To get long-lasting benefits, USDA should pursue land easements, rather than pay billions of dollars to landowners who abandon a short-term commitment to land stewardship whenever commodity prices boom, says the Environmental Working Group. The green group is cool to a Trump administration proposal to put more money into easements because it’s outweighed by drastic cuts in the rest of USDA’s conservation portfolio.
In a report released today, the EWG calls for a shake-up in the federal approach to soil, water and wildlife conservation on private farmland. Since the mid-1980s, the Conservation Reserve has dominated the field, spending around $2 billion a year to pay landowners to idle fragile land for 10 or 15 years. The gains in conservation often are transient because the land is eventually put back into crop production, says EWG.
“Instead, we should invest tax dollars in programs that create more lasting change,” says EWG. “Permanent or long-term easements cost more per acre and in the short term protect fewer acres but they provide longer-lasting land protection.”
The report, “‘Retired’ sensitive cropland: Here today, gone tomorrow?”, advocates a top priority for two USDA programs, the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program and the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. “Improving and investing more funding in CREP and ACEP wetland reserve easements would provide many environmental and public health gains,” it says. “Environmental gains from short-term voluntary conservation programs…are fleeting.”
CREP is a state-local-federal variant of the Conservation Reserve targeted at specific regions and goals, such as reducing farm runoff into waterways. In some states, CREP programs include a long-term or permanent easement on farmland use, funded by nonfederal sources, at the end of the 10- or 15-year Conservation Reserve contract.
In its proposed fiscal 2018 budget, the administration says it would put an additional $3 billion over 10 years into ACEP, more than tripling its current funding of $125 million a year. The White House also would add $1.9 billion to the Environmental Quality Incentive Program, which shares the cost of reducing runoff from fields and feedlots. It gets around $450 million a year now.
“This is part of a larger effort to better target conservation funding,” says the USDA budget book. Officials offered few details. At present, the ACEP includes easements to restore, protect and enhance wetlands and easements to prevent conversion of farmland, including grasslands and rangelands, to non-agricultural uses. The EQIP would become USDA’s primary working lands program and ACEP would be the primary easement program under the White House proposal.
At the same time it would expand ACEP and EQIP, the administration called for ending enrollment into the Conservation Stewardship Program, now the largest U.S. working lands program, and eliminating the Regional Conservation Partnership Program. With the Conservation Reserve enrollment at the maximum 24 million acres allowed under the 2014 farm law, the administration would limit entry to grasslands and small-acres but high-priority projects such as wellhead protection, filter strips along waterways and shelter belts to block wind erosion. It would continue incentive payments for CREP land but end them for Conservation Reserve enrollments. “In total, these reforms are expected to save taxpayers about $5.6 billion over 10 years,” said the USDA budget book.
“Increases in EQIP and ACEP are nice,” said EWG senior vice president Craig Cox, but the administration package “is a disaster” for conservation.
Lawmakers such as Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson have suggested expanding the reserve to 40 million acres in the 2018 farm bill. The EWG report says landowners took nearly 16 million acres out of the Conservation Reserve from 2007-14, during the recent commodity boom. “We made a $7 billion investment in protecting land” without lasting benefit, said Cox.
Lawmakers will hear conflicting ideas about land stewardship in drafting the farm bill. Wildlife groups prefer land retirement programs such as the Conservation Reserve, as do some farmers seeking guaranteed revenue during a slump in farm income. Some of the biggest U.S. farm groups back working-lands programs as a way to keep land in operation and to make it easier for beginning farmers to get a start. And groups such as EWG says easements offer the best protections to water quality.