the cause and effect are not necessarily cleaner water or air or protected habitats but more degradation to our free market society and our economic base as a country agriculture is the driving force here in monterey county nearly every local job depends on our industry in some way as we are a single industry dependent here by forcing additional or conflicting regulations on an industry already challenged to be sustainable in our newly green society we are tearing down the most important element of our society our safe abundant food supply we all drink the same water and we all breathe the same air and i thank you for your time and providing this opportunity for us to agriculture my name is mike jarrard i am the president and ceo of mann packing company located here in the salinas valley for the last seventy two years our company ships field packed as well as fresh cut value added vegetable commodities to customers here in california across the country and canada we are local and national contributing to the health and well being of people in california and across the country moreover our growers and i employ three thousand one hundred agricultural workers in salinas who contribute to the economic strength of this community as you are aware today the produce industry is facing a multitude of challenges but none perhaps as significant as environmental regulation we are concerned with the process being used by the u s epa and other relevant federal agencies to advance environmental regulation in a nutshell the process is broken regulations are being promulgated in a siloed fashion without taking into account complete scientific information the use of real world data or adequate input from agricultural stakeholders including farmers  my testimony i will focus on the issue of numeric nutrient criteria which are used by regulators to establish the amounts of nutrients allowed for discharges into waters such as ditches canals streams rivers and lakes nnc are also used to determine if a body of water is impaired under the clean water act which triggers total maximum daily loads a calculation of the maximum amount of a pollutant that a body of water can receive and still safely meet water quality standards and a torrent of mandatory requirements on dischargers americas farmers correlate nnc with actual biological conditions and across geographic areas is limited when nnc are established incorrectly they are costly to the regulated community and leave questions as to the observable impact on the actual biological conditions of the waters being regulated on the national stage the nnc policies established in florida and the chesapeake bay watershed are front and center and how have established a template for how nnc should be structured nationwide florida the requirements in development are the result of a settlement agreement with activists which is not only highly problematic but also raises fundamental questions of fairness and transparency and effectively undermines the rights of the regulated community to customary open proceedings agriculture has urged u s epa to delay further nnc policymaking until it has effectively engaged all relevant stakeholders in a thorough and transparent review of the strategic direction of nnc policies these issues in concert with the nnc epa is planning to finalize in august two thousand and twelve for all other florida waters as part of this process we believe epa must answer the numerous and significant scientific economic and policy questions about these during the twelve years since the strategy was issued a considerable body of applied scientific knowledge and policy experience has been developed by the research community states and epa work on nncs at the state level has involved considerable debate on s matters within states between states and between epa and the states much remains unresolved this substantive experience with the difficult scientific and practical pitfalls of nnc needs to be drawn upon to develop a sound path forward for nnc policies in general in the case of florida there are significant questions about the statistical modeling and biological science used by epa by epas own admission in the proposed rulemaking there is no scientifically establish correlation between what has been proposed nnc in florida and the desired biological conditions for the regulated waters in general we believe there is a serious lack of rigorous generally accepted science that justifies the particular methods epa adopted to generate the nnc in florida in addition since the development of the one thousand nine hundred and ninety eight national strategy there has been little or no significant or organized public participation in nnc policy development an open and transparent process is essential if both in the direct costs to the regulated community but also for the economy as a whole the florida department of agriculture estimates that the total initial cost for agricultural producers to comply with the nnc for lakes rivers and streams to be between eight hundred and fifty five dollars million and part time jobs will be lost not just agriculture is at risk the florida department of environmental protection estimates that the total capital cost for utilities to comply with these nnc would be approximately four dollars ten cents billion the florida water environment association estimates the cost for compliance with all of the nnc that epa has under development to be between forty seven dollars billion and ninety eight dollars billion over thirty years it also estimates that the average household utility bill will increase between six hundred and seventy three dollars and seven hundred and twenty six dollars a year the size of these costs for florida alone are reason enough to justify revisiting the national strategy to ensure that a sound and responsible path forward is developed lastly with regard to the substance of the proposed nnc epa needs to fully consider the implications and outcomes that will result if it sets the nnc for the lakes and streams at standards that are far too stringent impractical and unattainable for florida and the rest of the united states the goals of the clean water act must not be set and pursued in isolation from all of the other important goals and priorities that society has including promoting