column: george wuerthner's "on the range"
Conservation Reserve Program: Government Boondoggle
By George Wuerthner, 7-23-08
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The Conservation Reserve Program or CRP was established in 1985. Designed to keep marginal lands out of Ag production, CRP pays farmers and ranchers to retire acreage from commodity production in exchange for an annual rental fee. In 2007, the cost of the program was $1.8 billion.
With the raising price for commodities like corn and other grains due to the ethanol boondoggle, farmers and ranchers are now crying to have their (CRP) contracts terminated. Farm producers are appealing to the Secretary of Agriculture, Ed Schafer, to terminate the contracts due to national emergency—which they claim is the need to grow more food to reduce consumer prices—but of course is really about growing farmer and rancher bank accounts.
The effort to terminate contracts displays one of the greatest weaknesses of the CRP program—its lack of permanence. CRP benefits are transitory with no permanence and come at a high price--$36 billion so far and counting. It’s time to reconsider its future.
How it Works
The CRP pays landowners an annual rental fee to retire land from commodity production and usually requires the planting of some kind of cover vegetation like crested wheatgrass or other plants (which is also co-shared by taxpayers). During the life of the contract (typically 10-15 years) the farmer/rancher agrees not to plow, hay or graze the enrolled lands. Most of the enrolled acreage is on the Great Plains; with eastern Montana, eastern Wyoming, North Dakota, Kansas, eastern Colorado are among the regions with the highest CRP acres.
Conservation Values
No doubt there are some conservation benefits to CRP lands—especially since it covers more than 36 million acres. Compared to plowed row crop land, CRP does reduce soil erosion, improve water quality and provide wildlife habitat values. However, that is like comparing a Walmart parking lot to a golf course. Just because it’s green and has some plants, the golf course is better for soils, water quality and wildlife than the pavement. Because cultivated land is about the least valuable wildlife habitat imaginable (far worse than subdivisions, by the way), taking any row crop out of production almost guarantees higher conservation value.
Furthermore, since enrollment is based upon rancher/farmer needs, not the needs of wildlife, many of the enrolled parcels are small, isolated, and often surrounded by other fields in agricultural production. Thus these lands become population sinks, drawing in nesting birds, for instance, which are then easily caught by predators who focus their hunting on the small tracts of unplowed land.
Nevertheless, studies have shown that CRP lands do have significant value for some wildlife, particularly in the regions with the greatest enrolled acreage. One study in the Prairie Pot Hole region of eastern Montana, North and South Dakota found that CRP lands were responsible for providing habitat for an estimated 1.8 million additional grassland birds including sedge wrens, grasshopper sparrows, dickcissels, bobolinks, and western meadowlarks. Another study found that CRP contributed to an estimated 30 percent increase in five major duck species in the same region.
Many environmental groups support the CRP, in part, because of these wildlife benefits. Though privately they might admit that CRP is an ineffective and costly way to achieve these benefits, most see hitching conservation to the fat already dripping from the farm bill pork as the most politically feasible means of achieving some conservation benefits.
Indictment of Farming
Of course, such wildlife, water, and erosion studies are as much an indictment of farming practices as anything. They demonstrate clearly how farmers externalize many of their costs of production on to the land, water, air, wildlife, and ultimately the taxpayers.
The question we should be raising is why farmers and ranchers are permitted to externalize production costs by polluting water, farming highly erodible lands, and squandering soil, and are allowed to destroy valuable wildlife habitat like riparian areas or prairie potholes with no consequences.
Lack of Permanence
The biggest defect I see in the CRP program, besides its huge cost and its haphazard approach to protecting critical wildlife habitat, is its lack of permanence. At the end of the 10 or 15-year contract, any farmer/rancher can decide to start plowing their CRP acreage, completely negating any conservation value that may have been achieved.
Indeed, even without termination of the contracts, the vast majority of CRP lands are at some point during the contract period released for livestock grazing, haying, and even farming, due to “emergencies” like drought, floods, and other excuses used to remove CRP lands from the limited protections offered by the program.
