The Water Issue and what the RI Farm Bureau is doing to help At the WAPAC general meeting where the recommendations from the group were presented to the WRB, Farm Bureau again challenged the need for the recommendations made by the WAPAC. At this meeting, attended by about 50 people, only a handful represented water users. Most of the people were government employees or quasi-government employees. It appears to Farm Bureau that the WRB may take the advice of the WAPAC on a few issues that we are very concerned about. We are confident they will require water reporting, establish a central state authority to decide reasonable water use and will establish a minimum stream flow to protect aquatic life. We are not sure if they will have the audacity to establish the fees recommended by the WAPAC, but they will certainly consider it. Farm Bureau believes that in the long run any data collected will be used against us rather than for us as the WAPAC says the intent is. We like our current riparian rights vs. a State central authority telling us when we can use our water. This system has worked for years with no significant problems. We don't mind protecting aquatic life, like fish, as long as we are allowed to irrigate. But, we fear that over zealous environmentalists in the near future will suggest farm pumps be pre-maturely turned off to protect the fish. The fish will live, but our crops will die and the State will not compensate us for our damages. If Farm Bureau was to fight each one of the individual battles mentioned above and have a significant impact, we would need a full time staff devoted to those issues so that hundreds of "man-hours" could be devoted to doing research, preparing testimony and attending countless committee meetings, rule making hearings and legislative hearings. We simply do not have the resources to do that. In fact, a lack of resources is one of the main reasons we lost our battle at the committee level with WAPAC. If we could have "stacked" the committees with people devoted to agriculture like the State did with government employees, the outcome might have been different. Thus, RI Farm Bureau has sought legislation which will exempt us from future water withdrawal programs. This does not mean we can take all the water we want whenever we want. Riparian rights doctrine dictates that a farmer cannot take so much water that deprives neighbors of their water rights. Farmers cannot dig a pond unless permission is granted from the RI Division of Agriculture and farmers must comply with current wetlands laws and the Clean Water Act as it stands today. Back to News