The annual Plowprint report by the World Wildlife Fund estimates 2.5 million acres of virgin grasslands in the Great Plains were converted to cropland, or energy and urban development last year. While it’s a smaller loss than the 3.7 million acres of 2015, the perennial loss of grasslands is a threat to water quality and wildlife habitat in the Plains, which stretch from Texas into the Canadian prairies.
“Since 2009, nearly 8 percent of the landscape has been plowed for crops, leaving about 54 percent of the Great Plains grasslands intact,” said WWF. It estimated that if the remaining 25 million acres of grasslands were preserved, it would prevent 1.7 trillion gallons of water a year, laden with soil and fertilizer, from draining into streams and ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico.
Martha Kauffman, director of WWF’s Northern Great Plains program, urged Congress to protect grasslands in the 2018 farm bill by expanding stewardship programs such as Sodsaver, which withholds crop insurance subsidies for five years for grassland that’s converted to farmland, and programs that provide incentives for landowners to maintain grasslands. “Plowing up marginal lands and the last remaining temperate grasslands can’t be the answer” to rising global demand for food, said Kauffman.
When grassland is plowed, wheat, corn and soybeans are the most commonly planted crops. The areas with the highest rates of conversion in the Great Plains are northern Missouri, eastern Colorado and the Gulf coast of the United States, and the prairie parklands of Canada. In the northern Great Plains, land conversion is greatest in the so-called prairie pothole region of the United States and parts of Saskatchewan and Alberta in Canada.