Once was... is not.

"Copper" waits patiently at the end of a food plot in a CRP field.

The scene pictured above, will take on a drastically different look in the fall of 2013.  No... it's not that "Copper" will be older and fatter.  Although that may be the case, as with most of us, the CRP field where this picture was taken has fallen to the plow and will be farmed this spring along with 9.7 million acres that have been released from the CRP program since 2007.  With the increase in grain prices and land prices, CRP has failed to keep up with support and demanding values.  Although we are currently playing both sides of the fence, where we will see it affect us the most is definitely in our hunting.  The Snake Den will lose approximately 960 acres of CRP ground in 2013.  Luckily we have teamed up with another landowner, who is very pro-active in enrolling his ground in the program, and should combat the loss with the addition of another couple thousand acres.  In the scheme of things though, it's a drop in the bucket.   South Dakota lost nearly 168,000 acres of CRP in the last year, Lyman County nearly 20,000.  CRP provides vital nesting and brood-rearing ground needed for hen and chick survival.    

Attached is a snippet of the newsletter that I receive from Pheasants Forever.  There are a ton of stats contained within the article, but the bottom line is this: as CRP acres decline, so do pheasant numbers.  You can also see the correlation provided here by SD Game, Fish and Parks.  We can only hope that congress and landowners alike can see the value in CRP, along with pheasants and other wildlife.

USDA Secretary Delivers Welcome CRP News to Pheasants, Quail and Hunters
CRP General Sign-up announced along with opening continuous CRP
Minneapolis, Minn. - February 16 -
Pheasants Forever (PF) and Quail Forever (QF) were pleased to be joined today by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack during its sold out 30th anniversary banquet in Minneapolis. During his keynote address at the event, Secretary Vilsack announced much needed conservation tools to the attendees. The audience for the announcement included U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, U.S. Senator Al Franken, U.S. Representative Collin Peterson, and more than 1,000 Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever members.
The Secretary outlined three major USDA conservation measures for Ameri-ca’s farmers and ranchers. First, a new 4-week Conservation Reserve Pro-gram (CRP) General Sign-up is scheduled to start May 20th and will provide landowners with a competitive opportunity to enroll their toughest-to-farm, environmentally sensitive acres in CRP for the benefit of wildlife, water qual-ity and soils. The last general signup occurred during the spring of 2012, in which nearly 4.5 million acres were offered and 3.9 million of those acres were enrolled in the program.
Second, Secretary Vilsack announced there will be a review of soil rental rates in an effort to keep CRP competitive with current near-record commodity-driven land prices. And third, Secretary Vilsack announced plans to reopen enrollment for Continuous CRP acreage made possible by the extension of the 2008 Farm Bill through 2013. The reopening of Con-tinuous CRP makes available 1 million acres reallocated in 2012 to some of CRP’s most targeted and effective practic-es, like CP38 SAFE and CP33 Buffers.
“Under President Obama’s leadership, USDA has worked with a record number of farmers, ranchers and landowners – more than 500,000 across the nation – to achieve record benefits in soil and water conservation,” said Secretary Vilsack. “By ensuring that CRP remains strong, vibrant and an economically viable option for producers, we can ensure impactful conservation efforts in the years to come – including healthy wildlife habitat in every corner of our nation.”
“We absolutely needed these tools to be delivered now. Considering the massive habitat losses experienced as a result of last summer’s drought and the fact producers are planning their spring plantings right now, this was a critical announcement for farmers, hunters and conservationists,” says Dave Nomsen, Pheasants Forever’s vice-president of governmental affairs. “Of particular importance today was mention of the soil rental rates review. Improving CRP’s financial viability is critical to making this program successful for our farmer friends.”
The Conservation Reserve Program is a voluntary program designed to help farmers, ranchers and other agricultural producers protect their environmentally sensitive land. Through CRP, eligible landowners receive annual rental payments and cost-share assistance to establish long-term, resource conserving covers on eligible farmland. Land can be enrolled on a continuous basis for a period of 10 years. Land currently not enrolled in CRP may be offered in this sign-up provided all eligibility requirements are met.
Landowners interested in learning more about the upcoming general signup, review of soil rental rates or the continuous CRP acres available, are asked to contact a Pheasants Forever Farm Bill wildlife biologist. For additional inquiries, please contact Dave Nomsen, Pheasants Forever vice-president of governmental affairs at (320) 834-3076 or email Dave.
Pheasants Forever, including its quail conservation division, Quail Forever, is the nation's largest nonprofit organization dedicated to upland habitat conservation. Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever have more than 135,000 members and 720 local chapters across the United States and Canada. Chapters are empowered to determine how 100 percent of their locally raised conservation funds are spent, the only national conservation organization that operates through this truly grassroots structure.