Subsidizes Social Engineering
Subsidies are a huge social engineering program designed to shift tax money from urban areas to anti government/”independent” rural communities. Ag subsidies, including CRP, maintain the economic viability of marginal farming/ranching operations throughout the region, including all its negative environmental impacts. Interestingly, subsidies tend to hurt the economic viability of Ag producers in areas more suitable for farming by keeping production high in marginal areas. Since all wheat, corn, etc. is sold on a national, even international markets, production from marginal areas pulls down the average price received by all farmers, including farmers in areas with better soils and moisture regimes.
Inflation of Land Values
CRP also inflates land values. It is common to see ranches and farms advertised with sales pitches like: “5,000 acre ranch, 4,500 deeded acres, $30,000 in CRP payments annually.” In much of the region, you’re not so much as buying land, as buying the low property taxes, as well as government and environmental subsidies, that go with Ag land. Without such subsidies, the price of marginal farmland—land that shouldn’t be farmed anyway because of its high environmental costs—would drop in price making it far less expensive to buy either for either public or private conservation.
Buying Land the Best Solution
CRP is like trolling a huge lake all day in hopes you might catch a few fish. Far better to focus your fishing in places where fish are concentrated than wasting your time on a lot of fishless water. A focused land acquisition program would produce far more long-term conservation benefits at less cost than the current haphazard lease system.
Public acquisition could permanently remove agriculturally marginal lands from potential subdivision, and reduce overall crop acreage, thus ensure higher prices for crops produced on non-conservation lands. At the same time public acquisition would result in improved water quality, less soil erosion, and greater wildlife benefits. Plus the public would realize guaranteed public access for hiking, hunting, wildlife watching, camping, etc.
A similar acquisition of marginal farmland in the 1930s helped to create our national grassland system. Perhaps the recent Ag efforts to terminate the CRP contracts can be an opportunity—a chance to implement a real conservation reserve program that buys, rather than rents, highly erodible lands, provides good wildlife habitat, and public access.
George Wuerthner is an ecologist, writer and photographer.
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Comments
all conservation groups in the Western States, and to groups
like Defenders of Wildlife, Wildearth Guardians, And the Greater
Yellowstone Coalition. Keep up the good work.
Problems with the arcticle:
1:The landowner "usually requires the planting of ... cover ... such as crested wheatgrass" . The landowner must plant vegetation that is approved by the NRCS. It is a mix of at least three or four different native grasses and forbes, crested wheatgrass doesn't "score" well so isn't used anymore. Alfalfa also is a lower scored plant. Any noxious weeds must be eliminated and the stand must meet minimum densities to be accepted.
Without this "co-sharing by the taxpayer", if it was put into grass in would be planted to crested wheat and alfalfa exclusively. This is not the greatest feed or cover for wildlife.
2:Small and isolated plots? Where is he looking?! You can walk from the Rocky Mountain front by Choteau to Fort Benton, which is 75 miles as the crow flys and never step off of CRP land. If anything these plots are allowed to be too big. Every year my fire department fights at least one several thousand acre CRP fire.
3:Other than reading about these studies that indict farming I'm not sure if he as ever been to a real farm here on the east slope of the Rockies. Notill and other minimum till farming practices have improved soil tilthe and reduced water and soil erosion. I make a living off of less than 12 inches of rain a year, do I want any of it running off? The soils of eastern MT are shallow in depth, do I want it blowing away in the wind? His indictment lacks real world knowledge of what happens here in MT.
4:His "lack of permanence" arguement also misses part of the program. Critical areas and riparian areas are allowed to be permenantly enrolled. The part about grazing and haying also shows a lack of understanding of vegetative cylces. Any stand of vegetation needs to be disturbed occasionlly to eliminate the dead and to allow room for new growth to occur without being choked out. Fire is the only other method of doing this. (see #2).
5: You will get no support for any enviromental causes by pushing the "Big Open" theory for eastern MT. The highest quality wheat in US comes from this arid region. It is used to blend with the junk from Kansas so that breads rise and cakes are fine grained. Don't believe it? Look at the Portland Grain Exchange, MT origion wheat is bought at a premimum by the Far East.
Do not take that I don't think there are not problems with the program. Trying to make it more difficult to be in the program will only force farmers to go back to farming this ground. The lawsuit in WA about CRP haying and grazing has helped to take several thousand acres out of the program in my area.
