CRP Lawsuit Not Resolved

Courtesy of the Texas Farm Bureau Ag Headlines

The first legal steps toward resolving the lawsuit filed by the National Wildlife Federation against USDA concerning emergency haying and grazing of Conservation Reserve Program lands have been taken. A temporary restraining order prohibiting the haying and grazing of those acres has been in effect since last week. A federal judge in Seattle imposed that TRO.

While the court found “strong likelihood” that the Farm Service Agency of USDA “violated the National Environmental Policy Act,” it also stated that “our law does not…allow us to abandon a balance of harms analysis just because a potential environmental injury is at issue.”

The court, in part, ordered the following:

“The parties will meet and confer in an attempt to agree on a modified preliminary injunction that takes into account all of the relevant hardships. If they are unable to agree, they shall nevertheless produce suggestions for mitigating these hardships. The parties might consider limiting the total acreage that can be hayed and grazed under the CFU initiative to the 2.5 million acres that Deputy Administrator John Johnson predicts will be the total number of acres actually affected by this initiative; a provision that would forbid the Secretary from reviving this program without first conducting an

Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) or a Programmatic EIS; a provision that would forbid participation by land that has been hayed or grazed within a certain number of years; as well as any other provisions that the parties conclude would serve to mitigate the relevant harms.”

Texas Farm Bureau will participate in the efforts to mitigate the hardships that would be imposed if the haying and grazing is not allowed. Texas Farm Bureau members are involved in the case.