Secretary Vilsack Announced Welcome CRP News
Is Anyone Paying Attention? We’ve Lost 9.7
Million Acres of CRP Land in Five Years.
The amount of land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), at 27.1 million acres, is down by 26 percent, or 9.7 million acres in the past five years, to a 25 year low. During this same time period, corn acreage has increased by 13 million acres. Farmers are once again planting crops on marginal lands “fencerow to fencerow” to cash in on today’s high commodity prices. CRP payments haven’t risen to compete with crop returns, and the program itself is being whittled away by Congress.
The Conservation Reserve Program exists to provide land owners with some financial incentive to idle their land, which in turn benefits the environment while providing commodity price sup-port by reducing surplus production. But now, ethanol policy makes that curb of surplus production unnecessary. The original CRP legislation, the Food Security Act of 1985, set a goal of enrolling over 40 million acres into the program by 1990 but that has never been reached and is now falling sharply. The laws regulating the program have been tweaked many times since begun in 1985, being tugged and pulled by various special interests. Prior to the CRP, we had “set aside acres” in the 1970′s and “soil bank” acres in the 1960′s.
If you visit one of the USDA’s websites promoting the benefits of the Conservation Reserve Program, you will see a long list including the following:
• Reduces soil erosion by an estimated 450 million tons per year, compared with pre-CRP erosion rates.
• Protects surface waters from sediment and nutrient enrichment with enrollment of 1.8 million acres of streamside grass and forested buffers.
• In prime pheasant habitat, a 4 percent increase in CRP grassland acres was associated with a 22 percent increase in pheasant counts.
By K. McDonald on March 7th, 2013
• Sequesters 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually in soils and vegetation on enrolled lands.
• Includes 8.3 million acres enrolled in the Prairie Pothole region providing habitat important for migratory waterfowl, grassland birds, and dependent species.
There’s nothing not to like in that list. CRP policy is an environmentally friendly one which helps protect this nation’s privately owned natural resources of soil and water. It adds to biodiversity and wildlife habitat. The program is especially appreciated by older farmers. On the down side, nearly half of CRP funds go to the top ten percent of recipients, according to the Environmental Working Group. And, some politicians argue that we shouldn’t pay farmers not to farm where they shouldn’t be farming in the first place.
Today, the economic incentive to grow corn, even on marginal lands, far exceeds the average amount of $57 paid per acre by the CRP program. Keep in mind that most of the acres enrolled in CRP have always been the marginal lands, those which are less productive, and are more vulnerable to erosion. In addition, budgetary pressures in writing a new farm bill make this program an easy target. At this year’s current enrollment the CRP costs the taxpayer around $1.6 billion, down from 2 billion a few years ago.
The map below shows us that 2.5 Million Acres of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) land was lost in just one year in the con-tracts held in 2011 versus 2012. Much of the area exiting the program this past year was in the Plains states to grow more corn on marginal land. The two states converting the most CRP land to crops this year are North Dakota and Montana, in part due to in-roads of corn and soybean acres into this traditionally wheat growing region. After these two states, Minnesota, Missouri, and Kansas top the list of recent CRP lands lost for crop conversion.
Agribusinesses are reaping fat financial rewards from the price incentive to plant a record 97 million acres in corn, including on what was formerly CRP land. Further land use changes are also resulting from the ripple effect that high corn prices have on all of the commodities, not only in the U.S. but around the globe. High prices are appreciated by producers, but current Ag policy of intensive, industrial, all out agricultural production isn’t free and it isn’t sustainable. Unfortunately, environmental interests can’t compete politically with policies that promote the increased use of fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, commodity exchange, and equip-ment sales.
This next graph shows us the loss of CRP land since 2007 in the top four corn producing states.
Farmers, who are always at the mercy of policy which determines their economic survival, are being told today that they are being patriotic and helping with national security and energy independence by growing corn for ethanol. A truly patriotic policy would instead be the preservation of our nation’s soil and water for future generations.
This story wouldn’t be complete without pointing out the sharp contrast in priorities of land conservation between the top agricultural leaders of the E.U. and the U.S.
The European Union’s agricultural commissioner, Dacian Cioloş, saw the destruction that all out production did to the soils in his home country of Romania under the former communist regime, so he wants to see 7 percent of E.U. farmland turned into environ-mental priority areas which are off-limits to the use of chemicals and high-tech farming methods. He also knows that 90 percent of Europeans want to see policies which promote the public good in return for their taxpayer money spent on agriculture. He was trained as a horticultural engineer and spent thirteen months over a number of years doing organic farm internships in Brittany France. He was selected to lead the E.U. in agriculture because of his horticultural experience and education, and for his “modern vision” for agriculture. He wants an E.U. agricultural policy that discourages monocultures, encourages rotational farming methods, and decreases fertilizer use.
In contrast, our U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, is a lawyer and a politician, a former governor of Iowa.
If allowed a say on the issue, Americans, too, might strongly support CRP initiatives over today’s other farm programs which are far more expensive: direct payments, tax payer subsidized crop insurance, and biofuels incentives.
But, CRP support in Congress is fading. In the 2008 farm bill, it took a hit of 7 million fewer acres, and in the 2012 farm bill the plan is to cut another 7 million acres and to cap the program at a total of 25 million acres by 2017. That’s a far cry from the original 40 million acres planned in the 1985 legislation. A total of $6 billion in conservation cuts is expected in the next farm bill. In the congressional fiasco that occurred at 2012′s year-end, the old farm bill was extended through September 2013, when a new bill cover-ing the next five years should have been passed and would now be in place.
The story and statistics that I’ve presented above aren’t widely-known. Americans need to contact their policy-makers to let them know what is important to them. The Conservation Reserve Program and agricultural conservation support is in trouble and needs our help.