Nation's largest conservation program facing challenges

As promised, Prairie Fire is pleased to present yet another view of the farm bill discussion continuing in the halls of Congress.

By Duane Hovorka and Tim McCoy

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is America’s largest private-lands conservation program, providing wildlife habitat, reducing polluted runoff into streams and conserving soil on 34 million acres of land across the United States.

Recent studies show that the CRP is reducing soil erosion by 450 million tons per year, protecting over 170,000 miles of streams, and providing habitat that produces 13.5 million pheasants and 2.2 million ducks each year.

Despite the program’s success, changes in the market for grain, a tight federal budget and decisions at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) put the high level of benefits now provided by the program at risk.

As we went to press, a Congressional conference committee writing a new five-year farm bill was considering cutting the Conservation Reserve Program to no more than 32 million acres, from the 39.2 million acres now authorized. The cut would total some $1.2 billion over the next 10 years.

The proposed cuts were offered by House Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Ranking Republican Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.). The proposals were part of a package designed to achieve a farm bill without the need for new tax provisions that could trigger a veto by the president.

The program was conceived in 1985 as a way to promote soil conservation and reduce overproduction that was driving down grain prices, by taking highly erodible land out of crop production and planting grassland species. In those early years of the program, many CRP fields were planted with a single species, often smooth brome grass. The seed was cheap and available, but brome provided little wildlife habitat.

As the program matured, USDA put in place an “environmental benefits index” that provides incentives to plant mixes of native grasses and forbs that are adapted to the local area. The result has been a substantial increase in the wildlife value of the CRP, while maintaining the water-quality and soil-erosion benefits.

Other changes broadened the benefits of the CRP even further.

With prodding from the sustainable farming community and others, USDA identified a set of practices that provide particularly valuable benefits—things like windbreaks, grass waterways and grass buffer strips along streams. USDA allows farmers to enroll just part of a field, and to enroll it at any time without waiting for a formal CRP sign-up period.

These “continuous sign-up” practices now cover 2.9 million acres across the USA, and make up a growing share of CRP acres enrolled in the program.

Conservation partnerships

After passage of the 1996 farm bill, USDA expanded the scope of the Conservation Reserve Program to include targeted partnerships to address natural resource issues in particular areas. Through the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP), state or local governments, and in a few cases nonprofit organizations, contribute a share of the cost of payments on about one million acres of CRP land.

The first CREP was established in 1997 in Maryland, and was designed to protect water quality in the Chesapeake Bay by reducing nutrient loads through land treatment on 100,000 acres. The second CREP was established in 1998, and promoted the planting of buffer strips along streams in the watershed to address water-quality and wildlife issues along the Minnesota River.

Nebraska’s first CREP partnership, the Central Basin’s CREP, began in 2002 with a focus on enrolling wildlife habitat on pivot corners and buffering streams. Landowner interest in enrolling wildlife habitat on pivot corners and small streams fields exceeded acres that could be enrolled within the first four months the program was available. With preliminary grant funds recently announced by The Nebraska Environmental Trust, Nebraska landowners would be able to enroll another 16,000-plus acres in wildlife habitat in the Central Basin’s CREP over the next three years.

The Platte-Republican Resource Area CREP in Nebraska shows how the program can be used to address water quantity issues as well. The goals of the program include a 125,000 acre-foot reduction in irrigation water applied, along with substantial reductions in pesticide, nitrogen and phosphate applications, and 85,000 acres of restored native grassland habitat.

Federal rules prohibit CRP contracts from paying more than dryland rental rates, so state funding makes up the difference by paying to retire the water use for at least the 10–15 years of the CRP contract. USDA committed $158 million, and the state $36 million, in an effort to enroll 100,000 acres by the end of 2007.

The Nebraska CREP is also an example of the limits of a voluntary program in a region of great uncertainty.