vibrant strong job creating businesses economically strong communities and the productive and valuable use of the land for agricultural and other nnc should be carried out in parallel to the national working dialogue agriculture has suggested in the chesapeake bay watershed the recently finalized epa issued chesapeake bay total maximum daily load could push hundreds of thousands of acres of productive farmland out of cropland epa projects that roughly twenty percent of cropland in the watershed about six hundred thousand acres will have to be removed from production and be converted to grassland or forest in order to achieve the required loading reduction this despite the usda national resources conservation services finding in its draft two thousand and ten report on the progress made by agriculture in conservation and national resource improvements from two thousand and three to two thousand and six that farmers  actively implementing erosion control practices on about ninety six percent of the cropland acres in production in that watershed as a result nrcs states that sediment contributions from cultivated cropland to the bays rivers and streams are reduce by sixty four percent nitrogen by thirty six percent and phosphorus by forty three percent nonetheless the progress made by agriculture was seemingly ignored epa moved forward with an unnecessarily inflexible new plan to regulate farming practices in the chesapeake watershed in developing this plan epa relied on a scientific model that epa itself admits was flawed and failed to give stakeholders a meaningful opportunity to review its assumed facts the rigidity of the plan also appears to limit the states flexibility to change  adapt their water quality plans even though epa regulations specifically allow states to modify water quality goals when necessary to avoid substantial economic and social disruption the bay states estimate that implementation will cost billions of dollars seven  for virginia and three dollars billion to six dollars billion for new york alone with regard to nutrient standards closer to home farmers in central california coast are experiencing firsthand how federal regulatory policy is driving our state regulatory process for water quality the central coast regional water quality control board is in the process of developing a new regulatory paradigm for california farmers in the central coast in much the same manner as the requirements in florida and the chesapeake bay watershed i e without full use of available scientific data real world information and adequate stakeholder outreach as this is in my own back yard i would like to describe some of the other specifics the order that is being contemplated would automatically place growers of nutrient intensive commodities into a high risk contribute to exceedances of nutrient water quality standards in waters of the state or the united states within four years of the adoption of the proposed order to do this they will be required to monitor individual discharges at the f level demonstrate a fifty percent reduction in two years and a seventy five percent reduction in three years as noted earlier while agriculture is willing and already working to reduce deleterious impacts of nutrients in water quality through new technology such as slow release fertilizers careful development of nutrient budgets and reducing the amount of water that runs off an operation the regional goals that are born out of flawed numeric nutrient criteria policies will be impossible to achieve  chairman let me put this in simple economic terms in a preliminary study conducted by the grower shipper association of central california it is estimated that the central coast could lose between two hundred and thirty one dollars million and two hundred and ninety eight dollars million in business revenue between nineteen million and twenty five dollars million in tax revenue and could lose as many as three thousand three hundred jobs in the central valley despite the significant progress growers have made in meeting water quality objectives by the implementation of best management practices the central valley regional water quality control board is moving toward requiring all growers regardless of growing practices andor threat to surface or groundwater to comply with the new requirements these include geographic commodity specific general waste discharge requirements andor conditional waivers  wdrs that would include surface and groundwater monitoring and management plans individual farm evaluations and individual certified nutrient management plans which would dictate how much and when a nutrient is allowed to be applied staff recognizes th would result in some prime unique farmland and farmland of statewide importance being converted to nonagricultural use in closing we are asking for you to help to fix the broken environmental regulatory process we need to depend on a process that uses best available science takes in account operational data and encourages input from the agricultural stakeholders without this certainty our livelihoods and the food and fiber we produce for this country are threatened thank you for caring enough to come here today and well good morning chairman issa and congressman farr my name is mark murai i am a third generation farmer our family farm is located in oceanside california for the past five years i have served as president of the california strawberry commission the commission represents all of californias strawberry shippers processors and more than five hundred family farms the average california strawberry farm is seventy three acres california strawberry farmers are able to achieve the highest yield in the world on these small farms that dot californias coast collectively california strawberry farmers grow over eighty eight percent of the strawberries for the nation and create over seventy zero on farm jobs in other words california strawberry farmers are the most efficient farmers in the world able to grow the most fruit per acre than any other strawberry farmer in the world this hard work ethic is also what supports california farmers to comply with over seventy laws and regulations many of these government requirements originate with the u s epa for example u s epa has one of the toughest pesticide registration