Wichita ? More than a year after it was signed into law, a historic farm program that pays farmers to protect the environment on their working land has yet to sign up a single producer.

Farmers and environmentalists alike are urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture to enact the Conservation Security Program, which provides money and technical help for good stewardship practices that foster noneroding soils, clean air and water, wildlife habitat and energy savings.

USDA has yet to publish the rules for the program, which was signed into law by President Bush in May 2002.

“It will in essence cheat farmers out of a year’s worth of payments they otherwise would have gotten,” said Ferd Hoefner, a Washington lobbyist for the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “From the farmer’s pocketbook point of view, there will be less farm income because of the year’s delay. From the environmental point of view, it is a year without the environmental benefits the program will bring.”

Bruce Knight, chief of Natural Resources and Conservation, said he expected the rules to be published and public comments taken on them this summer. But USDA officials declined to speculate on when farmers could actually start signing up for the Conservation Security Program.

“This is one of those programs that it is more important that you do right, than do it fast,” Knight said.

Boost for environment

The program allows USDA to reward excellence in conservation, rather than programs in the past that helped with remediating environmental problems or helping people come into compliance with regulations, he said.

“With the Conservation Security Program, we have the potential of trying to encourage cutting-edge and leading-edge conservation,” Knight said. “This is a very new and innovative approach to conservation than in the past — and that is why this rule-making process is taking longer than our constituents may desire.”

The Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which did its own analysis of those comments, said more than 400 of the comments from farmers specifically urged USDA to get the program under way this fiscal year.

“It is more of a foot dragging by the administration than anything else. They are claiming a lot of money for conservation, but some (of us) question what the real commitment is,” said Mary Fund, spokeswoman for the Kansas Rural Center.

Unlike the Conservation Reserve Program — which pays farmers to take farmland out of production — the new Conservation Security Program would pay them for conservation practices on working agricultural land.

“It is a historical development,” Fund said.

The voluntary program rewards farmers who enroll in the program, which involves a “whole-farm” environmental planning process dealing with soil, water and other resource issues.

“What we really need to focus on at some point is what goes on in farming practices on working farms, and the Conservation Security Program was the first one that came along that would allow us to do that,” Fund said.

It was a concept that brought together farm and environmental groups.

Farm organizations — including the American Farm Bureau, National Farmers Union, American Soybean Assn., National Cotton Council and National Rice Federation, among others — have joined environmental efforts to get USDA to start the program.

“There is pretty broad support for it, both within the sustainable agriculture arena and more mainstream farm organizations, and pretty solid support within the conservation and environmental community,” Hoefner said.

But one of the program’s biggest opponents is U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts. The Kansas Republican has been critical of the program since the farm bill first created it.

“It was completely unproven. It was a completely new program — convoluted and complex — and the details of the program were left out of the legislation,” said Sarah Ross, a spokeswoman for Roberts. “It was left to USDA to create regulations for the program; that is in part why there is a delay,”

Farm groups contend the problem with delays in beginning the program is that Congress can continue to chip away at its funding. Earlier this year, Congress funded its emergency drought-disaster bailout to farmers using money from the Conservation Security Program.

Another challenge is that the program is technically an entitlement program with a $3.7 billion cap, Knight said. Traditionally, entitlement programs — those farm programs that pay farmers income — are not capped.

“We’re doing everything we can to move it through the rule-making process and departments as quickly as we can,” said Craig Derickson, acting program manager at USDA for the Conservation Security Program.