After an initial flush of applications in 2005, farmer interest in the program appeared to dry up. By September 2007, about 48,500 acres had been enrolled, just under half of the goal. The Nebraska Department of Natural Resources says high corn prices have deterred some from enrolling, along with limits of the program. Uncertainty - about future corn prices, federal commodity payments, and further restrictions on water use in the Platte and Republican basins - all appear to be playing a role as well.

Focus on pheasants

After the CRP was introduced in 1986, pheasant numbers in states with substantial CRP acres began to increase. The pheasant harvest per hunter in Nebraska rose by more than 50 percent over the next decade, and the South Dakota pheasant population grew from 2.9 million in 1985 to 4.9 million in 1994.

Nebraska wildlife biologists began to notice a change, as our pheasant numbers started to fall in the mid-1990s. Year to year variations in pheasant numbers are common, due to the impact of weather, but wildlife managers noticed something else as well. The CRP fields that had been planted to grass in the late 1980s were maturing, and in many cases thick stands of grass were crowding out forbs. Those annual weeds provide habitat for the insects that young pheasants and other birds need to quickly grow and mature after hatching in the summer.

After several years of experimenting with solutions, the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and Pheasants Forever launched Focus on Pheasants in 2002. By managing CRP and other mature grassland habitats using practices such as disking mature stands of grass and interseeding forbs and legumes, the program turned CRP fields back into pheasant havens.

The managed stands of CRP had taller and more dense cover, with a more open understory that allows pheasants and quail, especially chicks, to safely move around and forage. Through interseeding, managed CRP areas again included the broadleaf plants that provide higher numbers of insects and also provide winter seed resources. The vegetation is again providing overhead cover to protect birds from predators, and providing open space below the canopy where birds can readily move around in safety.

The program provides benefits for other grassland birds that also prefer early successional grassland habitats, the kind with more vigorous cover, fewer grasses, more forbs and open space at the ground level. With CRP management being completed on portions of CRP fields in successive years, grassland birds that preferred the dense grasses on existing CRP are also accommodated.

Other states are adopting similar approaches. In 2001, the Southeast Kansas Quail Initiative was formed to reverse the fall in bobwhite quail populations in a four-county area. The initiative helps farmers pay to convert fescue to native grasses and forbs, and to plant shrubs like American plum, fragrant sumac and gray dogwood that benefit quail.

In 2004, USDA launched its own Northern Bobwhite Quail Habitat Initiative, with a target of boosting quail habitat on 250,000 acres in 35 states. Those states include all of the states in the Great Plains except Montana and North Dakota. Nebraska was allotted 6,000 acres under this proposal for field borders focused on habitat for upland game birds, and expects those acres to be fully enrolled this spring.

In March 2007, USDA announced a new State Acres for Wildlife Enhancement (SAFE) program, setting aside a half-million acres for state-driven efforts to restore habitat for high-priority wildlife species. Landowners in Nebraska will have an opportunity to enroll up to 22,900 of SAFE acres starting in spring of 2008 to provide habitat for Greater Prairie Chickens in northeast and southeast Nebraska, and for upland game birds on smaller CRP enrollments statewide.

The hunting connection

States - especially those on the Great Plains that have very little public land - have capitalized on the hunting opportunities created by the Conservation Reserve Program. Hunting-access programs in 20 states now provide additional payments to farmers - typically $1 to $5 per acre - in return for providing public access to hunt in their CRP field, and to further improve the habitat. Nebraska’s access program, the CRP Management Access Program, focuses on both providing access and providing incentives for landowners to incorporate CRP management on enrolled acres.

Colorado, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming also have walk-in hunting programs that include CRP and sometimes non-CRP land. The new farm bill versions passed by the House and Senate both include a new federal grant program— dubbed “Open Fields” - to help states establish and maintain similar programs across the country.

Challenges

Increased interest in producing energy from plants has put pressure on the Conservation Reserve Program in several ways. Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and South Dakota are four of the top five states in ethanol production capacity, and together they have more than half of the 13.5 billion gallons of annual capacity built and under construction in the USA.

