Farmers urged to support Trump rollback of water rules

The Trump administration called on farmers to throw their support behind a proposal to withdraw federal protections for many of the country’s waterways and wetlands. Environmental Protection Agency acting administrator Andrew Wheeler and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue on Tuesday traveled to middle Tennessee to drum up support among the state’s agricultural community in their pursuit to replace the Obama-era water protections.Environmental groups have warned the proposed overhaul will be a grave assault on the aims of the 1972 Clean Water Act, the foundational U.S. water protection law. The changes would affect what waterways and wetlands fall under jurisdiction of the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Trump administration would remove federal protections for wetlands nationally unless they are connected to another federally protected waterway.Groundwater, stormwater, most farm ditches, wastewater treatment systems and land already converted for crops would also no longer be regulated under the Clean Water Act.The Clean Water Act bans polluting any “water of the United States” without a permit. However, pinning down a definition of such water has been the subject of legal scrutiny for decades.