A pilot program agreement between Minnesota and the federal government may ensure cleaner waterways, but will come at a price. A Memorandum of Understanding between Minnesota, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), aims to establish a program to reward members of the agriculture industry who agree to meet certain water protection standards.

The voluntary program will give farm operators who adopt practices from the Clean Water Act (CWA) an exemption from future state and federal water quality standards for a certain period of time. The exemption period could last as long as 10 years. The CWA regulates pollutant discharges into U.S. waters and quality standards for surface waters.

The USDA is calling the agreement “historic,” and says it will “encourage farmers to protect local rivers, streams, and other waters by reducing fertilizer runoff and soil erosion.”

“Participating farmers would agree to implement the plan; in exchange for implementing that, they would have a period that the farm would be meeting state water quality goals,” said Michael Schommer of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. “It would be simply saying this is the bar we want you to meet and we would not want you to do anything additional.”

Schommer says the exemption period is intentionally vague, and the details—including periods of participation—are still being worked out.

Schommer says the exemption period is intentionally vague, and the details—including periods of participation—are still being worked out.

Some say that the vague nature of the plan could present problems.

“There’s never been a well-developed way that the EPA regulates agriculture,” said Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch. “The devil is always in the details.”

Lovera adds that it’s typically a struggle to get the agriculture community to comply with the CWA. Especially when that community includes everything from people raising sugar beets and corn to people running a large livestock operation or a small farm.

“When it comes to EPA and large-scale agriculture, they don’t have a lot of ability or political will to make them comply with the Clean Water Act; they rely on the states,” said Lovera. “I think they’re trying to tackle it in a different way [by] asking them to do something.”

According to Friends of the Mississippi River (FMR), the American agriculture sector has been exempt from “programs that require measurable and enforceable reductions in water pollution” since the CWA’s 1972 passage.

The organization says they were caught by surprise about the new state-federal agreement, and that it’s not as groundbreaking as the government is making it seem.

“It’s not necessarily that [farmers] would be asked to go above and beyond [any existing environmental standards],” said Trevor Russell, director of FMR’s Watershed Program. “This is more of the same that they have already been asked to do, and should have done for a long time.”