programs on the globe and after a product is species act first the endangered species act requires federal agencies to consult with the national marine fisheries service and the fish and wildlife service the services the agency actions that could impact threatened or endangered species on their critical habitats the consultation process was guided by an optional process created in two thousand and four for consultation between epa and the services to address the impacts pesticides on endangered species called the counterpart regulations which established alternative consultation processes so that epa could fulfill its esa obligations and to make the consultation process more flexible efficient and timely however as a result of an activist lawsuit judge coffner in the u s ninth circuit court invalidated parts of the counterpart regulations based on his belief that the process violated the esa procedural obligation not because there was any actual harm to any endangered or threatened species as a result in essence  mandated process would require the u s epa to conduct one comprehensive review and then the epa would then send the data to the u s fish and wildlife service or the national marine fisheries service for them to review the data once more the services then would complete their review called the biological opinion which could contain restrictions on pesticide use then the service would send back to the epa for yet another review so that epa could determine whether restrictions could be instituted the result is yet another regulatory process and for california we now have three reviews of the same product however the biggest problem is that the national marine fisheries service has no expertise and no experience in pesticides as a result their reviews to date are grossly flawed as they are based on old data old use patterns  old agronomic practices and non peer reviewed information furthermore because of a combination of a lack of expertise and resources not one consultation has been completed to the point of implementation despite court ordered schedules given these circumstances there are so many problems that both state and federal government officials have expressed great concern let me  quotes from letters by u s epa the california department of pesticide regulation and washington department of agriculture first the following examples are comments from the national marine fisheries service recent series of biological opinions to determine if any of the fifty four pesticides that have a negative impact on pacific salmon that run in rivers from canada to mexico first the washington state department of agriculture  since two thousand and three wsda washington state department of agriculture has invested significant financial and technical resources in the collection of monitoring data from salmon bearing waters in washington state water samples are collected weekly from thirteen salmon bearing streams during typical pesticide use season the monitoring locations sampled represent various agricultural areas and one urban area in california department of pesticide regulation dpr remains concerned that the deficiencies identified in our september fifteen two thousand and eight comments on the nmfs draft biological  best available data for example a review of californias surface water monitoring databases show that out of forty four thousand six hundred and forty one water analysis for nine pesticides included in this less than one percent of the samples exceed the proposed maximum concentration limits moreover the majority of exceedances were from pesticides that are scheduled for cancellation this data suggests that not only continuing the quote additionally these biops continue to lack transparency for example the rpa section establishes a process to determine the adequacy of suggested risk reduction measures without threatened status of the species has not changed appreciably during this considerable period it would appear to provide some indication that the use of these pesticides are not appreciably reducing the likelihood of both survival and recovery which and therefore are considered to be a minor factor in species survival relative to other factors continuing the quote the draft lacks a level of transparency necessary for epa to understand  nmfs rationale for its opinion that any of these pesticides will jeopardize the continued existence of any of the species at issue it is generally not transparent as to what methodology nmfs employed to collect the information dated september fifteen two thousand and eight so how does this impact agriculture based on these erroneous studies the national marine fisheries service will now require buffers ranging from one hundred and twenty five feet to one  these buffers will result in hundreds of thousands of acres being taken out of production or suffering from severe infestation additionally this year the center of biological diversity filed the same type of procedural lawsuit on four hundred pesticides listing hundreds of species if it takes national marine fisheries service over a decade to evaluate fifty four pesticides for one species imagine how long it will take to evaluate four hundred pesticides for multiple species located throughout the u s at the current rate it would take over five hundred years this does not help farmers or fish i am going to go on to a different  now and this has to do with the u s epa ozone standard as you know the california mountains act to capture natural and manmade organic compounds that evaporate into the air called volatile organic compounds  implementation plans or sips as a result of these plans california farmers were asked to do their part to reduce voc air emissions from organic and conventional pesticides in response california strawberry farmers have implemented a variety of new technologies that reduce voc air emissions more specifically since the one thousand nine hundred and ninety four sip was approved strawberry farmers have reduced voc emissions thirty to fifty percent depending on each individual farm ten years later the ventura air pollution control district issued a press release stating quote best air on record and noted that ventura county had met the u s epa one hour ozone standard for three years in a row and was now in compliance instead