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Land Use

As Millions of Acres Come Out of Conservation Reserve Program, What’s Next?

By Courtney Lowery, 11-04-09

Photo by Ed Luschei, used under Creative Commons from Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/luschei/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

More than 3 million acres of farmland in the country is ready to be broken again this season, freed up from contracts from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a little-known farm program that has large implications for land-use in the West and Midwest.

Roxana Hegeman of the Associated Press details the changes afoot with the program in a story today. The basics are these: CRP was created in 1985 in the thick of the farm crisis. The program pays landowners to take their land out of production and let it “rest” in native grasses for a specified period of time. Contracts range from 10-20 years. In September of this year, 33.47 million acres were enrolled in the program. But, the 2008 Farm Bill, passed last fall, capped the total acreage at 32 million, so as contracts expire, more and more land is coming out of CRP.

According to Hegeman’s story, more than 3.4 million acres were taken out of the program in September—most of them in Texas, Colorado and Kansas, but “hundreds of thousands” of acres are also going back into production in Montana and the Dakotas. In September of 2008, more than 2 million acres were taken out of CRP nationwide compared to September the previous year.

The USDA has boasted CRP as the largest private-public conservation effort in the country and indeed, studies from the agency show great benefits to water, erosion and habitat since its introduction. But, in the last five years it has come under fire for a number of things, the largest being the criticism that it takes farmers off of the land and thus contributes to the depopulation of rural America. It’s also been panned for being a “retirement plan” for farmers, driving up land prices by making cropland attractive to amenity ranch buyers who are looking for places to hunt and fish while getting income from the land. (See a piece from last fall about these issues here.)

Most of concerns voiced in Hegeman’s story are about what all this land going back into production will mean for the environment and for crop prices. She writes about, “a greater risk of new dust storms, soil erosion and water pollution. Farmers also worry more grain will mean even lower commodity crop prices.”

But, is there any hope that as these lands go back into production they might create more room for more farmers working the land and more energy in rural communities? (There are, recently, indications that new farmers are sprouting up across the nation as the local food movement inspires more young people to get on the land. Access to land is often the biggest roadblock for these new farmers.)

The answer is: Maybe.

As Hegeman points out: “Bringing the land back into production is not expected to reverse the loss of small family farms: Today’s growers can farm vast tracts with modern equipment, seamlessly absorbing new acres into existing operations.”

But, in addition to capping CRP, the 2008 Farm Bill also included a provision that addresses that concern by providing an incentive for the lands coming out of CRP to be put in the hands of new farmers.

It’s called the The Conservation Reserve Program Transition Option and offers landowners two extra years of CRP rental payments if they sell or lease the land to beginning or disadvantaged farmers who pledge to farm or ranch sustainably.

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, one of the groups that backed the provision, put it this way:

“With the likelihood that millions of acres of land covered by expiring CRP contracts will return to production in the next few years, this option offers an important opportunity for beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers to get a start on the land while also increasing the likelihood that the ecological integrity of the land will be protected.”

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