Guest Commentary: George Wuerthner's "On the Range"
Conservation Reserve Program of Questionable Value
By George Wuerthner, 4-14-08
There was a recent article in the New York Times describing how many farmers, in light of rising grain prices, are hoping to cancel their contracts for the Conservation Reserve Program or CRP. Few people outside of the farm belt have heard of this program, but for 25 years, CRP has been the backbone of the government’s welfare system for farmers.
The program pays AG producers to take highly erosion-able lands out of production and plant it to some kind of cover vegetation—usually grass. The program currently covers 36 million acres or about 8 percent of all cropland. Ostensibly CRP was created to prevent the loss of soil to wind and water. But over the years it became a vehicle for pumping billions of dollars into rural counties based on a host of other reasons—many of them illusionary, transitory, or ineffective at best, in particular the idea that CRP protected wildlife habitat.
How it Works
Farmers elect to enroll in the program which pays a rental fee that averages about $50 an acre. Farmers typically sign 10 year contracts promising not to farm or even graze such lands. In 2007 the federal government paid $1.9 billion dollars to farmers and ranchers under this program. By comparison our entire National Wildlife Refuge System of 545 refuges which covers 98 million acres is scheduled to receive in 2008 a mere $398 million dollars.
Problems
There are many problems with the program that few people (besides myself) have been willing to discuss. For one the program pays farmers to do something they should be doing anyway—which is to avoid farming highly erodible lands. If our current air and water pollution laws were enforced and applied to Ag , such lands would be off limits to crop production. But since we ignore water pollution from Ag sources, and in some cases, legally permit non-source pollution from AG production, farmers/ranchers, unlike everyone else are allowed to degrade our air and water without penalty.
A second problem is the assumption that CRP protects wildlife habitat. I will address that below, but the benefits of this program are greatly exaggerated and inefficient compared to other methods for preserving wildlife habitat (such as outright fee purchase).
But the Achilles Heel in the program is its lack of permanence. Despite spending more than $36 billion over the life of this program, we gained no long term guarantee that these lands would remain unfarmed or subdivided. And as crop prices rise, more and more farmers are electing not to renew their contracts and/or attempting to cancel them, thus erasing any gains that may have occurred as a consequence of the program.
Over the 10 year life of a typical CRP contract, a farmer “earns” $500 an acre. In many states like Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and other plains states where the highest acres are enrolled, one can buy marginal farmland for less than we (taxpayers) are currently paying to rent it—and permanently withdraw it from all Ag production.
Popular in Congress
Despite its cost, the program was very popular in Congress. Representatives from farm states loved it because it was a good way to take money from urban dwellers and pass it on ranchers and farmers—about 400,000 individuals. In some farm/ranch regions such subsidies often amounted to half or more of the annual “income” from farming.
A friend of mine who works for the NRCS sarcastically refers to CRP as the “farmer retirement fund”. In eastern Montana where he lives many farmers/ranchers enroll enough of their land in the program that they are able to just quit farming-at least farming the land—and to farm the US Treasury. While the average payment is not huge, milking the government is a lot less risky than planting crops, paying for the fertilizer, machinery, etc. that farming entails. For instance, 1000 acres at 50 dollars an acre equals $50,000 annually. At least some farmers/ranchers in his area have taken the money and run-- either moved to town where they sit around the cafes drinking coffee and complaining about government waste or have moved to California or Arizona to await their annual CRP payments.
A second justification for the program is that removing lands from production would reduce overall crop output and thus increase the amount paid to remaining producers. In a sense, the CRP was a mechanism used to increase the price of grains, but outright purchase of these lands would have the same effect, and do so permanently, helping farmers who actually worked the land realize a better income for their effort.
CRP also won the support of some other government agencies since CRP was a “conservation” program not a direct “farm crop subsidy” thus helped the US governments meet international treaty agreements that limits farm subsidies.