If conservation groups do not work with farmers and ranchers to help keep them on the land, the Republicans gain more voters and more seats in the legislature and Congress. Instead of blaming a guy for making a living, help to find a way that both sides can be happy with.
Your comments do add some depth and insights to my comments. Thanks. But let me counter or at least clarify a few things.
The reason I mentioned crested wheatgrass is because many of the CRP acres I've walked that are covered with it. I don't have statistics but a lot of CRP was planted in crested wheatgrass. Crested wheatgrass now covers millions of acres. It doesn't disappear as you probably know. Though new enrolled acres may now be planted in a small diversity of grasses and forbs, it still isn't the same as the native prairie.
Second, your perspective on CRP occurrence may be skewed by your location. I don't have county by county figures in front of me, but I do know that Montana has more enrolled acres than any other state--about 2.8 million acres. Thus it is not surprising that there are large blocks of CRP in your area. But if you go to other states, the parcels are not nearly as continuous and are more isolated and fragmented.
As for vegetation "choking" etc. that's the mythology you hear all the time from ranchers and their lackeys in range departments (I went to grad school in range science, so do know a bit about the biases of that so called "science".) It's not unlike the "decadent" and "overmature" stuff one hears from foresters to describe trees that aren't growing enough board feet anymore. It's entirely an economic perspective masquerading as a biological perspective. Grasshoppers, for instance, consume 3 times the biomass of grasses in Yellowstone as all the ungulates. There's no shortage of "disturbance" to grasses it's just not the kind of disturbance done by cows.
Third, I think you are again blinded by your own situation. Most of Montana should never have been plowed at all and though I don't know your personal circumstances, I suspect even where you farm is probably not sustainable--even though you sound like a very careful and able farmer. But in the long run you are losing--the soil is slipping away. Again I don't know your personal situation, but most farmers are only maintaining soil productivity by adding more and more fertilizer. So in a sense, fossil fuels are subsidizing farming in the region.
But you are still fighting geography. Montana is too dry. Precipitation is unpredictable. Farmers in Montana survive primarily because of government subsidies, not because of any inherent productivity of the land. And every few years there is a bumper crop that carries them to the next good year. Though it has changed recently, not long ago, half of the "income" of farmers in Montana came from government payments.
Sure no till and other practices have reduced soil erosion, and so on, but the last time I looked over half of Montana's farmland east of the Rockies was rated "highly erodible" by the NSRC. And according to NSRC statistics Montana has the second greatest acreage of highly erodible lands in the entire West after Texas. In truth most of this highly erodible acreage should never be farmed at all--no matter what kinds of practices or techniques are used. Even with the best methods, erosion rates cause excessive pollution of air and water, not to mention the loss of top soil over time.
If CRP were to be terminated, I'm betting if there were money appropriated to buy these lands to take them permanently out of production, a lot of farmers would jump at the chance to unload the marginal acreage.
I do really only have a good prespective of the northern tier states, MT to MN. As you go towards MN their is less CRP and more cropland until their is even no pasture, only draws and sloughs that are too wet to farm.
I have seen and used burning to revitalize hay ground from time to time. Cheatgrass or downy brome loves undisturbed soil. Many native pastures and coulees that have never been broke have been taken over by this weed. This has even happened on ground that isn't grazed by cattle. Yes grasshoppers do eat it but it still takes over.
Yes as a conventional farmer, I do put fertilizer on my wheat and barley but also rotate with peas do help with natural nitrogen fixing. As far a sustainable, MT has the highest acreage of organic wheat and barley acres in the US, so it can be done completely without fertilizer. I have several friends (Jon Tester and I have known each other for ten years) that are completely organic or partly organic. With costs going up it looks better every year. And yes big chunks of the state should have never been broke but if the wheat didn't come from here where? Remeber, most MT wheat is milling quality not feed. Most goes into noodles to feed Japan, Taiwan and Korea. If not from here would you slash and burn more of Brazil?
With the current budget climate in D.C., I don't see any funds for that kind of program. Working lands conservation are the types of programs that will receive money.
