While making few changes to crop subsidy programs, the Republican-sponsored House farm bill unveiled on Thursday would expand the land-idling Conservation Reserve by one-fifth and eliminate the green-payment Conservation Stewardship Program. Elements of the CSP would be folded into another USDA program, but advocates said overall spending on working lands conservation would be cut by $7 billion in the coming decade.
The Conservation Reserve, which was created during the farm crisis of the mid-1980s, pays an annual rent to landowners who set aside fragile land for 10 years or longer. It was capped at 24 million acres as part of budget cuts in the 2014 farm law. The CSP, a brainchild of then Sen. Tom Harkin, was created a decade ago to encourage growers to practice soil, water, and wildlife conservation as part of their daily operations.
Under the draft unveiled by House Agriculture chairman Michael Conaway, the CSP would be folded into the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which shares the cost of “practices,” such as constructing terraces or lagoons to reduce runoff from fields and feedlots.
Critics of the CSP, including Conaway staff workers, say that it pays farmers for conservation measures already in place, and that it is unwieldy because the entire farm must be enrolled. More than 70 million acres are enrolled in the CSP at present, at relatively low payment rates per acre. In the new EQIP, a much smaller number of practices — three per region — would be eligible for CSP-like contracts, and farmers could hold multiple contracts to mitigate so-called natural resource concerns.
EQIP currently gets $1.75 billion in annual funding and the CSP a slightly larger amount. Conaway aides said EQIP funding would rise to $3 billion a year in the 2018 farm bill. But Ferd Hoefner of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition said total spending on working lands programs would fall by $7 billion from the $35 billion that would be spent over a decade if the two programs were not changed.
“We are strongly opposed to both the whopping $7 billion cut — more than the entirety of the cut to the entire [conservation] title in 2014 — and the disappearance of CSP and its essential attributes,” said Hoefner. EQIP is aimed at existing problems, while the CSP is an incentive for farmers to adopt advanced conservation techniques.
The government pays about $2 billion a year on the Conservation Reserve. The cost of the farm bill expansion, to 29 million acres, would be offset by reducing the annual payment to 80 percent of the local rental rate for farmland. The payment rate would be reduced again on land that is re-enrolled at the end of a 10-year contract.
Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, the lead Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, pushed for a 30 million-acre Conservation Reserve. Sportsmen’s groups prefer a large Conservation Reserve because it creates wildlife habitat. Farm groups have leaned toward working lands programs in recent years as a way to keep land in production.