Land Idling Program Shrinks as Prices Soar
By PHILIP BRASHER, Gannett Washington Bureau
The town of Seymour, Iowa, has lost one-third of its population over the past three decades, and John Flood, who manages a local grain elevator, figures that one of the causes was a federal program that took large swaths of Wayne County cropland out of production.
"You had all that land idled and no one doing anything with it," he said.
Soaring crop prices are now coaxing landowners in Wayne County and across the Midwest and Great Plains to put some of that acreage back under the plow, and now Congress is considering reducing even further the program responsible for idling that acreage.
A farm bill that leaders of the congressional agriculture committees drafted this fall would cap the $2 billion-a-year Conservation Reserve Program at 25 million acres nationwide, down from the current limit of 32 million acres. When the program was first created at 1985, the government was allowed to enroll as many as 45 million acres.
Grain processors and livestock farms have been pushing lawmakers to roll back the program as a way of increasing production of corn and other crops. The National Grain and Feed Association, which represents processors, elevators, livestock producers and other grain users, argues that millions of acres of land now in CRP could be broken and seeded to corn, soybeans, wheat and other crops without damaging the environment.
The cut in CRP acreage "didn't go as far as we wished they had, but it was certainly moving in the right direction," said Randy Gordon, vice president of the grain users association.
The agriculture committees wanted to enact the farm bill as part of a deficit-reduction plan that a congressional supercommittee was charged with writing. The supercommittee ultimately failed to agree on a plan, which means the agriculture committees will have to start over next year writing a new farm bill through the regular process of committee and floor votes in the House and Senate. But the draft the lawmakers produced this fall shows the direction they are likely to go.
The program was created in 1985 at a time when crop and land prices had collapsed and the country was awash in grain surpluses. Landowners were offered annual payments in return for signing contracts to stop farming erosion-prone tracts for at least 10 years. The land was then seeded to grass or planted with trees.
The program wound up not only helping to reduce grain reserves but also generating large increases in pheasants and other wildlife because of the new grasslands in which they could thrive. The program is also credited with reducing wind and water erosion because the enrollment was targeted to hilly lands and areas near streams and ponds.
The program's supporters worry that shrinking the acreage significantly is going to reduce wildlife habitat while increasing soil erosion, increasing pollution of streams and rivers.
"There is so much land, so much grassland, being broken to go for corn for ethanol that we simply can't afford to lose anymore," said Bill Antonides, a wildlife biologist who is president of the South Dakota Wildlife Federation. "It's not just an issue of wildlife, it's an issue of conservation and water quality. It affects everyone, not just sportsmen."
To limit the harm to wildlife habitat and maintain political support for the new farm bill, the draft proposal called for lowering the acreage cap gradually and earmarked subsidies through a separate program to help landowners pay the cost of creating habitat. That would help offset the impact on wildlife habitat of the reduction in CRP acreage, said Dave Nomsen of the advocacy group Pheasants Forever.
According to a summary of the draft bill, the legislation also would have extended a program that offers incentives to landowners to turn over expiring CRP acreage to beginning farmers rather than renting it to large-scale operations that want to expand.
The program already has been losing acreage as the 10-year contracts have expired and crop prices have been at historic highs. About 29.6 million acres are enrolled currently after landowners pulled 2 million acres out of the program as contracts expired at the end of the 2011 budget year, Sept. 30.
Wayne County, where farmers harvested about 109,000 acres of corn and soybeans last year, still has one of the highest levels of CRP acreage in Iowa at 41,613 acres, but that area is down from the peak of 61,471 in 2004.
Contracts for another 6.5 million acres nationwide expire at the end of fiscal 2012 and an additional 3. 3 million acres expire in 2013. Some of that land could be re-enrolled but landowners are likely to put much of the acreage under cultivation because of the returns they can now get from corn, said Chad Hart, an economist at Iowa State University.
Contracts on nearly 12,000 acres of CRP land in Wayne County expire in 2012.
Because the future reductions in CRP acreage will likely take place over several years, the impact on the price of corn and other commodities is likely to be muted, said Hart.
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Contact Philip Brasher at pbrasher@gannett.com
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"Conservation Reserve Program Facts@
IOWA
1.7 million acres under 105,552 contracts
Average annual payment: $131 per acre
Acreage under contracts expiring in 2012 and 2013: 415,640
SOUTH DAKOTA
1.1 million acres under 31,016 contracts
Average annual payment: $59 per acre
Acreage under contracts expiring in 2012 and 2013: 332,242