I know of several people that are pulling ground out of CRP to farm it again because the returns are higher. Yes, some might accept a buyout but what would you do with this state? Turn it into a park? Again, proposals like that would make more opponents to conservation efforts and lead to fewer politicians that can help.
Glad to hear that more native seed is being planted. That's a definite plus, especially if it were to stay in grass. But the recent efforts to cancel CRP points to the precarious nature of renting land. The landlord can always throw you out. Better to own. Since the taxpayers are renting the land, we will never have full control over it. That is why everyone wants to buy a house, not rent it if they can afford to buy.
As to your last point, you are correct about current budget climate. The reason many environmental groups support CRP is because they see hitching efforts on to the farm bill as one way to get conservation pork. But keep in mind that in a sense all money comes from the same source, so that money spent on CRP means there is less money elsewhere, and more competition for it.
I think a real "conservation reserve program" were presented properly as a Ag land retirement program that purchased highly erodible land from willing sellers might just win over critics and I'm also certain some farmers would welcome the chance to sell their farms and get out of the business. As far as the public is concerned, it would be a far better deal. After all how you compare temporary benefits to permanent benefits?
A buyout would provide permanent public access, permanent reduction in soil erosion, permanent reduction in water pollution, permanent protection against subdivision, and permanent wildlife habitat, while at the same time INCREASE pay for the remaining farmers by reducing overall crop out put--well I think such a proposal might just look attractive--especially compared to the alternative--throwing money down a rat hole that is lost every time crop prices go up.
Oh, and once again thanks for your insights and comments above. Good stuff.
I would point my finger at the capital gains tax as a reason old farmers would rather not sell, but rent the land to be farmed or for those with some sort of geriatric personal conservation ethic, the CRP program. Either way, they get income that does not generate social security taxes, a place to live, and some money to maintain the homestead. When you look at the money this country spends on generational welfare, education, and incarceration costs, the CRP program is a breath of fresh air. And made fresher by the open space, the native species. Actually, a really good deal for old farmers.
As to being a social engineering process to send urban money to rural areas, I thought that was what natural resource extraction and creation was all about. The division of labor and capital. Lots of people stay in the city, creating a huge service industry, while they broker the financial lives of the resource producers with banking, insurance, medical centers, commercial centers, manufacturing centers and distribution centers. The money flows both ways, not one. Hard to run a restaurant in the city without farmers, or build houses without loggers. To make the urban omelette, some rural eggs get broken.
As to CRP as a vehicle to drive up land values, that is a straw dog. Amenity land purchasers drive up the land values. You can buy a middle of the road apartment in NYC for $10 million bucks. And a hell of an industrial farm or ranch, with a lot nicer home and many more things you can do on your own land. NYC or Dallas of Chicago or Pittsburg or Atlanta land values drive the ag land prices in the New West. If you can buy a little beach house on a barrier island for a couple of million, you can maybe buy a huge house and a few hundred acres of ranch for that in Montana. Or any other New West state.
If you take commodity prices, input costs, your best farming practices costs, and then run them against the tax system and what you might expect to service in terms of debt, you can't buy a farm or ranch. Does not pencil. The math does not work. CRP is not the problem. Amenity land purchases drive the market, and have for 150 years. Rich guys buy the ranches, and some times they go broke and big ranches get broken into little ranches and the whole process starts over again. But it is a lot better deal than communes of Soviet Russia as a business model. And a far better means of food security than the government owning the land.
I have not seen any reason or compelling evidence that says putting resource lands in the hands of government will be of lasting benefit. They intend to let all the timber they can burn. Someone thinks that burns will produce more clean air over time. That now translates to burning all in their charge will be the best option over time, all the while denouncing logging or grazing as bad, bad, bad. And evil farming practices are the bane of wildlife the world over. fine. So go eat some bark, pick some bugs. Someone has to feed the computer programmers by some means. That is what farmers are here for. They are not here to observe idle land. They are here to make a living selling stuff to people who can't grow it themselves. On land. Cultivating. Turning dirt.