CRP’s Public Problems
Despite its popularity with farm state representatives, the program owes much of its widespread Congressional popularity to the strong support of CRP from environmental and sportsmen groups. The main rationale for environmental support was the presumed benefits of CRP to wildlife. Nevertheless, there are many reasons why CRP lands were of limited value to wildlife.
While there is no doubt that in some cases, removing these lands from ag production and placing them in CRP did have some wildlife benefits, it’s still necessary to ask whether this is the most effective and efficient means of realizing such benefits. I think any rational analysis would conclude that the positive benefits are greatly exaggerated, and the costs are high.
First, there is no requirement to consider wildlife in lands chosen for enrollment under the program. Many farmers place marginal agricultural lands in the program, while they continued to farm the better lands. Thus it was/is quite common to have CRP parcels encircled by active croplands. These isolated parcels of land provide little good habitat for wildlife, indeed, even become population sinks. Predators have been shown to target the patches of grasslands amid plowed fields knowing there would be nesting birds and mammals hidden in the grass.
A second problem is that CRP has no requirements for planting native vegetation. Most farmers/ranchers plant exotic grasses as their cover crop providing far less value to wildlife than if native grasses were required.
Worse, in times of drought ranchers are often permitted to graze these lands removing cover and food for wildlife. During drought ungrazed grasslands are even more valuable to wildlife than in times of good precipitation so grazing them under these conditions has even greater consequences for wildlife than under “normal” conditions. Typically ranchers are not even required to pay back their CRP payments—even though they were getting to use the land for Ag production.
Finally, CRP does not provide any public access to these lands.
What’s the Alternative?
Instead of funding the CRP program Congress could fund outright land acquisition and/or at least conservation easements of eligible marginal Ag lands. In a sense, this is exactly what we did back in the 1930s when Congress bought out many farmers in the Dust Bowl years. These lands are now part of our National Grasslands system. It is time to expand our system of national grasslands and wildlife refuges on the plains by buying, instead of renting, marginal farmlands.
For the $36 billion dollars we have already spent on CRP, we could have purchased huge swaths of the farm belt, permanently removing these erodible lands from production. If we could redirect funding in the future towards acquisition of marginal Ag lands instead of rental, we would see huge benefits to water quality.
Outright purchase of land would also permanently remove these lands from crop production, increasing the economic prospects of all farmers remaining in business.
Third, outright purchase would permanently protect these lands as wildlife habitat, and under federal ownership, we could also restore native plant cover.
Finally, expansion of our national grasslands system would provide all Americans access to lands for camping, hiking, hunting, fishing, and nature study.
What is obvious now is that our investment of $36 billion in the CRP has produced marginal and more importantly, transitory benefits, and was an ineffective in the long run at protecting wildlife, soils, and water quality. I hope that next time Congress takes up CRP funding, they consider redirecting these moneys towards land purchase rather than land rental.
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Comments
If the choice to pull out of CRP was a global food problem, then the liberals would decry the farmers for their greed in attempts to meet a world food problem. The very same political left, the global warming alarmists, and the environmental community, have decided and promoted ethanol and bio-diesel. For them to now berate the farmers and the Congress for their efforts to make less polluting fuel and substitutes for fossil fuels in far greater amounts by using past CRP acres is laughable. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
The logical end to George's argument, of course, is having Uncle Sam own all the land, so geniuses like George can manage it all for some other reason than human needs. There is a danger in that. If the global warming alarmists are correct, then those lands will lose most of their wildlife use as the potholes dry up along with the rivers. We will have spent a lot of money buying something with a great debt to environmental depreciation. Again, we have two opposing views of the future by the same people.
The one thing that many people owning many parcels of land brings is diversity. The most non-diverse lands are in government ownership today. A case in point are the refuges with less useful habitat than when they started out. The ones with the most diversity and use are the ones that are being farmed in various areas. Go figure. And, a lot of waterfowl use a refuge as a place to spend the day after a night of feeding in farm fields.
