From the Regional Board’s perspective, requiring more stringent and costly compliance standards for higher-risk farms is more fair than holding all regulated entities to the same standards. “If they are rational,” argues Sunstein , “agencies will bring enforcement actions against the most dangerous violator.” Another group of growers feel the Agricultural Waiver is unfair for a different set of reasons. This agricultural group asserts that while they are attempting to comply with the Waiver’s provision , other growers are able to get away with noncompliance due to a lack of enforcement. A farm advisor told a story of a San Benito County farmer that was “jumping through all the hoops to comply with the Agriculture waiver regulations saying, ‘I’m paying to have my tail waters and wells tested, but how can I compete in the marketplace if my neighbor’s polluted tailwaters come through my farm and is not doing anything to comply? I cannot ask the market to give me a higher price for my crop to help offset the expenses.’” This statement speaks directly to the uneven impacts resulting from insufficient enforcement as well as the tough political economic conditions under which farmers are operating in the region. The 2012 Ag Waiver attempts to address different aspects of fairness in its regulatory requirements. First, the Regional Board and staff acknowledged that each farm is unique and requirements should not be one-size-fits-all ,plastic pot manufacturers which is why it devised a three-tiered system that intentionally split farms by size and risk to water quality.
The Regional Board received several comment letters from smaller farms, perhaps like the one in the San Benito case, who were concerned about requirements being overly burdensome due to their size. Because of these concerns and because smaller farms may pose a smaller risk to water quality, they have been placed in Tier 1 with the least costly and onerous requirements. There was also some dialogue of creating an even lesser tier with no requirements for those farms that have very minimal discharges to act as an incentivize curtailing pollution. However, a “Tier 0” would be the equivalent of stopping pollution altogether, and in such a case a farm would not have to apply for a permit at all. For Tier 2 and 3 farms, the option of transferring to a lower Tier does exist, however. Additionally, governmental and third party agencies have established programs to provide technical and financial assistance to help growers achieve compliance mandates. For example, Section 319 of the U.S. Clean Water Act provides territories and tribes with grants for non-point source pollution. In 2012, these grants provided $164.5 million for pollution abatement projects throughout the country . Another department, The U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resource Conservation Services , works closely with landowners and growers to provide cost-share, technical assistance, and economic incentives to implement BMPs for water quality improvement. The USDA’s Conservation Reserve Enhancement Programs and the NRCS’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program offer free consultation and financial services to growers who implement best management practices for water quality protection. Nongovernmental agencies, such as the Community Alliance for Family Farmers , offer similar assistance to growers, particularly those in need of help financing and installing native vegetative buffer strips, which in the early phases of Ag Waiver negotiations was presented as a particularly challenging hurdle for Tier 3 farms.
Consulting groups that aid in the implementation of BMPs in California include the University of California Cooperative Extension, academic and research institutions, and growers’ consortia.As runoff from crop fields continues to pollute waters throughout the Central Coast, policymakers are increasingly forced to tackle the monumental task of how to best regulate agricultural discharges. Several complicated factors either drive or constrain improved water quality management and pollution control. In California’s Central Coast, conditions that have weakened agricultural water pollution policies in the region include budgetary and staff constraints, the 2006 E. coli breakout, and the powerful agricultural lobby. On the other side, environmentalists, environmental justice groups, health organizations, scientific studies, S.B. 390, and the 2015 California Superior Court ruling have pushed the Regional Board to develop more comprehensive water quality protections. The 2004 and 2012 Central Coast Agricultural Waiver made incremental pollution protections. Both Waivers represent a significant step forward in the way society thinks about and growers manage discharges from agriculture. As one farm advisor explained, “the Agricultural Waiver was a success because it is a move in the right direction. Everyone in the research and extension community is trying to better understand nutrient management, which is a good thing… And it will inevitably impact growers’ approach to [fertilizer] inputs in the future, including cover cropping and nutrient management plans.” Though best management practices may be better understood as a result of the Ag Waiver, water quality has still not improved as a result. A top priority of the Regional Board should be to develop strategies for increasing adoption of effective management practices and evaluating their success through numeric water quality monitoring.
