Managing Waters

Right now it's cherry season and rain is a big no-no for cherries. But what if it did rain and create a lot of puddles around your orchard and property. Are you prepared to deal with these so called navigable waters? That's what the EPA wants to do. Congressman Doc Hastings is against the idea.

HASTINGS: This comes from the Clean Water Act and when you talk broadly about clean water, nobody argues that we shouldn't have clean water. But the issue is how you define water sources that would fall under that act. The historical way has been navigable waters, generally meaning waters that are natural river waters and so forth. And what EPA is attempting to do is to change the definition away from navigable. You take that out of the definition and what you end up with is the federal government potentially regulating all waters.

This is where it gets really silly...in a governmental kind of way.

HASTINGS: If you want to take that to the extreme - if you have a huge rain and all of a sudden it creates a wet spot that takes some time to soak in, in theory that could become a water that's under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act. Now if that falls on private property one can only imagine litigation and other things that would follow just by changing that definition. So I think the EPA is frankly overstepping their bound on this.

That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.