The best example of modern, politically driven land redistribution, and how to dismantle a fine agricultural effort, we have to only look to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Twenty years ago, that country was the breadbasket of southern Africa. Today, it can't feed itself. Large white owned farms were taken by force and the land handed over to cronies of Mugabe, former soldiers, and they got nothing to farm with. No irrigation pumps, no tractors, no capital whatsoever. And, when the history is taking land by force in a dictatorship, there is no lending institution to finance farming, no agriculture department of the Freedom Liberation National Union. Now Zimbabwe has the most inflation of currency in the world, and is starving with little hope of having the money to import the food they need. Government is the land owner, the lead farmer, and has failed miserably. As it would in the U.S. Our Congress is so crooked, so bought off, that the public good would be only met by graft and paybacks of political favors. MegaAg Consortiums would be farming the land at some point down the road to keep the populace from famine. After all, the lefty world is joined at the hip with Mega Business in the U.S., and as we recently observed. Democrat Senator Baucus managed to get a billion dollars worth of pork inserted in the Farm Bill to pay back favors to the Timber Barons in a land buyout, and in tax reductions. So would go the CRP lands. DuPont or someone like that would end up with a sweetheart lease and farm them all with genetically engineered seed.
Leave CRP alone for now. Those dollars spend just as well as the checks everyone got this year from Uncle Sugar to move the economy. People in urban areas make inordinate amounts of money for their efforts, and some make that money just by being members of the lucky sperm club. Let them send money to rural America. It keeps the wheels of commerce greased. And God knows that we need a lot of that right now.
You discount farm ground too much as not being good for wildlife habitat. It depends on what you consider wildlife. In my area we have plenty of deer, elk, pheasants, and coyotes in our farmland. In fact yesterday the spray pilot reported 25 head of elk in an 18 acre field that is surrounded by rangeland. All over we see thousands of deer in the fields and hundreds of elk in the foothill fields. Why are they so predominant if wildlife doesn't like farmland?
You try to compare a Walmart parking lot to a golf course with the same regard as farming to CRP. You can't tell me that the golf course also doesn't use pesticides, fertilizer, and a heck of a lot of water to leach it all into the ground and have runoff? Golf courses aren't as pure as you would try to make people believe.
Again CRP was about soil conservation, not wildlife preserves. The small CRP areas may not be big wildlife preserves but they remove the really marginal land that may lead to excessive water erosion that hurt streams for the fish. There is still a lot of wildlife out in farmed lands although you would like to make it sound like all farm land is a big void of wildlife. We have lots of damage every year in our fields by wildlife. With lots of native grassland around us why don't they stay there if it is so preferable to them?
I also disagree with you that the vast majority of CRP has been released for haying, grazing, or farming. I sat on the FSA County Committee from 1996 to 2006 where there is shared management in several counties and we had virtually no haying or grazing. There is always a cost associated with doing so and restrictions on timing and how many cows that it usually stopped at that point because other alternatives were always cheaper. The counties are maxed out in allowable CRP acres so there is a lot of it around.
There most assuredly is a conservation value with having land in CRP grass for 10 years. A lot of fiber from the grass has built up the soil tilthe and increased the Organic Matter in the soil helping it hold water much better for extreme weather events keeping it in place and out of the streams for many years even if it does go back into farmland. Just look at the bluegrass production history around Lake Coeur d'Alene, ID drainage area. It has helped keep the sediment in place as a rotation for farming practices.
All of this brings us to how would government ownership help make it better wildlife habitat than private ownership if that is your ultimate goal? I know many farmers that are far more conservation conscious than the government is. What government agency has an abundance of money in their budget to take on more things? Most I know of have to work with less money every year.
How would the government buy this land if you say CRP payments drive up land prices? A farmer isn't going to sell any land to the government for less money than he could get from someone else so the government is going to have to offer more and if another person really wants it then he will have to raise his offer above what the government will offer thus continuing to increase land prices that you say is a problem with just subsidies. The only thing the government would get at low ball price offerings is really marginal land that has lots of problems and not very productive as far as wildlife habitat is concerned and the government would have to spend a lot to rehabilitate this land. How would the land be managed and maintained?
Most rural areas have little revenue from other industries or retail other than from the land. If land is bought by the government and taken off the tax rolls, how would that help the economy of the small towns and counties in keeping their infrastructure of schools, hospitals, and police protection in tact? You offer no method of replacing this lost revenue if government buys up land. That is how the system is and it would take a large revamping of how America operates. Otherwise it would be raising taxes on the remainder of the people and property.