The issue of farming the Treasury is addressed by George. Again, the farmer is signaled out for using the program as a way to have an income and not wear out machinery and land. I sort of thought that was the purpose. My idea of farming the Treasury is to have the Trust for Public Lands, the Nature Conservancy, buy land and then turn around and sell it to the US Govt at 30-103% of what they paid for the land under the guise of getting their "costs" of buying the place back. Or, is that just a backhanded way for the environmental left in Congress to reward their special interest buddies? Either way, that is how it works, folks. And then the money from off-shore drilling royalties goes to pay for it. Oil money for the government buys the lands, takes them off the tax rolls, pays way too generous profits to the NGO buyers, and Ted Taxpayer foots the whole bill in the dark because he and has ilk have no access to the smoke filled rooms of High Roller Big Environment and the sleazes of our Congress. You know those whores will sell out to who ever is paying, and Big Green is just another special interest buying your congressman or woman.
CRP is bi-useful. Can be habitat when supplies are great and producing farm land when need is high. When the Enviros demanded bio-fuels, in a food market that was balanced with world needs, that balance was upset and prices have risen dramatically. So CRP land is essentially filling the bio-fuels need, not the food need. It is your baby, Enviros. You made the decisions, got your way. Quit whining.
You uttered a common mistake of private property rights crowd--that making land public somehow reduces the tax revenues. The government compensates counties for In many instances, the opposite happens because in most states, large landowners--namely ranchers, farmers, and timber barons--have made sure their buddies in the legislature have enacted many tax breaks on their behalf. In all states that I have ever checked there are very low taxes on large land owners if the land is considered AG or timber lands.
The federal government and most state governments have a tax compensation program to affected counties. The federal program is called the Payment in Lieu of Taxes or PILT. (Unfortunately Republican legislators have consistently raided the program to reduce payments--unbeknownst to most of their supporters back home in Rural America. Nevertheless, even at reduce funding levels, PILT payments often exceed what a county would get in taxes for identical private lands.
I can recall a situation in Montana years ago when the county commissioners in the county I was living in complained about the sale of 35,000 acres of ranchland to the FS. The county commissioners (who should know better) went on and on about how it was going to hurt the county tax revenues until it came out that under the PILT payments, the FS would be paying 8 times as much as the rancher had been paying those lands.
That was in the days before the Republicans cut funding, even today PILT payments are still often higher than taxes on private lands--not because the fed. government is so generous--just that ranchers, farmers and timber companies are taxed at such low rates.
I can give you one example in the East from just a few weeks ago. Essex Timber Company in Vermont just put 86,000 acres up for sale. Their average per acre tax is $1.82 an acre on that land. Just across the river in New Hampshire on more or less identical timberland found on the White Mountain NF, the federal government paid $2.32 an acre in PILT payments last year (Payment in Lieu of Taxes).
But that is only part of the benefit. On the White Mountain NF, maintains roads on Forest Service lands that are open to the public. There are campgrounds. Trails. Etc. None of which exists or is severely reduced on the private timber company lands.
I could go on and on, but subsidizing private landowners to keep them from polluting the public's water and air is bogus. Better to own it and keep soils from eroding--all the while we enjoy the benefits of public access, etc.
I just wanted to share this interesting Email I just received. Why can’t ATV abuse ever be an election issue. This is a real problem in Colorado, especially considering our weather and diverse terrain.
____Email
Thousands of Americans responsibly use off-road vehicles for work, to explore the backcountry and to enjoy nature's beauty. But a growing, irresponsible contingent of reckless riders are ruining things for everyone else.
These reckless riders damage public and private land, get themselves hurt, burden law enforcement, and ruin hunting, fishing and hiking experiences for the rest of us.
Please, click here <http://advocacy.sparklist.com/t/945/10305846/103/0> to join our grassroots effort to promote responsible off-road vehicle management and to get e-mail alerts on our efforts to protect the backcountry for everyone.