of supporting this accomplishment activists sued the state of california for failing to implement a separate regulation unfortunately lawsuits dont make sense as more information emerged about this issue it made less sense according to the california air resources board emissions inventory approximately forty percent of the vocs in ventura county are from naturally occurring sources  inventory actual vocs from pesticides are less than two percent of all vocs in ventura so once again out of the four percent that organic and conventional pesticides make up  forty six percent of that four percent is made up of methyl bromide which is not even a voc u c davis professor doctor peter green has been funded by the state of california to conduct independent scientific research about reactivity of nitrous oxide and voc he testified to the air resources board that quote organic gases react photochemically however they do not react equally meth such a very very low reactivity that it would be reasonable to exclude it from regulation at a ground level ozone precursor furthermore ozone production is strongly dependent on nitrogen oxides nitrous oxide which must also continue to be reduced this is especially true in air basins under conditions where nitrous oxide is the limiting reagent and where natural background vocs limit our ability to reduce total vocs in other words there are so much naturally occurring vocs that even if you eliminated all vocs from agriculture it would have no effect on ground level ozone because the amount of ozone that will be created is based upon emissions from cars and factories  from burning of fossil fuels unfortunately after sixteen years of having this type of information u s epa continues to require the obsolete requirements identified in one thousand nine hundred and ninety four that must agricultural uses of methyl bromide to date methyl bromide alternatives have been identified for nearly all crops strawberries are the largest exception australia israel italy japan spain and numerous other countries all requested critical use exemptions for strawberries within the past three years epa has approved substitute products to clean the soil they have approved methyl iodide for post harvest uses they have approved sulfuryl fluoride as a result reduced the amount of methyl bromide critical use exemption application by more than fifty percent now after reducing the availability of methyl bromide u s epa is taking comment on canceling both of these substitute on a petition to suspend and cancel methyl iodide we are concerned that epa has reduced the cue that is critical use exemption for methyl bromide by fifty percent because it said that new alternatives were available examples of the impacts to agriculture i would be happy to answer any questions at this time thank you chairman issa thank you as i said we are going to probably go back and forth quite a bit here  i had the pleasure or displeasure of going to the annual trips for the montreal protocol over the years and as i have watched the reduction i have watched it with a little bit of horror isnt it true that basically  are transitioning to unfortunately regulation and this is something that the united nations does not even understand that the sovereign body of california has a regulatory process that is even above the u s and it is very discouraging to think of where our industry will be or many industries if we have infected soils and there is no way  to clean them up the global economy is contributing to the spread of insects and diseases throughout the world and so we have to have a method just like our bodies take medicine we have to have a way to clean up our homes from termites our soil from disease and pests chairman issa also having cut flowers in san diego we are well aware that they have watched their industries move to south and central america specifically because of the access to not just cheap labor but to chemicals not available in the u s let me just go back on one thing you had a long and wonderful testimony and i appreciate everything that was in it but can i reduce down how you are being dealt with on these pesticides maybe to an example and if you agree with it let me know what you are really being told is that you are speeding but you havent yet gotten in the car you have been given the ticket for speeding and now your job is to prove that your car cant go over fifty five miles an hour to a lay person isnt that the demand you have there has been no proof that a particular pesticide or fifty four of them are being put excessively into the watershed by your company or by your industry and yet you are having to prove that whether it is steelhead or salmon or any other this process is happening when you even have the other regulatory agencies at the state other states put in comment letters that say the process is flawed and yet we are not acting to correct this chairman issa so not everyone  said you are not speeding just a whole bunch of states have said you are not speeding and you are still not allowed the keys to the car mister murai yes and if you look at our future if you look at the consultation or the opinions that need to be formed taking half a efficient products tools that farmers can use it is very discouraging chairman issa well since i have the ranking member on the agriculture committee and someone who has been looking at these issues locally for i don't know about a half a century  cows on the land and the nitrate that they put in the land in the first place and i think the difficulty is that we have been living with a lot of government around us we are surrounded this county has billions of land management and we have the epa we have the national marine fisheries we have a national marine sanctuary here we have a national marine estuary we have the national park service with the pinnacles the national forest service with los padres national forest we have got a lot of government around us and those are just the federal side you know the feds come up with their rules and then the state has the department of fish and game department of food and ag the county ag commissioner a well planned state we require every city to have a general plan they have to go through all kinds of check offs in order to have that plan counties have to have general