For the first time in more than a decade, the Conservation Reserve, which pays landowners an annual rent in exchange for taking fragile cropland out of production, is full, thanks to surging interest in the Grassland CRP option, said the Agriculture Department on Wednesday. Grasslands will become the largest element in the reserve, with more than 9 million acres enrolled in the year ahead.
The USDA said it would enroll nearly 2.7 million acres during a grasslands signup this spring on top of the 1 million acres accepted from a “general” signup for fields and other large tracts earlier in the year. There were 23 million acres in the reserve at the end of May. The program cap is 27 million acres.
“The long-term goal of the program is to reestablish valuable land cover to help improve water quality, prevent soil erosion, and reduce loss of wildlife habitat” through contracts that run for 10 to 15 years, said a USDA summary. Created in 1985, the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP, is the largest federal land retirement program and costs close to $2 billion a year.
Enrollment waned after 2007 due to factors that included a reduction in rental rates and higher commodity prices that made crop production more attractive. The enrollment limit, set at 45 million acres in the CRP’s early years, was reduced repeatedly over the years by Congress. The 2018 farm law reversed course, starting at 24 million acres in fiscal 2019 and rising to 27 million acres this year.
Zach Ducheneaux, administrator of the Farm Service Agency, said the CRP had reached its acreage cap. “With a low number of acres expiring in 2024 and 2025, getting any closer to the statutory cap of 27 million acres would hinder USDA’s ability to conduct meaningful future signups or to implement existing and new Conservation Reserve Enhancement Partnership (CREP) agreements in 2024.”
Besides general and grassland enrollments, held annually, the USDA operates so-called continuous enrollment, available year-round, for high-priority practices, such as windbreaks and filter strips, on small tracts.
Grassland CRP pays an annual rent while allowing producers to graze livestock and harvest hay from the land. Rental payments were set at a minimum of $15 an acre. The USDA says the program helps sequester carbon in vegetation and the soil and increases resilience to drought and wildfire. A priority is given to land in the Dust Bowl area and the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.
“Grassland CRP clearly demonstrates that conservation priorities and agricultural productivity not only have the capacity to coexist but also complement and enhance one another,” said Ducheneaux.
Of the land accepted for Grasslands CRP, 430,899 acres were in Colorado, followed by 417,865 acres in Nebraska and 325,443 acres in South Dakota.
For the CRP overall, the leading states were Colorado, with 2.45 million acres; Texas, with 2.16 million acres; and South Dakota, with 2.1 million acres.
“The new farm bill presents a generational opportunity to repurpose CRP,” said farm policy expert Carl Zulauf of Ohio State University last week. Grasslands will be the largest component of CRP, he said, and continuous enrollment will match the amount of land that entered through “general” enrollment. “CRP has evolved into a program distant from its original design,” which was the removal of fields or entire farms from crop production.
With the development of GPS technology, general enrollments could be converted to a site-specific CRP that also includes continuous enrollment, he said. “A carbon capture CRP initially focused on grasslands may offer more potential to capture carbon than the much debated, currently unproven carbon markets for the 318 million acres of principal crops in the United States.”