Responsible Trails America (RTA) is a broad coalition of people, including those who enjoy the backcountry, private property owners, and those who responsibly use off-road vehicles for work or recreation. We want to protect access for everyone, and stop this irresponsible contingent from ruining things for everyone else and sticking taxpayers with the bill to clean up their mess. We are advocating affordable, common-sense steps that will keep trail riding and the backcountry responsible and safe for everyone. Thanks for getting involved.
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______End Email
Passing the Word,
John Woodlock
You always expand a reader's access to truth and logic.
THANKS!
As you probably know much of the land in the Great Plains is considered "split estate." The owner who owns the "surface rights" may not own the sub-surface or mineral rights. Even if the government were to purchase the surface rights, unless they also bought the sub-surface rights--assuming they were for sell--they could not open the land up to mining, etc.
However, even if there were no split estate, suggesting that private ownership somehow guarantees or prevents things like coal mining, oil and gas development, etc.can or will be prevented is uncertain. Any private owner can decide to sell his/her rights to development to another. With public ownership there are at least a few more hoops that have to be jumped through before this can happen. And hopefully with a change in the current administration, those hoops will become more difficult for energy companies to lope through than at present.
When you compare PILT with property taxes you must note that PILT is generous with someone else's money. The Tim Blixeth model. Property taxes are generated by earnings from the land, and represent that earning potential. Even though ranching has low earnings potential as compared to the value of the land in the real estate market, it is still the earnings of ranching that determines the tax rate. Basic fairness, which is not the long suit in all things of Environmental special interests, determines the law as it should.
Some ag land taxes are deferred in some instances. When land use changes, or sometimes when ownership changes, deferred taxes are due. Capital gains taxes are deferred taxes paid on unearned rise in value. Government prints money, drives inflation, and then at sale or death, demands an inordinate amount of the sale proceeds or gain. No matter what, that money is generated on the private side, and is transferred to the public side for what good on that piece of land or those people I cannot see. It is nothing more than redistribution of wealth downward by law, and fodder for the Democrat welfare machine. (You brought party to the discussion. I am just replying in kind.)
The private owner of the ranch you refer to was selling calves and cows, buying heifers and bulls, horses, equipment, groceries, locally, and supporting the local community. The USFS has closed the Ranger Station, combined the NF into another, greatly reduced staff, and is now planning to burn the whole of it in the name of austerity of finances, ecosystem purity, and just plain oneryness and stupidity, which is about what one would expect from an agency driven by social engineering and lawyers. The surest and best way to ruin a good piece of land is to let the USFS manage it, and the public to run wild over it. The access controlled private property is what provides the security cover for wildlife that maintains critical mass and needed winter grounds. As it now stands, critical winter habitats are ag lands with crop residue and CRP lands. Some of that CRP will also have residue on it soon. The Environmental Community demanded bio-fuels, and screwed up the food supply, CRP, and now they must live with the mandates their special interests bought in Congress and State legislatures.
