CRP

In today’s environment of cutting spending on Federal programs, tough decisions are being made. Here’s a program that most of you in urban areas have not even heard of, but it’s a big issue for farmers and it affects all of us.

An article in the Star Tribune discusses the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). This program pays farmers to keep marginal land out of cultivation. The benefit to the rest of us:

Keeping those acres out of production has reaped enormous environmental benefits. CRP has increased the number of ducks in the Prairie Pothole Region of Minnesota and the Dakotas by 2 million a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nationally, between 2004 and 2007, CRP lands retained 1.86 billion pounds of nitrogen, 420 million pounds of phosphorus and 1.8 billion tons of soil -- much of which would have found its way into the Mississippi River and the so-called dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It also reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 200 million tons. And that was just four years.

But the program is under fire from two fronts. First, with today’s grain prices, CRP payments don’t compete with what the farmer could earn by cultivating the land. Second, the program will likely be a victim of cost cutting during the budget negotiations.

How much is it worth to improve air and water quality? Is it more important than other potential cost-cutting targets? Just one more thing to consider.