Of all of the current Congress’s attempts to manage the U.S. economy — housing bailouts, “stimulus” packages, an energy bill that bans light bulbs — the farm bill is probably the most exasperating. This year’s bill, should it ever pass, will further prop up prices for sugar, and it will encourage farmers to plant crops for which there would otherwise be no demand. And farm bills receive broad bipartisan support — even as they pay non-farmers for living on former farmland.

But this year’s farm bill contains a special-interest provision you’ve probably never heard of — the Qualified Forestry Bonds program. This provides federally funded tax-credit bonds for forest purchases that meet the following four criteria:

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The forest must be adjacent to U.S. Forest Service Land;

Half of the parcel must be turned over to the U.S. Forest Service;

It must include at least 40,000 total acres; and

It must be subject to a “native fish habitat conservation plan approved by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.”

Your initial reaction might be, “What’s so bad about that?” The government does far more damaging things than forest-land preservation, after all. But this farm-bill provision offers a lesson on how things are sometimes done in Washington. Only one parcel of land in the entire United States meets the criteria set for the Qualified Forestry Bonds program. You see, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has approved exactly one “Native Fish Habitat Conservation Plan,” covering a 1.6-million-acre parcel that reaches from western Montana into eastern Washington State. And that parcel is owned by the Plum Creek Timber Company, the single largest private landowner in the United States.

Plum Creek Timber (PCL), with a market cap of $7 billion, began its corporate life in 1987 as Burlington Resources, spinning off of Burlington Northern to manage the railroad giant’s timber and mineral resources — some of which date back to the original railroad land grants of the Lincoln administration. In 1999, Plum Creek became a Real Estate Investment Trust, and began unloading its land holdings for high-end residential and recreational use. Today, with the real-estate and timber markets flat, Plum Creek has been looking to sell larger tracts of timberland to large institutional investors. The farm bill’s Qualified Forestry Bonds provision could provide up to $500 million to help sweeten such deals.

Plum Creek spent some $220,000 lobbying Congress in the first quarter of this year. Its PAC has spread $400,000 in campaign contributions between the parties in the last decade. PCL Employees have given $16,600 this cycle to Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance committee and the author of the bond provision. Baucus, whose staff did not answer inquiries, was enthusiastic enough about the forestry bonds that he put them into the Farm Bill (H.R. 2419), though they have nothing to do with agriculture. The bonds also didn’t have anything to do with energy when Baucus put them in last year’s energy bill.


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