I have no way to compare Vermontistan with the New West, but "I was a US Attorney and prosecutor" Leahy and Bernie "the Far Left Socialist Independent" pretty much tell me all I need to know about the place. Their existence and who supports them might give us a clue as to why the land is for sale. You know and I know that timberland, zoned as such, pays little in property tax because they tax the timber as it is cut. That is called a severance tax. Using an ad valorem tax on timber, perhaps the real local property tax rate on 30% of the merch value of the standing timber, annually, always resulted in the timber being cut when the taxes dictated, not the market, and did not serve the timber owner or local and state government. When a tree reached merchantable size, it was cut. Nowadays, the value of the timber cut is taxed with a severance tax and then with capital gains. Timberland is paying high taxes, indirectly. Moreover, in the Great Lumber Depression (today's lumber prices are those of the 1970's) that any timber is being cut is only to serve bankers and tax collectors, and not the landowners. However, if they allow the land to go to subdivision, then the tax rates go up in an inverse proportion to the habitat values of that land. The low tax rate and timber zoning is how to keep habitat, not unlike CRP. That is how taxes are used to promote the public good. The tax system is used to influence land use, some would call it a subsidy, and again it is government calling the shots to produce the result desired in collaboration with various special interests. Now George, your special interests are not universal, and therein lies the rub. You somehow think the money to manage (ha ha ha) public land, protect it (ha ha ha), comes from the fabled money tree. Wrong! That land needs money from federal taxes every year to exist, to have some minimum of protection. It does not produce revenue that supports its costs. The private timberland does or it gets sold to someone else who thinks they can gain a profit from the land. There is no pretense of profit, financial sustainability, on public land. The new use evidently is for kindling and tinder to reduce the vegetation to mineral earth in some sort of grand morality play of ecosystem ethics and gross stupidity and neglect. Nothing produces air and water pollution, soil erosion, like a stand removal fire from a government sponsored conflagration. The farmers tractor has emissions reducers, bio fuels to power it. He contour plows or nowadays, plants into residue he is required to leave with an air drill with no till fertilizer injection at the germination site, all directed by computer driven by GPS and GPS soil information from collection and infra red satellite imagery. The USFS conflagration is the equivalent of a small nuclear bomb going off, and all kinds of bad stuff gets airborne from the chemical changes and heat. Not a good deal, unless of course, you are an apologist for the social engineers of the USFS and their failed management which has produced this option of forced arson by government edict.
Next Jimmy Carter will come to the New West to watch forests burn as an impartial observer to keep the process open and public. His pockets will be filled with fusees and FSSSEs will have him in their pocket. Just like it is supposed to be. I bitterly jest.
As George points out, the government already tried his plan, as part of Roosevelt's New Deal. It was a disaster. The reaction to it led to the absurdly expensive price supports that had the government buying and storing hundreds of thousands of tons of surplus food every year.
Rather than costing us anything, the Conservation Reserve Program has saved us TRILLION$ over the program it replaced. The GENIUS of CRP is its impermanence, allowing diversity and flexibility for adaptation to changing conditions.
We have all enjoyed the benefits in the form of a stable inexpensive food supply, controlled erosion, reduced pollution, and increased wildlife habitat. The losers have been the manufacturers of herbicides, pesticides, fertilizer, and fossil fuels.
It might be nice to have some more National Grasslands in appropriate places, but that's no reason to pick on CRP.
Taking land out of private hands and placing it in the hands of the government is clearly George's real agenda.
The subject of the true costs of CRP lands is not spoken much within sportsmen groups. They, like some other taxpayers, seem to like paying several times the value for the same piece of land that is never sold. CRP is symbolic of the whole Farm Bailout Bill that benefits only a selected privileged people while expensing those of us that do not benefit. (but the aggies try hard to show we do benefit while being ripped off, or they try the scrare tactic of "they just want to steal our property")
Permanent public title to the lands should be the lands included in the CRP program. Stop wasting taxpayer’s money.
Your comments are needed and appreciated on NewWest.net and most particularly so when it comes to articles posted on this site by George Wuerthner.
As ' B ' so accurately noted, "Taking land out of private hands and placing it in the hands of the government is clearly George's real agenda."
One must wonder why he doesn't just move to one of the many countries in the world that prohibits the ownership of private property and let all the Americans who fought and died to prevent that from happening in the USA Rest In Peace.
My concern is not the lack of access or "farming the treasury" but the impact CRP had on small towns where the loss of production resulted in the loss of ag services - dealers, silos, etc. Had they had an oppportunity to adapt to changing markets, some of those small towns might still have function but different ag production still taking place. A large, rapid, short term governent program probably foreclosed some of that adaptation.
