News Coverage
USDA Urges Farmers to Keep Setting Aside Land
Published July 30, 2008
WASHINGTON
Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer is winning praise from environmental groups for deciding not to allow farmers and ranchers to withdraw their land without penalty from a popular conservation program.
Some farmers and ranchers had hoped to withdraw their land from the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays producers to set their land aside, after severe floods hit the Midwest last month. But Schafer said Tuesday that the damage to corn and soybean crops was less than originally feared.
Schafer says those who do withdraw from the program will still have to pay a penalty.
The Environmental Working Group and the Izaak Walton League of America immediately praised Schafer's decision, as did Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat.
Alliance for Agriculture Growth and Competitiveness, a group representing beef, poultry, pork, grain and feed industries has been unsuccessfully lobbying the Agriculture Department since 2005 to allow landowners to pull out of CRP contracts without penalty.
In a letter to President Bush, the group said the U.S. is "experiencing shortages in agricultural commodities that must be addressed promptly.
"There is no switch to be flipped that will result in immediate increased food production, but the United States needs more tillable farmland in production to help provide some relief to these ever burgeoning problems in 2009 and beyond," the letter said.
In May, Schafer said the federal government would open millions of acres of Conservation Reserve Program to haying and grazing after birds have finished nesting on grasslands this summer.
CRP, which started in 1985, pays landowners to idle environmentally sensitive land for conservation. Farmers are paid to plant cover such as grass on the land.
The program dolled out about $1.9 billion to landowners last year, the USDA said. It pays a nationwide average of about $50 per acre annually.
In mid-April, there were 34.6 million acres enrolled in CRP, down about 2 million from a year ago, the agency said. Contracts on another 1 million acres are set to expire this year.
The program currently is authorized at 39.2 million acres, or about 10 percent of U.S. crop land.
North Dakota has about 3 million acres enrolled in the CRP, after losing about 400,000 acres from contracts that were not renewed last year. It was the biggest exodus of acres of any state from the program.