plans and in the coastal system we have to have local coastal management plans one of those things that agency be the one stop agency for these privately owned lands as richard smith talked about a private river where the private owner could go in and do something that was consistent with in now because you get it from the political side the legislative branch and you get it from the legal side and what i have found talking to a lot of the secretaries who come in to head these agencies if they just said people are so gun shy they dont want to suggest you do something bold because you will be criticized for it so maybe we on the law making side want to require i mean what we love about this basin is look these guys for one hundred and seventy years have kept this land in agriculture and the rest of california out we were the first this is where california government began this is where the eastern rim trade began pacific rim trade began out of monterey those things leaving here with agricultural product sailed but now you dont know what the rules of the game are because every level of government creates their own without consultation with the other california in most instances is way ahead of the federal government have been able to create an air board it is regional in these three counties i used to sit on it as a county supervisor i think by and large it has worked pretty well and agriculture has been very supportive of keeping this air staff approaches to wanting to be a tough cop rather than just trying to be practical and make things work so i think that we are not going to be able to solve this problem  really create kind of a one stop in the whole sense of things i think mister groot was absolutely right that you need a place to go that you can have these permits all done in one place where everybody is sitting at the table and if that plan is developed for this region it is going to be different than chesapeake and different than san diego because we are a different area but i don't know how we stop it  that was put into our constitution i believe mister nassif in my statement i am talking about only on the federal side as far as primacy it doesnt relate to the distinction between the federal and the state mister farr and primacy then just overturn that and if epa said well i don't agree with that then they dont get an incidental take statement which would provide immunity from lawsuits so they are hesitant not to take that so you have taken away the primary function of  immunity from lawsuits if you go ahead and do this without taking into consideration and agreeing with our orders so i think what you have to do is establish that once epa makes the decision that you dont start de novo these biological studies that could take up to ten years to complete you say all right here is the study that has already been done by epa now here is a list of things and check the boxes what has been done what hasnt been done what needs to be done they can take some corrective action really worked out a kind of one stop master plan for how to deal with it and i found that federal epa was less restrictive than california epa in the cleanup how deep do you have to dig down to get t lead out of the dunes it was going to be turned over to state parks and essentially if you only went down a few inches and got all the lead out you would still turn it over to state parks but they would have to put signs up that it was a hazardous waste site and so if you epa handle these things rather than some of these other agencies because they have the primary responsibility they have the wherewithal to do these kinds of things and as some of the others testified you start consulting with these bodies who have no real experience in pest des like the national marine fisheries service what are you going to get how many biologists are you going to have this lawsuit that was filed by the center for biodiversity you are talking about twenty seven thousand four hundred different everybody knows what the rules of the game are and we dont just go in and pick out one application and say okay we are going to sue on that practice like part of it would be cleaning out the salinas river so that when it floods  federal or if it is concurrent jurisdiction as it appears to be that you are going to be able to resolve things you have to get the two parties together and have some sort agreement that if the national says something there has to be some basis for the state then to move forward on what they do mister farr but how about then signing it off i mean we have a coastal plan which is essentially california had a plan then they went to the seventy three jurisdictions along the coast and said you develop your plan consistent with state guidelines and the state guidelines were consistent with federal guidelines and then it was all sent to the secretary of commerce he signed off of it and now the counties and cities implement their own coastal plan they dont have federal people there looking over their shoulders you know i have been very supportive of trying to get the a commissioners to be that one because we are the only state that has an ag commissioner in every county and they are state licensed professionals perhaps we ought to give that office a lot of these authorities to act was passed and it wasnt until i started getting involved in government that i began realizing that you had two distinctly different places to go for essentially the same relief under endangered species you can go to the federal government and all their agencies or you can go to a duplicate entity often inside the state let me ask two rhetorical questions but i do want answers to both one is should we revisit the endangered species act to give a state such as california a choice if something lies completely within its jurisdiction meaning it is not an interstate endangered species and we have some of those that are native only to lines and if it does any of those things then the state would be out now constitutionally there is no problem with the federal government denying the state separate jurisdiction on an item which concerns multiple states in commerce we do it quite frankly all the time but would that limiting of if you will the state looking at issues that are also looked at from a federal level and