GOLDEN POND, Ky.-(AP)--Environmentalists are suing the U.S. Forest Service over what they say is an illegal dole: The agency's long-standing practice of subsidizing corn and soybean farming on a nature preserve in western Kentucky and Tennessee.
Two farmers have received at least $200,000 in federal subsidies since 2000 for cultivating more than 2,100 acres in the Land Between the Lakes, which sprawls for 235 square miles.
For abiding by some restrictions and leaving 20 percent of what's planted in the field to feed wildlife, the farmers get the land for $10 an acre in an area where farmland leases for $78 to $99 an acre, according to the U.S. Forest Service and an agricultural economist.
The Forest Service has issued dozens of permits for farming in national forests and national recreation areas. However, it appears only those in Land Between the Lakes receive federal subsidies, according to multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to the nine U.S. Forest Service districts, a search of farm subsidies from 2000 through 2006 and interviews conducted by The Associated Press.
Oregon-based Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics filed papers June 3 in U.S. District Court in Paducah, asking a judge to end the farmers' payments. The group's executive director, Andy Stahl, said it's the only forest system area that's been enrolled in the farm subsidy program - and he further contends it shouldn't be.
Former residents have also been left feeling betrayed, saying some 5,000 families were forced off homesteads in the 1960s to create the national recreation area. Some of those farms had been passed down for more than 200 years.
"If the government wants to pay farmers to plant the fields for the wildlife, so be it, but no one should make a dime off our sacrifice," said Carolyn Sue Bonds, who used to live in the area. "I had rather see the land covered in briars and saplings rather than a single ear of corn harvested and sold from that land."