The role of the Conservation Reserve Program in controlling rural residential development
Journal of Rural Studies
Abstract
Rural population growth in the form of residential development frequently results in the loss of agricultural productive land as well as loss of adjacent open space that often characterizes rural communities. A land-use prediction model was used to determine what influence the USDA Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) may have on urban sprawl and rural community sustainability. The model demonstrated that the projected mean rural residential growth rate was almost half the growth rate with CRP as compared to without CRP in the local land management mix. In addition, ecosystem integrity on the land surrounding a rural community was sharply increased with the introduction of CRP. However, community economics and subsequent social character of the community may have been significantly impacted by CRP. In order to partially mitigate CRP-induced community impacts we propose future CRP guidelines support the establishment of within-production field scale ecological refuges. These refuges would satisfy the conservation requirements of the program, return a level of traditional agricultural production to the land management mix, and provide the adjacent community with aesthetic and recreational amenities that are frequently associated with modern rural economies.
And I suppose you'd prefer to replace those farmers sitting around doing nothing with biologists sitting around doing nothing, just like Arne Naess suggests?
Plus as I suggest in my essay in many instances, we are paying more now in rental fees over the terms of the contracts than it costs to buy these lands outright. Does it makes any sense to continue renting them?
Buying them would provide permanent protection against irresponsible use by landowners (who are causing water pollution, air pollution,etc.--thereby ruining the values of other landowners and of public resources like water) by farming these highly erosion prone lands.
Buying these lands would improve the financial situation for farmers by permanently removing these lands from competition by excessive crop production. Buying these lands would also provide permanent protection of wildlife benefits, public access, and enjoyment.
Under the Bush administration, paying counties for revenues lost is not a priority, and the funds that are authorized by the PILT legislation and that is supposed to be paid to counties has been raided to pay for other priorities like the war in Iraq. Nevertheless, even under the anemic payments that the Bush administration and the Republican controlled Congress authorized for the past seven years, PILT payments are still typically higher than taxes paid by private landowners.
Thanks for the comments and research findings. They are interesting and to a degree substantiate some of my points. Namely that the CRP program had some unintended consequences, and little long term permanence.
Whether one thinks CRP was the best thing for farmers, wildlife or not, the end result has the potential of being short-lived as either grain prices rise giving farmers an incentive to replant their lands to grain crops or land prices rise giving farmers an added incentive to subdivide or sell their property. In either case, the investment of $36 billion dollars is of questionable value or at the very least a very expensive and not the most efficient, nor the best way to protect the values for which the program was created.
We would have achieved much more of the stated goals for the CRP program, including reduction in soil erosion and water pollution, creation of wildlife habitat, reduction in crop production so as to increase prices for those remaining farmers still involved in production, and prevention of subdivision by outright fee acquisition and/or at the very least purchase of development rights to that open space could be maintained, if not the wildlife habitat.
There will be a time of reckoning, CRP or not. Do these lands go to grass for livestock in the private sector, or are they now fodder for a buy-up for eco-purposes?
I'd say in the long term, it would be better to keep these lands available for commercial food production. If this country ever gets to the point of production parity, there's going to be very little left over for ecotourism.
Then in one of your comments, above, you state that "There's a perverse response from many of the comments here that the "government" is somehow different than you and me."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Congress the arm of the "government" comprised of those selected and elected to represent that "you and me"?
And it's that one-and-the-same "government" that you've found so much fault with that you seem to think would do such a far better job with the management of any land ~ anywhere! ~ than the private property owners who own it now?
Why not just call a spade a spade, George, and openly declare your often-stated and seldom camouflaged desire to restructure our SOCIETY so it meets all the standards of one that is socialistic and/or communistic? No reason to beat around the CRP bushes about it, is there?
Some of us just can not forget or ignore the MANY generations of citizens of the USA who lost their lives fighting to see to it those types of societies would NEVER take over this Greatest Nation on Earth and be allowed to erode or diminish any of the rights of every private citizen lucky enough to have been born here or to have legally immigrated to this Great Nation.