requiring quite frankly the various states to look to one stop would that be a first step and we are not talking about eliminating anything off the endangered species list if anything states would come to the federal government and say i have got steelhead trout and i believe they should be added and so on would that management system to you as californians be unreasonable or would it in fact be a place in which all the parties would go to one place so that you wouldn't be finding yourself with two separate and distinct entities often unable to come to a common conclusion said have a lack of a one stop and the first question would be if you have two states and you cant i have tried doing this i have gotten them in the room but at the end of the day if you have jurisdiction state and federal you cant create a one stop you have at a minimum two stops so the first question is is it reasonable in a substantial portion of all if you will operations such as pesticides which the federal government is controlling endangered species which are of notion in my life i have always tried to have less federal government and try to have more state government and so it is a notion i am not used to considering chairman issa and by the way the contrarian one would be could the state opt out of the get to determine the outcome as long as it is consistent with their plan so if the federal government for example wants to drill for oil in federal waters as long as california show that that is inconsistent it they get to veto that federal action and i am thinking that if you really got into this regulatory process which is what you are all talking about you are going to have to have a sign off that once you have creat this plan so to speak then the locals control and as long as that plan doesnt violate federal laws or state laws and you have worked that out in the planning process you can go ahead and carry out your practices because i think you will never get to you can have one office you walk in and you still keep all the chairs on the titanic and it sinks because they will still go out and file lawsuits i think it needs to be very carefully approached and i am going to use the yellowstone wolf as an example here because there are two different states who want two different objectives one wanting to turn it over to the federal government and let them make the decision and the other wanting to take local control both states want the wolf delisted neither are getting their way i think this approach needs to say that if the states want to take this over and handle it that they are the sole survivor and take that over and if they delist it then that is their choice so i think there needs to be a careful caveat that if the states do decide to take this control that they have the full and final say over it and i agree california doesnt need more government i am not necessarily advocating that our epa take over that role but rhetorical if consultation is in the law not notice but consultation isnt consultation without a deadline simply a isnt that what was woven into a lot of your testimony today that when the federal government requires or encourages consultation we have to also limit that time period so that unless the two parties agree that consultation must continue and they really are having a dialogue and they need more time that ultimately consultation is notice with an opportunity to respond and not an opportunity to veto isnt that what i think i heard from each of consultations and even when the lawsuit settlement discussions are ongoing it is the request of the plaintiff that until these things are resolved that you stop using these particular chemicals  pesticides whatever they are or that you put a buffer zone in between what you are growing and the water or what could be transferred by air elsewhere or into water and so they effectively stopped it without ever having gotten a verdict in their favor and so that part of the process needs to be changed so that in fact if epa has already approved the use of a pesticide and it is a registered to actually respond to your previous question as well and then segue into what you just requested when you were talking about driving down to a local jurisdiction the lowest common denominator obviously that is always the easiest way to accomplish a result and when i reflect back upon my own testimony and look at the common thread here we have mandates being forced upon us without a real sense of cooperation at the local level or creation of some cooperation between conflicting bodies if you will and i know representative farr you were very accommodating as well as reflecting in some of your comments i have read in the past about the two thousand and four ag waiver that we implemented here in the central coast some time ago and the progress that we made on that and now we have a two thousand and eleven ag waiver proposal on the table there has been a lot of knowledge and a lot of discipline built from that process which is kind of what you are describing chairman issa and if we can just continue that quality study and it has been a model for the whole country in fact this administration is now proposing a program called the swat team to essentially get everybody in the room and do exactly what we are doing so we started this process long before anybody else in the country thought about getting everybody in the room under one roof and working out a process by the way it was voluntary there were no penalties involved if a farmer wasnt doing things right they learned the right way to do it and it has been a very collaborative process and people have learned a lot from it and i think we have had some good results we dont need to change it chairman issa now i am going to open a  farmers and packers are now under the mandatory e verify requirement is it fair to say and i am not talking about your individual companies but it is fair to say that in agriculture we are dealing with probably depending upon where in agriculture anywhere from half to all of the hires on a given week are going to be undocumented and that if we dont come up with an effective program that provides legal labor well in fact we are saying e verify causes you to not hire the available labor that in fact we are heading for a train wreck in agriculture here in salinas