Farmland conservation program may be plowed under

When crop prices rise, farmers plant fencerow to fencerow, even on marginal land where the soil washes off or blows away. When prices inevitably drop, many farmers enroll some of their less-valuable land in federal conservation programs, removing it from production. The largest and most successful of these land-retirement schemes, the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP, pays farmers about $1.7 billion yearly in exchange for a 10- or 15-year promise to idle land with the highest risk of erosion. Doing this also protects a lot of wildlife habitat, particularly for declining grassland birds, and reduces soil erosion by an estimated 450 million tons a year. But now, CRP is facing a triple threat: Crop prices are high, so farmers didn't renew contracts on 4.4 million acres last year, and they aren't enrolling enough new acreage to make up the loss. The federal budget crisis has put farm conservation programs on the chopping block. And the new farm bill -- which funds farm conservation and other subsidies as well as rural development -- hits Congress next year. In May, 72 agribusiness groups, including livestock producers who want increased grain production for cheap feed, and fertilizer companies eager to maximize sales, asked Congress to put new "flexibility" in CRP -- letting farmers pull out without penalties even before their contracts expire. Groups like Ducks Unlimited and the National Wildlife Federation are defending CRP, but many conservationists and farmers agree that the program could be improved...more