WASHINGTON, Nov. 11, 2015 - Farmers and
other landowners are invited to USDA’s 46th general sign-up for the
Conservation Reserve Program, to run from Dec. 1 to Feb. 26.
The 30-year-old program will be shrunk
in acreage by almost a third, to 24 million acres by 2017, from a high of 36.8
million acres in 2007. Congress had ordered the downsizing as USDA recedes from
conservation programs that idle cropland and expands those that encourage practices
to enhance soil, water and wildlife on actively farmed and ranched lands.
Though the cutback is mandated, the
decline in acreage has also been driven by a strong market for field crops that
enticed farmers to return fields to crop production when CRP contracts expired.
Alexander Barbarika, USDA specialist on CRP, says that shift showed up
particularly where new varieties of high-yielding, shorter-season soybeans and
corn expanded production of those crops from the Corn Belt northward and west
into the Great Plains: From 2007 to 2015, for example, CRP acreage fell by 57
percent in Montana, 55 percent in North Dakota and 40 percent in Michigan.
In the meantime, farmers are committing
more and more land in the Conservation Stewardship Program,
in which producers take a comprehensive whole-farm approach to conservation
practices. Enrollment has mounted steadily to just over 65 million acres in
48,000 contracts.
Still, 1.4 million acres were in CRP
contracts that expired in September, and another 1.6 million are in contracts
to end next September. So USDA will have a fistful of acres that can be put
into the program’s 10- and 15-year contracts that give landowners rent plus
match their expenses to idle the land.
While national CRP acreage has plunged,
the average rent CRP pays per acre
has climbed by a third. The average is now
$67, though it ranges widely, of course, according to commercial land values
and rents. Thus, CRP payments, average $30-$40 per acre in the dry West but
over $160 in Iowa and Maryland. The increases have occurred with the past
several years’ steep climb in commercial land values, but also because the
distribution of CRP acreage has shifted away from large fields of cheap,
highly-erodible land in the Plains and West, and toward smaller tracts and
strips of pricier land along rivers, around lakes, in wetland areas, or to
created strips for pollinator habitat, and so forth. As a result, total rents
paid by CRP are down much less than is the acreage: only about 10 percent since
2008, to $1.6 billion a year.
CRP has seen a strong trend into affiliated
“initiatives.” The largest is the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, or
CREP, which sets up partnerships with state wildlife agencies to focus jointly
with states or regions on specific wildlife protection and habitat goals.
For example, says Barbarika, “In the
Chesapeake Bay area, all six surrounding states have CREP agreements . . . for
restoring the bay, saving the bay,” by reducing pollution in runoff, improving
fish and waterfowl habitat and more. “They’re able to better target their
efforts together that way,” he says.
A related CRP initiative, called State
Acres for Wildlife Enhancement (SAFE), was started in 2008 and provides CRP
rental payments and assistance to landowners who complete plantings and manage
areas as requested by state and local agencies or other nonprofit wildlife or
naturalist entities as part of USDA-sanctioned plans to improve wildlife
habitat. More than 1 million CRP acres are now devoted to SAFE.
CRP’s growing penchant for promoting
wildlife coincides with the trend on American farms and ranches to expand
wildlife populations and offer hunting, bird-watching, bed and breakfast, farm
visits and the like as part of the farming business. In announcing the upcoming
CRP sign-up earlier this year, for example, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack,
ordered the designation of “an additional 800,000 acres
for duck nesting habitat and other wetland and wildlife habitat initiatives to
be enrolled in the [CRP] program.”
All told, CRP’s wildlife enhancement
initiatives, including one started in 2012 to increase pollinator habitat,
claim one in seven of CRP acres nationally.
While Congress shrank CRP acreage, long
devoted entirely to removing tilled land from crop production, it also merged the Grassland Reserve Program
(GRP) into CRP for purposes of rental payments and total acreage, so that the
grassland idling contracts must fit within CRP’s 24-million-acre cap. USDA is
also currently accepting applications for GRP contracts.
Note, too, this CRP feature added by
the farm bill. Called the Transition Incentives Program,
it offers two extra annual rental payments to expiring CRP contracts if the
contract holder is selling the land and completes an agreement with USDA to
sell to a beginning (farming less than 10 years) or socially disadvantaged
farmer. About $25 million remains available to fund those extra payments.
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