Corn-based ethanol production capacity in those four states has more than doubled in just two years, driving corn and other grain prices higher. Farmers have shifted other crop acres to corn, and hundreds of thousands of acres of sod in the Great Plains have been plowed or planted to crops.

Congress passed a new energy bill in December that will require continued growth in ethanol use, doubling the corn-based ethanol use in America to 15 billion gallons by 2022, from about 7 billion gallons produced in 2007. The increase is the equivalent of about 19 million new acres of corn.

As the price for corn and other grains has risen, farmers have been reluctant to lock in a set rental payment for the next 10 years under a CRP contract. CRP rental rates are adjusted based on average county rental rates, but the lag time between adjustments means that rental rates for new CRP contracts have not caught up with cropland rental rates that have risen substantially the past several years.

Last May, the National Grain and Feed Dealers and 36 other national and state grain and livestock organizations asked then-Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns to allow CRP contract holders to get out of their contracts early with no penalty, and they pressed the secretary to not hold a general CRP sign-up in 2007 or 2008.

While Johanns and his successors, Acting Secretary Chuck Conner and new Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer, have to date refused to allow farmers to get out of their CRP contracts penalty-free, they have also refused to hold a general CRP sign-up. As a result, in September 2007, contracts expired on more than 2.5 million acres of CRP across the country, and no new contracts were issued to replace them.

Nationwide, the loss of CRP acres - and habitat - was about 7 percent, but states like South Dakota (19 percent), North Dakota (12 percent) and Missouri (9 percent) saw even bigger losses. Anecdotal reports indicate a large portion of this land will go right back into crop production.

Over the next three years, CRP contracts will expire on 10 million more acres of land nationwide. If USDA refuses to adjust CRP rental rates and hold a new whole-field CRP sign-up, the impact on wildlife, erosion and water quality will be devastating, especially in the Great Plains. And, if those expiring 10 million acres are brought back into crop production, the net effect will be the release of 154 million tons of carbon that were stored in the soil during the CRP contracts: the equivalent of putting nearly 27 million new cars on the road.

Growing fuel

From the energy perspective, one of the new challenges for CRP may come not from the need to convert acres to crops, but from the need for harvestable biomass to produce cellulosic ethanol. This does cause concern among natural-resource and wildlife interests, but if done carefully, the wildlife benefits of CRP can be maintained with a balanced approach for harvesting energy, preventing soil erosion, improving water quality and improving wildlife habitat on lands enrolled in the program.

The new energy bill calls for the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, including 21 billion gallons from sources other than corn-based ethanol. The first commercial-scale ethanol plants that will use cellulose from sources like cornstalks, wood and wheat straw, rather than corn, are now under construction.

The enzymes and technology needed to convert switchgrass to ethanol are still in the development stage. Because that technology is most efficient when converting a single type of cellulose, the ability to turn a mixture of prairie grasses and forbs into ethanol is still many years away.

A single-species stand of switchgrass is environmentally more sustainable than an annual crop like corn, but it provides only limited wildlife habitat compared to a high-diversity mix of native prairie plants.

So, solving America’s need for fuel will not be as simple as turning CRP acres into an “energy reserve.” Instead, we need to move forward with policies that protect the many wildlife, water-quality and erosion benefits provided by the Conservation Reserve Program on our nation’s farms.

In future years, the demand for the benefits that the Conservation Reserve Program provides will be just as high, and likely higher, than today. The CRP can only continue to deliver water-quality, wildlife-habitat, soil-erosion and global-warming benefits if it is adequately funded by Congress, and properly implemented by USDA.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

Delicious  •   Digg  •   StumbleUpon  •   Propeller  •   Reddit  •   Magnoliacom  •   Newsvine  •   Furl  •   Facebook  •   Google  •   Yahoo  •   Technorati  •   Icerocket