10/21/08 Studying ecosystem markets for farmers and ranchers

Washington Ag October 21, 2008 A bill enacted from this past legislative session has the Washington State Conservation Commission conducting a study on the feasibility of conservation or ecosystem services markets for farmers and forest land owners. American Farmland Trust supported the legislation and its Northwest Director, Don Stuart explains. Stuart: "We need to provide a way to get farmers paid for a lot of the environmental services they now provide for free. Basically to create a marketplace for them to do that. Also we are losing land out of agriculture for environmental mitigation and we need some way to deal with that. We are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on environmental mitigation for transportation and other construction projects and the way the thing is set up currently a lot of that ends up being spent taking agricultural land out of production." The legislature provided funding for the study and pilot projects and a report will be made in December of 2009. Other supporters of the legislation included the Farm Bureau, Dairy Federation, Washington Cattlemen, the Grange and several environmental groups. I'm Bob Hoff.