COMMENTARY:

The federal government is now so large, with so many complex laws on so many subjects, it is often at cross-purposes with itself. Indelicately, it also sometimes behaves like "a bull in a china shop."

The following down-to-Earth illustration is drawn in part from the pages of the Progressive Farmer, a magazine seldom read in Washington but important in rural America.

In a "world-class environmental success story," the government's Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) has since 1985 paid farmers $35 billion to turn 34 million acres of plowed land back into grasslands. The Progressive Farmer reported: "The CRP has cut soil erosion by 450 million tons a year, keeping sediment, fertilizer and pesticides out of waterways and water supplies. Pheasant populations are up 22 percent. Two million more ducks take wing every fall. ... outdoor spending in the U.S. [has increased] by $300 million a year, and it brings in $39 million a year to landowners."

Now, however, egged on by those environmentalists who want to replace gasoline with corn-based ethanol, and influenced by the Corn Belt political lobby, the government has sabotaged its own success. With soybeans now up to $15 a bushel and corn at $7 (up from $1.65 a bushel), land is rapidly being withdrawn from the CRP and again plowed up. "It's a no-brainer," says farmer Don Tolley of Missouri. Other farmers agree. More than a million acres were withdrawn from the CRP last year in the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas alone. More than half a million more are expected to be withdrawn this year. Experts at Iowa State University predict 20 million acres will be withdrawn within the next 10 years.

They also say that because of recent mistakes by the Agriculture Department in executing contract extensions with farmers, some of the most environmentally sensitive grasslands will be among the first to be plowed up. In addition, by using the current record-high grain prices in a new revenue-based subsidy system, Congress has minimized risk and undermined the effectiveness of whatever penalties the Agriculture Department may still be able to impose on farmers who withdraw land early.

Artificially high grain prices and the destruction of the CRP are largely traceable to the government. Federal mandates for vastly increased biofuel production are a big factor. Estimates are that all the additional corn produced on former CRP land will go into ethanol. Devaluing the dollar has simultaneously increased export demand for U.S. grain and boosted its dollar-denominated price. General price inflation has also been caused by the Federal Reserve in an attempt to deal with a mortgage crisis in which it was complicit.

In the "break it, fix it, break it again" category, this is not the first time that millions of acres of grasslands in the Plains States have suffered at the hands of the federal government. Beginning back in the 1860s with the Homestead Act, the government gave away millions of acres of grassland in plots so small they could only be used to grow crops - even though the land was wholly unsuitable for plowing. Later, during and immediately after World War I, government price supports for wheat caused millions of additional acres of grass to be plowed under, ultimately helping cause the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. More than 4 million acres were so severely damaged that beginning in 1937, the Soil Conservation Service took them over and has spent the last 70 years trying to get the grass to grow again.

There are lessons to be learned from these intersecting farm, environmental and monetary policies and the conflicts among different economic interests that use the power of the federal government to gain advantages.

Perhaps those among us who have been anxious to implement far-reaching new federal climate and energy policies should step back and think about the collateral consequences. Is this a case where pulling a thread would unravel the fabric?

More fundamentally, it is time to reconsider whether our present know-all, do-all, spend- all, tax-all model of federal governance is any longer suitable. Perhaps it is true, as Bill Clinton so famously said more than a decade ago, that "the era of big government is over."

Do we really want the federal government to do to the rest of America what it has already done to agriculture?

Ernest S. Christian and Betty Jo Christian are lawyers and part-time farmers who receive small amounts of federal crop subsidies

They could fuck up a wet dream couldn't they?