by Ken Root
On December 23, 1985, President Ronald Reagan signed into law what can be argued to be the greatest long term soil, water and wildlife conservation program in American history. It came at a time of economic depression on the farm and a time of public discontent with agricultural policy. Through the years, farmers and sportsmen have benefitted directly from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and the volume of environmental rhetoric has been lowered by the positive interaction between government and private landowners.
I can?t say that CRP has been CPR for all of agriculture but giving landowners a choice ?to farm or not to farm? highly erodible acres, saved a lot of soil. It also reduced the opportunities for young farmers to enter the industry. I was told in the early 1990?s, when farmers finally came out of the depression of the previous decade, that old farmers and CRP had kept a lot of young people from entering agriculture. If you look back at bidding a whole farm into CRP and the allowance of fields that were not classed as environmentally sensitive, it was clear that some counties enrolled too much into the program. The USDA capped that amount at twenty-five percent of the farmland in a single county and many hit that number.
In today?s terminology: ?CRP made winners and losers? as those who provided inputs and services for crop farmers were negatively impacted while those who grew grass seed and provided other inputs and labor for improving CRP land were rewarded.
The greatest benefit, which still exists today, has been the positive relationship with sportsmen. Expanding habitat for waterfowl and upland game birds was dramatic, as the reserve approached forty million acres in the early years. The recurring cost, and a more precise approach to achieving the conservation objectives, dropped the acreage to just over thirty million acres but that is enough to keep pheasants and quail flying and deer crossing the highways in large numbers
About the only thing the outdoorsmen did not get from CRP was access to private land. Several arguments were put forward that the enrolled land, like the wildlife, should be the property of the public. With the law enforcement warning that shotguns would be pointed both ways, if town hunters showed up to shoot on CRP land, that concept never had a chance.
I am not sure the CRP would have been adopted so quickly had agriculture not been in a very deep recession in the first half of the 1980?s. John Block led the USDA when grain bins were full and government looked like it had run out of options to keep farmers in business. In 1983, USDA proposed a ?Payment in Kind? program where farmers who set aside acreage of target crops were paid in grain for doing so. They were basically given that year?s production to sell in the marketplace without planting and harvesting their own farms. It was bold and cut supplies over the short term, especially since that was a drought year in some regions. But the reality of overproduction popped back up as the 1985 farm bill was being written. The CRP just seemed to be the right idea at the right time and farmers decided it was to their advantage to exploit it rather than to fight.
Water quality may have been in the plans of the creators of the program but it did not come forward for several more years. Once soil erosion was subdued, the value of perennial cover was recognized in recovery of water quality in streams, rivers and lakes. There remained a lot of criticism of fertilizer and pesticide runoff from fields but the capacity of grass waterways and riparian boundaries to filter sediment and pollutants became another gold star for CRP.
Management of CRP should be credited for a portion of its success. Although there was some problem in communicating the requirements and payments in the early years, farmers and landowners learned the ins and outs very quickly. Frequent sign up periods caused increased attention and decision making so reshaping of acres could be accomplished. Mapping became more accurate in determining land most in need of set-aside for conservation purposes.
As grain prices rose in 2006 and beyond, many farmers took land out of the reserve to gain the economic advantage of high priced corn, soybeans and wheat. Per the contract with the government, that was their choice and most made it constructively rather than just wanting to return to recreational farming on land that should never have been plowed.
If we look back at a hundred years of farming, it is regrettable that the Conservation Reserve Program didn?t exist before the plow ever came into the plains. Private ownership of land may not have been the way to go with regions that would later blow away but few were visionary enough to make any valid predictions of what would come several decades later. So, we react to our mistakes and re-evaluate our options. CRP gave farmers an option in a time of great need that remains a good one today.
