The government could idle more environmentally fragile cropland if it alters its management of the Conservation Reserve to maximize the benefit achieved per dollar instead of aiming for the greatest benefit per acre, says a study by the think tank Center for Agricultural and Rural Development. Created in 1985, the Conservation Reserve, which pays landowners to idle fragile cropland for 10 years or longer, is the largest U.S. land set-aside program ever with an annual cost of $2 billion.
“Under cost-effective targeting, (Conservation Reserve) acreage and payments would increase in the Great Plains and the Southeastern states but would decrease in the Midwest,” say authors Ruiqing Miao, Hongli Feng, David A. Hennessy and Xiaodong Du. They say enrolled acreage could increase by 45 percent and benefits to soil, water and wildlife by up to 21 percent for the same amount of money. The study also considers potential results if money saved on crop insurance subsidies were credited to the Conservation Reserve – “The government can enroll significant acres at zero real cost.”
The 2014 farm law responded to the agricultural boom of the past several years by lowering the ceiling on enrollments to 24 million acres in 2018, a step to encourage crop production. Farmland prices have zoomed since 2006, boosting the cost of enrolling land in the reserve because payments to owners are based on land rental rates. At latest count, 24.17 million acres were enrolled for an average payment of $66 per acre per year. Contracts on 1.9 million acres are to expire on Sept 30, 2015.