifty environmental groups recently sent a letter to the Senate committee considering the Farm Bill: “Despite CRP’s proven success and continued popularity, the program has been operating under short-term extensions since 2023 and has not received meaningful policy updates or new investments since the 2018 Farm Bill.”
And as the lobbyists’ goals become increasingly entwined with political goals, they will have to make compromises. For example, in a new program proposed in the 2026 Farm Bill, forest owners don’t have to do anything different, just keep logging.
The Conservation Reserve Program, the USDA’s largest conservation project, illustrates two lessons from political economy. They are:
- Unrelated forces like “bootleggers and Baptists” often work together politically, sometimes even unintentionally — an insight offered by economist Bruce Yandle years ago.
- Bureaucrats, in cooperation with a pliant Congress, strive to maximize their budgets. Developed by William Niskanen, the “bureau maximization” thesis is summarized in a current economics text (James D. Gwartney et al.): “Economic analysis suggests there is a strong tendency for government bureaucrats and employees to want to expand their budgets and their authority well beyond what would be economically efficient.”
CRP was first authorized in the 1985 Farm Bill. The government pays farmers to take marginal or erodible acreage out of crop production. It offers additional subsidies and technical assistance to help farmers take environmentally beneficial steps such as planting native vegetation.
The program is not just about conservation, however. It also protects prices. Earlier this year, Jonathan Coppess of the University of Illinois said of the CRP: “The legislative history provides plenty of support that CRP was for both general conservation purposes . . . and market stabilization.” In other words, taking land out of production to boost prices was one of the twin goals of the CRP.
Bootleggers and Baptists
Now, to the first lesson. The name stems from Bruce Yandle’s observation of an old struggle to prevent liquor from being sold on Sunday in parts of the South. Baptists and other conservative churches publicly opposed selling liquor on Sunday on moral grounds; the bootleggers, too, opposed Sunday sales — in their case, because the prohibition increased their own sales. Bootleggers could work silently behind the scenes to influence politicians, while the Baptists could stir up public concern.
While the current CRP alliance does not involve anything illegal, it reflects a similar division of responsibilities: For the most part, while farmers (“bootleggers”) work behind the scenes to mold the law, conservationists (“Baptists”) support and applaud subsidized programs (although they may work behind the scenes, too).
The idea of marrying government-paid conservation with government reduction of farmland started as something of a subterfuge. In 1933, as part of the Roosevelt administration’s effort to prop up falling crop prices, Congress enacted the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). This was the infamous law that led to killing over six million piglets and sows, causing public outrage.
The AAA raised prices. But three years later, the Supreme Court struck down the Agricultural Adjustment Act, finding that its tax-and-subsidy scheme improperly allowed the federal government into agricultural regulation reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment. (That decision has never been formally overturned, but its restrictions on the role of the government have disappeared.)
Just two months later, the FDR administration came up with another law, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act (SCDAA), building on the recently created Soil Conservation Service (now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service). The new law justified controls on crop production to protect the soil and to curb erosion. “The goal was still to raise prices by reducing surplus crops,” explains historian Chandler Hansen, “but now it had the added benefit of implementing conservation practices to improve the health of the land.”
So, the USDA’s early conservation efforts were primarily to get around a stubborn Supreme Court. To be sure, the Depression and the Dust Bowl were wreaking havoc in farm country. But the acceptability of conservation provided cover for the farmers’ more pressing issue of holding up prices. According to Erik Lichtenberg of the American Enterprise Institute, the CRP is still an “afterthought.” Commenting on the CRP and a smaller conservation program (called EQIP), he recently wrote: “But they serve that function [environmental protection] only to the extent that it coincides with their main goals of protecting agriculture’s natural resource base and supplementing farmers’ incomes.”
Bureau Maximization
The CRP also illustrates William Niskanen’s “maximization” thesis. Since its 1985 founding, the CRP has initiated a number of new programs, reaching additional constituencies. For example, the 2014 Farm Bill started the Grasslands CRP, which “provides rental payments in exchange for maintaining grass cover,” under USDA’s goal of limiting how “environmentally sensitive agricultural land” is farmed or ranched. Thus the USDA has expanded conservation subsidies to cattle forage without requiring any land to be set aside and without having to prove environmental benefits would result.
One can’t help but see a persistent effort to “spread the wealth” (taxpayer wealth) to more interest groups. In the proposed Farm Bill, there is a new initiative, the Forest Conservation Easement Program (FCEP). Its purpose, the bill says, is “the conservation and restoration of eligible land and natural resources through the acquisition of conservation easements or other interests in land.”
The Land Trust Alliance, enthusiastic “Baptists,” says it differently. The FCEP would “allow willing private and tribal landowners to voluntarily sell their development rights to prevent conversion to non-forest uses.” In other words, the government (at taxpayers’ expense) could offer a forest owner enough funds to pre-empt him from selling his land to a developer. And the landowner could continue to operate his forest as in the past. The Department of Agriculture is a budget maximizer: the service to the institution has outpaced service to its alleged goals.
Assessment
To some, the expansion of USDA’s responsibilities is a welcome development, turning a law that catered to farmers, especially wealthy farmers, toward a more acceptable purpose, environmental protection. Who can deny that environmental protection is a good thing?
But private conservation is likely to be more effective than government conservation, as a long list of government management programs indicate — starting with the wildfires that plague Forest Service land and the enormous maintenance backlogs in our national parks. And private conservation, with its inherent creativity and on-the-ground practicality, is in danger.
To me, these programs underline a third political economy lesson, incorrectly attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”