Has it never dawned on you WHY citizens in every other nation on earth are willing to risk their lives and everything they own elsewhere just to come to the USA?
Perhaps I could suggest a remedy for your discontent.
How about you deed all you own over to whatever "government" you most admire, pack up your camera (assuming you might be unwilling to deed THAT over to a "government"?) and paddle your canoe to the shores of whichever socialistic or communistic country you most admire? Not sure if you can find one without cows OR mankind but it's worth a try, is it not?
There you could fully enjoy the type society you covet for yourself and the rest of us could have one less enemy amongst us.
Americans are well known for coming up with creative solutions to what ails 'em coast to coast.
But ~ surprise! surprise! ~ that has never yet demanded we forego or abandon the very principles that has made this Nation GREAT or sell out to "the government".
And hopefully it never will.
I agree with most of your comments about the declining rural population and reasons for that.
However, one assumption that many people make is that America somehow is going to suffer some kind of food shortage. Barring a loss of fossil fuels (which is a huge subsidy for production), America uses most of its existing Ag lands not to grow crops we consume directly, but to feed livestock. That includes most of the nation's croplands.
Most of the "Corn belt" is growing livestock feed. Even before the biofuel boom, we planted more than 80 million acres to corn (most of it feeder corn). To put that into perspective, Montana is 93 million acres.
Ditto for other major crops. Hay and alfalfa covers 130 million acres. Soy is another 75 or so million acres with only 2 % going for things like tofu and the like.
Wheat is the only crop that is largely used for human food--though even a percentage of it is sometimes used for feed.
By contrast we only devote about 3 million acres to veggies.
In other words, we could easily feed ourselves--and even the rest of the world if we didn't waste our ag lands for production of livestock feed, and just used existing grasslands for livestock production--if that is desired.
And don't tell me about PILT payments. That is another boondoggle I have little or no sympathy for.
I keep wondering when we're going to start paying river guides for when there is no water for them to work, or ski patrollers when there is no snow. Oh, but now I remember, they actually roll with the punches and don't whine about how hard life is when the weather doesn't cooperate.
Give me a break (an no, I'm not mocking John Stossel, the imbecile reporter).
And George, I'm not going to give up beef. You shouldn't want me to, because I and my "ilk" might leave the planet sooner as a result, right?
Regarding your comment about eating beef and how it might cause someone to die sooner--no I wouldn't want you or anyone else to die sooner than you would otherwise go. But you are correct that people who choose to eat large quantities of red meat do on average have a shorter life span.
With regards to you in particular, you're such an intelligent person that I see you as a real asset to the planet, so I do hope you modify your diet if you do consume a lot of meat and live a long time.
The biggest CRP crime there was the FSA and NRCS requiring oiver 20,000 acres of re-enrolled CRP ground to be plowed and reseeded, thus destroying a decade's worth of redeveloping soil profile, cryptogam layer, and native vascular plant communties. Unlike a lot of CRP you'll find out there, sage brush and native forbs invade the CRP established downwind of existing remnant stands of shrub-steppe in Douglas and some other eastern Wahsington counties.
Having made these observatons, it's still true that the same public tax dollars would be far better invested in permanent or long term conservation easements such as those concluded under the wetland reserve program (WRP). In these arrngements, the government obtains the conservation benefit on behalf of the public for the actual agronomic value of the land for perpetual easements, though 15 and 30 year term easements are also available. This ia better model than CRP generally.
Here's a good example of what we could be doing with all that money we are currently spending on CRP. The MDFWP is trying to buy a few ranches in eastern Montana. Note the high value wildlife habitat it is obtaining for a relatively small amount of money. If we could redirect the CRP funding towards outright acquisition of critical wildlife habitat we would be far better off. There's a lot of land for sale--all we need is the will power to buy it.