Hunters groups across the country are worried that a federal program that encourages farmers to conserve wildlife habitat and protect water quality could lose ground under the new farm bill being negotiated.
As House and Senate lawmakers tried to reach consensus on a final bill, the House Agriculture Committee recently proposed reducing the maximum number of acres that can be enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program by 18 percent.
If the proposal is adopted, a 23-year effort to protect wildlife and restore water quality on agricultural lands would suffer a serious setback, hunters say. The CRP was created in 1985 to pay farmers to retire environmentally sensitive lands under 10- to 15-year contracts. The program is already getting squeezed by high commodity and land prices that are luring farmers to convert their CRP acreage into croplands, groups say.
About 300,000 acres of CRP land in South Dakota are being removed from the program and probably will be used to grow traditional row crops.
"We're seeing market forces make conservation less attractive than it was two years ago," said Tim Zink, spokesman for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a coalition of hunting, fishing and conservation groups. "We're seeing that a lot of negative forces are converging on the back of CRP right now. It could send the program into a free fall."
The program, now capped at 39.2 million acres nationwide, is credited with producing an additional 2.2 million ducks and 13.5 million pheasants annually, protecting 170,000 miles of stream banks and keeping 450 million tons of topsoil from washing away.
Nearly 1.3 million acres of South Dakota farmland was enrolled in the CRP program at the end of January, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
"It's the most significant thing that has happened for migratory waterfowl since we started managing ducks in the 30s," said John Devney, senior vice president of Delta Waterfowl.
South Dakota Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin said the proposal to trim CRP acreage would merely bring the program down to a level that it would reach anyway as contracts expire and farmers reconsider their options.
The House version of the farm bill contains a provision that would make it easier for the USDA to respond more quickly to high crop prices and land rental rates and increase CRP payments to make them more competitive, Herseth Sandlin said.
"I feel confident that the conservation title (of the farm bill) will continue to be a strong title, understanding the importance that title is to many in South Dakota and local economies," said Herseth Sandlin, a Democrat, and a member of the House Agriculture Committee.
South Dakota Sen. John Thune, a Republican and a member of the Senate agriculture committee, said he opposes lowering the program's acreage limit.
"I don't think it's a good deal for agriculture generally," Thune said. "Any time you start getting down to those kinds of numbers again, that means there's probably a lot of marginal land in production and that's not good from a conservation standpoint."
Brookings investment counselor and pheasant hunter Bob Roe said he got a hollow feeling in his stomach when he drove around the state last fall and saw former CRP lands being ripped up and readied for spring planting.
"It's a sad picture because it takes years to develop those fields," said Roe, who owns 320 acres of CRP land in Beadle County, which he maintains as a wildlife refuge and hunting preserve.
But he said he doesn't begrudge landowners - many of whom are elderly and on fixed incomes - for leaving the CRP program when their contracts expire. In his neck of the woods, landowners get about $40 an acre for land enrolled in CRP, he said. They could rent the land to another farmer for $90 an acre, he said.
"One of the good things, one of the sustaining things that will happen is, there are an awful lot of trees that were planted under the CRP program and I would really doubt that they would get ripped out," Roe said. "Even if the CRP goes away, at least there will still be some winter cover for those birds. Even though it will hurt from a nesting success standpoint, those creatures are tremendously resilient. They'll come back."Gannett News Service
