Conservation Reserve

The USDA says there is now enough room in the Conservation Reserve that, for the first time in months, it will accept applications for high-priority stewardship projects, such as filter strips, that prevent erosion and maintain water quality on fragile land. Enrollment runs from today through Aug. 17 for the practices, which require comparatively small amounts of land.

More than one-fifth of the 24 million acres now in the Conservation Reserve, a long-term farmland retirement program that pays landowners to idle fragile land, have been in the program for 20 or more years.

Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey says modifications to three USDA conservation programs will help organic farmers get established. A member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Casey said with demand on the rise for organic food, "we must do all we can to help American farmers and ranchers meet this demand."

With the start of the new fiscal year, the USDA said it will accept most of the pending applications to enroll land in the Conservation Reserve, the first time in five months that land has been accepted under the so-called continuous enrollment option. At the same time, the Farm Service Agency said it suspended work on applications submitted after Sept. 30 "until later in the 2018 fiscal year" so it does not exceed the 24 million-acre limit for the land-idling program.

With the start of the new fiscal year, the USDA will issue $8 billion in crop subsidy payments, triggered by persistently low commodity prices, to hundreds of thousands of farmers. The government also said it will pay $1.6 billion in annual rental payments to landowners who enrolled fragile land in the Conservation Reserve.

Faced with prolonged and intensifying drought in the northern Plains, USDA opened a still-larger portion of the Conservation Reserve, ordinarily off-limits to farm work, to emergency haying and grazing. In its fourth announcement of permission for landowners to use the idled land for livestock forage, the USDA said haying and grazing would be permitted on wetlands and on buffer strips, often used to protect waterways from farm runoff, that are enrolled in the reserve.

With drought intensifying in the northern Plains, the USDA is taking an additional step to help ranchers short of livestock forage. The owners of land idled in the Conservation Reserve have USDA approval to harvest hay from the set-aside land in counties in North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana where drought conditions are rated as "severe" or worse.

The Conservation Reserve Program, which pays landowners to take fragile land out of production, is so close to its enrollment limit that the USDA will not admit high-priority land that ordinarily could be enrolled at once.

With simpler rules and caps on payment rates, the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays landowners to idle fragile land for 10 years or longer, could expand from its current limit of 24 million acres, says the Democratic leader on the House Agriculture Committee. "There's a lot of reforms that could be done on CRP," said Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson at the North American Agricultural Journalists meeting.

With farm income in a slump, South Dakota Sen. John Thune unveiled a short-term land-idling program to boost a farmer's income for carrying out soil and water stewardship on marginal farmland. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), a small-farm group, said the idea "is worth looking at."

The Conservation Reserve, which pays landowners to idle fragile cropland, should be expanded to 40 million acres from its current 24 million acres, said Pheasants Forever, a hunting and wildlife habitat group, at the first congressional subcommittee hearing for the 2018 farm bill. Land stewardship and farm groups urged larger funding for two USDA programs aimed at working lands.

With enrollment in the land-idling Conservation Reserve nearing its statutory limit of 24 million acres, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced revisions in the program to protect water quality and to benefit wildlife, pollinators and wetlands. Under one of the changes, USDA will pay up to 90 percent of the cost of environmentally beneficial practices, such as bioreactors and saturated buffers that clean up run-off from drainage lines running beneath cropland.

USDA has accepted more than 600,000 acres into a Conservation Reserve initiative to preserve grasslands and aims to enroll at least an additional 200,000 acres in a sign-up that ends on Dec. 16. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) says a large part of the land is in states where there is a high risk of grasslands being converted to cropland or development.

Some young and beginning farmers say they have lost access to cropland because the owners could get a higher rental rate from USDA's Conservation Reserve than they could by renting it, said Iowa Sens Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The senators said they have heard complaints from Iowans over the past few months about USDA's operation of the reserve, which pays landowners an annual rent to idle farmland for 10 years or longer.