Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity in the new farm bill to remodel the land-idling Conservation Reserve to focus on small tracts that merit attention and to encourage carbon capture on grasslands, said a farm policy expert on Monday. The reserve was created in 1985 to retire entire fields or even farms of fragile land from crop production, but those “general” enrollments have fallen steeply since 2007.
The reserve “has evolved into a program distant from its original design,” wrote agricultural economist Carl Zulauf of Ohio State University at the farmdoc daily blog, who used the common abbreviation of CRP for the program. The USDA pays landowners an annual rent in exchange for setting aside fragile cropland for 10-15 years in the CRP, plus cost assistance payments for undertaking particular conservation practices.
With the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1, there will be more land, 9.2 million acres, in the Grasslands CRP, a working lands program, than in other CRP components, he said. The so-called Continuous CRP, which helps landowners install practices such as windbreaks and filter strips on small pieces of land, would be as big as the General CRP, at about 8.2 million acres apiece.
“This transformation, plus advances in GPS (Global Positioning Systems) and farm tillage as well as strong returns to producing crops since 2007, suggest it is time to merge General CRP and Continuous CRP into a Site Specific CRP,” said Zulauf. “Similar to Continuous CRP, Site Specific CRP would emphasize identification of sites in a field with the highest benefit-cost ratio for improving environmental quality while keeping the rest of the field in farm production.”
A new Carbon Capture CRP could be built around the Grassland CRP and employ working lands “to meet a contemporary environmental need,” said the OSU economist. The Grassland CRP was created as part of the 2014 farm bill when lawmakers moved the separate Grassland Reserve into the CRP.
“A Carbon Capture CRP initially focused on grasslands may offer more potential to capture carbon than the much-debated, currently unproven carbon markets for the 318 million acres of principal crops in the United States,” concluded Zulauf.