With 22.1 million acres enrolled, the Conservation Reserve is often described as the largest federal land retirement program, paying landowners an annual rent in exchange for taking fragile land out of crop production for 10 or 15 years. “Over time, it has evolved more toward a working farmland program,” said four university economists at the farmdoc daily blog.
At latest count, USDA data show more land, 10.7 million acres, entered the reserve under its so-called continuous enrollment and grassland options than the 10.4 million acres that were accepted during “general” enrollments aimed at large tracts, such as farm fields. The 2018 farm law calls for USDA to hold a general enrollment and a grassland enrollment each year. As the name suggests, continuous enrollments are available throughout the year for small, high-priority projects, such as wind breaks or buffer strips along streams. An additional 1.2 million acres were enrolled as farmed wetlands and part of so-called CREP projects.
“Given the current profitability of crop production, it is not unreasonable to expect continued decline in General CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) acres as at least some of these acres return to crop production at contract expiration,” wrote economists Carl Zulauf of Ohio State University and Nick Paulson, Krista Swanson and Gary Schnitkey of the University of Illinois. “Negative environmental impacts can be minimized by using incentives to shift the most environmentally sensitive areas of General CRP fields and farms to Continuous CRP.”
On a fact sheet, USDA says Grassland CRP is a working lands program. “Given the current profitability of crop production and the over 400 million acres of non-forested grazing land in the United States, it is not unreasonable to expect that Grassland CRP could become a central focus of agriculturally generated carbon sequestration,” said the economists.