Few takers for Conservation Reserve opt-out offer

Few takers for Conservation Reserve opt-out offer

Landowners removed a comparatively small 90,000 acres from the long-term Conservation Reserve under an “opt out” provision written into the 2014 farm law just as commodity prices slumped. The withdrawn land is one-third of 1 percent of total enrollment in the reserve, according to USDA data. “The preliminary estimate is that 90,000 acres were withdrawn,” says the department in its most recent report on the reserve.

Besides the opt-out clause, Congress used the 2014 farm law to lower the ceiling on land in the reserve to 24 million acres by fiscal 2016, reflecting broad demand early this decade to expand crop production. Corn, wheat and soybean prices peaked in 2012 and have been on the decline since.

“This is considerably fewer acres than some of the proponents of the opt-out provision may have imagined, but commodity prices are also considerably lower than when the provision got added to what became the 2014 Act,” said the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

Under the opt-out offer, landowners would withdraw land so long as it was not highly erodible, a wetland or devoted to special purposes such as wellhead protection, wildlife habitat or filter strips. The offer applied to land that had been in the reserve for at least five years.

During a House Agriculture subcommittee hearing Thursday on conservation programs, some lawmakers suggested the ceiling on the reserve was too low, given the recent drought in the Plains and Southwest and the slump in commodity prices. The Conservation Reserve was created in 1985 and pays an annual rent to owners who agree to idle fragile crop land for at least 10 years.

A USDA fact sheet on the opt-out option is available here.

The USDA homepage for the Conservation Reserve is available here.