Enrollment in the Conservation Reserve, the largest land-idling program in the United States with 23.9 million acres under contract, is becoming dominated by high-priority practices, such as filter strips along waterways and habitat restoration for wildlife. The USDA says it accepted three times as much fragile land in three years through the continuous signup option as it did in the first “general” signup, open to all landowners.
“This is by far the largest continuous signup since inception in 1997,” says USDA’s Farm Service Agency. Some 1.3 million acres were accepted during the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, compared to 411,000 acres selected from offers submitted by landowners during the general signup. The continuous enrollment total was up 50 percent from fiscal 2015, when 872,454 acres were added.
The increased profile for continuous enrollment, so named because landowners can apply at any time, reflects the evolution of the Conservation Reserve to put greater emphasis on environmental benefits from enrolling land and the congressional decision in the 2014 farm law to scale down the reserve to a maximum of 24 million acres. Created in 1985, the Conservation Reserve pays landowners an annual rent if they agree to idle highly erodible or environmentally sensitive land for 10 years or more.
Landowners will receive annual rental checks totaling $1.7 billion in coming weeks, said the USDA.
“Conservation gains will be made on enrolled lands through conservation buffer practices, which keep nutrients and soil on the land and out of adjacent waterways, said the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “This year’s strong enrollment numbers are also a major victory for wildlife habitat conservation.”
Because the reserve was created during the agricultural recession of the mid-1980s, it carried an unstated goal of taking large tracts, or entire farms, out of crop production as a way to reduce grain surpluses and to provide farm income. Three states in the wheat-growing Great Plains account for nearly 30 percent of the land in the reserve today. There is a long-running argument about enrolling large blocks of land, which can benefit game birds and areas susceptible to wind erosion vs smaller projects that safeguard water quality.
Continuous enrollment usually focuses on comparatively smaller amounts of land, with offers automatically accepted if the land and the owner meet eligibility requirements. Unlike the general enrollment, offers for continuous enrollment are not subject to competitive bidding. More than a dozen practices can be applied to the land, ranging from wetland buffers and grass waterways to shelterbelts and public wellhead protection.
The rental rate on continuous-enrollment land, nearly $124 an acre, is more than double the $51.24 an acre paid on land accepted under general enrollment. The higher rate is paid because of the higher cost of the work that is required on the land.