No panacea exists to magically improve water quality in a short timeframe, except for barring agricultural operations altogether, which is politically, culturally and economically unfeasible. Rather, the Regional Board must use a diversified toolset, one that includes the implementation of science-driven best management practices to control pollution at its source. A number of policy tools have successfully regulated pollutant inputs, such as the Dirty Input Limit and the Netherland’s Nitrate Tax . The Dirty Input Limits approach departs from conventional environmental regulation since its focus is on inputs, or sources of pollutants. Traditionally, environmental regulation focuses on outputs, using control mechanisms to abate pollution at the end-of-the-pipe. Most of the provisions in the Agricultural Waiver are cases in point—by monitoring ground and surface water and mandating certain BMPs in an attempt to control fertilizer runoff after they have been applied , the Agricultural Waiver’s regulatory tools focus on output, rather than input limits. The provision that most resembled DIL approach was the nitrate balance ratio, but as mentioned previously, the State Board eliminated this mandate in its modifications to the 2012 Agricultural Waiver. In addition to nitrate balance ratios, which targets farmers use of fertilizers, the DIL approach also targets sources of contaminants further upstream. For example, manufacturers of pollutants such as fertilizers or pesticides might be required to cap their production,black plastic plant pots wholesale creating a ripple effect through the whole production stream. In theory, this type of tool could be highly effective in reducing the amount of fertilizers produced, sold, bought, applied and discharged into waterbodies. As suggested by Driesen and Sinden , this approach is useful beyond the tool choice in that it provokes a new way of thinking about environmental regulation. This approach has been successfully implemented in the Netherland’s as a nitrate tax, directly targeting inputs. In an attempt to decrease fertilizer use, the Netherland’s federal government implemented a hefty penalty on excess input of nitrogen . The policy proved to be remarkably effective in achieving its intended objective—one monitoring study showed that nitrogen surpluses in agricultural areas fell substantially as a result of its implementation . In this case, the federal government had broad authority to impose a highly coercive tool. Coercive tools are likely to be more effective, and yield redistributive results ; however, they are also the least politically feasible and popular because costs fall most heavily on regulated entities. Given the severity of the water pollution problem on the one hand, and the tumultuous socio and political economic conditions under which regional water quality policies are made on the other, the Central Coast Regional Board has no easy task. The Regional Board and its staff should be lauded for its efforts, but with water quality deteriorating it is clear that the current provisions do not go far enough. The three-tiered system was, in theory, a step towards more equity and fairness, increasing regulatory mandates for the most serious polluters. But the ease with which farmers have escaped Tier 3—the Tier with the most valuable individual monitoring data— begs the question of whether the tiered structured was effective.
Compliance requirements include reporting implemented water quality best management practices, however this system amounts to little more than a mere checklist. When agricultural operators themselves, not third parties or Regional Board staff, are the ones verifying the implementation and effectiveness of best management practices, it is difficult to discern the actual outcomes of on-farm implementation techniques. A more comprehensive monitoring and reporting program is needed to not only verify the effectiveness of implemented management practices but also to use as a baseline for calculating pollution loads and meet TMDLs and water quality standards. The Regional Board might look to California Department of Pesticide Regulation’s successful data collection system to use as a model. Finally, it is in the Regional Board’s interest to continue to foster participation and cooperation with the regulated industry, since growers are ultimately the ones implementing on-farm water quality protections.Best management practices that might be adopted to protect water quality on farms include vegetative buffer strips, retention ponds, and nutrient and irrigation use efficiency. The choice to incorporate these BMPs into agricultural systems can be influenced by government policies as well as individual motivations and attitudes . The agricultural industry, arguably more than other industries, faces myriad external pressures with regard to on-farm decision-making . Farms are increasingly forced to survive on slim profit margins, compete with highly mechanized systems, cheap labor and inexpensive agricultural products from overseas. Growers must weigh these economic factors against other demands, like those from regulators to implement water quality protection measures. Growers’ behavioral decisions to alter farming practices in favor of the environment have been widely researched . Prior studies in the field of agricultural economics have developed models to predict farmer decision-making, many of which are based on the assumption that farmers will maximize profits over other objectives . Work from behavioral economists, political scientists, social psychologists and other social scientists have complemented this “profitability” literature, softening the assumption of self-interest by demonstrating how cultural and psychological concerns can also heavily motivate farmers’ decisions to change their behavior . Dozens of in-site case studies, as well as several meta-analyses synthesizing these works cite a wide range of environmentally related decision-making factors influencing farmers’ choice to adopt or not adopt best management practices, including: a motivation to show others their environmental commitment , an intrinsic desire to protect the environment , farmers’ strong attachment to the land , and good stewardship . Of particular interest to this research is a growing body of work in the fields of political science and environmental policy that demonstrates how trust between stakeholders, including regulators and regulated groups, can impact farmers’ decision making, as well as how those views can change over time. Trust has been reported as a pivotal factor in solving natural resource conflicts, especially common resources . Given its weight in environmental policy processes, researchers have endeavored to uncover ways in which trusting relationships are cultivated as well as how they degrade. Leach and Sabatier describe two theories of how trust can develop in political arenas. The institutional rational choice model assumes that perceptions of trust are largely based on the information, or lack thereof, about the subject or group in question, whereas the Advocacy Coalition Framework believes trust is embedded in a hierarchical belief system of primary core values and more malleable secondary policy positions. According to ACF, similar core values between two stakeholders allow those individuals to filter information in a similar way, drawing parallel conclusions and fostering trust, but when preexisting beliefs do not align, diverging interpretations of evidence can often lead to distrust . Communication can also influence trust. According to Leach and Sabatier , “The strength of each interpersonal relationship ought to increase with the frequency of contact and with the cumulative number of interactions over time.” Research also shows that it is not only the contact frequency, but also the type of contact that matters. For example, the history of interactions and of agreements or disagreements can inform one’s trust. Inperson or long distance communication also plays a role. Ostrom and her colleagues found that face-to-face communication is a promising means of fostering trust. Relatedly, others have found that a lack of face-to-face contact could be an influential factor. For example, institutional distance, which might entail physical distance between growers and regulatory agencies, could hinder trust building .