If you want more wildlife refuges and more public access, how would open hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, etc help improve wildlife habitat? In my area a State Park has over 500,000 yearly visitors. Nearby is some privately owned CRP land that may have if lucky 1,000 visitors a year. If the government bought it how would having an additional 500,000 visitors now having access to that nearby CRP land improve the habitat of the wildlife that has been living there?
It makes little sense when you complain about predators attacking wildlife in privately owned CRP and then you want the government to buy the land and still allow the predators plus allow open public access and for people to be able to shoot the wildlife too?
You have every right to complain about something as you do have some valid concerns. I just don't see how your solution is any less of a boondoggle than what you are complaining about unless you change the whole way our country operates. The CRP program started out to mainly reduce soil erosion and you are wanting to turn it into something that doesn't even address soil erosion. You want a whole new program. Of course it would be expensive to turn CRP into something you want but it works well for how the government envisioned it.
Thanks for writing and providing your perspective.
A couple of comments on that perspective.
Yes, you're correct, CRP was originally put in place to reduce soil erosion. Why was that necessary? For two reasons, farmers were farming lands that should not be farmed because the soils eroded at excessive rates, causing severe wind and water pollution.
So in effect CRP was a program paying farmers not to pollute everyone else's water and air. Should we be paying people not to destroy and degrade other people's common property? We don't allow most industries to pollute freely--we don't pay them to stop polluting. We fine them for polluting. In my view, the entire rationale for CRP is wrong. We should be either making highly erodible land illegal to plow or we should make it very expensive to farm by fining people based on the erosion rate.
The reason CRP has been wrapped into a wildlife program was a way by conservation groups to tap into the incredible pork that is in every farm bill. If you can get a seat on a train that leaving the station anyway, that is a lot easier than trying to create a new train.
Regards my comparison between a golf course and parking lot--I wasn't suggesting that either a golf course is good. It is just better than pavement. Similarly though CRP lands do have some cover on them, most of the acres are not nearly as good wildlife habitat as natural vegetation. In other words, acre for acre, CRP while better than cultivated land, is not as good as natural vegetation when all species are concerned.
I hear the complaint about taxes all the time. That's should be a non-issue. There are two reasons. In most places private Ag and timber lands are taxed at very low rates. Typically the taxes paid by large private property owners is less than what the government pays in PILT (Payment in lieu of taxes). Most state and federal agencies do pay "taxes" or something as compensation. (though PILT has been raided in recent years by Republicans--which most of their rural supporters are unaware of). But when operating as designed, PILT payments are typically equal to and often greater than the taxes paid on similar private lands.
Depending on the kind of public land you are discussing, there are also other "benefits" of public land such as the maintenance of roads, weed control, fire control, and so forth.
And of course the public gets to enjoy those lands--including the rural residents who live near these lands--which is worth a lot.
But there is a second economic value to public lands. Places with significant amounts of public lands are attractive to "foot loose" individuals. That is, people who can move where they want to live. Thus public land becomes an economic engine that attracts new businesses and helps to keep people in region.
As a rule the more public and in particular, protected lands you have in an area, the healthier the local economy. That's a gross generalization, of course, because people are also attracted by many other things such as access to airport, hospitals, and so on. But if you were to compare areas with significant public lands with similar lands without much public land, you would find that the economic situation is generally better in places with significant public lands.
This attractiveness of public lands to foot loose industry is not always good--because it can create other problems--like unregulated sprawl, and so on. But there are solutions to these problems.
Whatever they are planted with, they are usually much better for wildlife, erosion prevention, and carbon storage than adjacent cultivated or grazed lands. Don't take his word for it, find out where the CRP lands are and look for yourself.
The biggest problem is their lack of permanence.
No disagreement that these lands are better for wildlife, erosion, etc. than a plowed field. That's my point. But that doesn't mean they are as good as lands that were fully restored and permanently protected. And if the money we spend annually were used for outright acquisition of land rather than renting the land, we would permanently provide wildlife habitat, reduce erosion, and provide some benefits to farmers as well who would have less competition of crops grown on marginal farmlands.