Conserving farmers
Last week, the New York Times ran a story about an increasing number of farmers pulling land out of the USDA's Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) because of rising commodity prices. The CRP basically pays farmers not to farm. As the program’s website says, CRP “encourages farmers to convert highly erodible cropland or other environmentally sensitive acreage to vegetative cover, such as tame or native grasses, wildlife plantings, trees, filterstrips, or riparian buffers.”. Farmers have been using the system for years to get payments for marginal land that is not all that profitable for them in the first place. But as food prices for everything from milk and eggs to corn have risen to all time highs, the incentive to not farm that land has been diminished. Some processors have even argued that farming CRP land is necessary in order to lower food prices.
Tom Philpott writes that, “plowing up the CRP land won't ease the food crunch significantly, but it will degrade millions of acres of vulnerable land and eliminate habitat for wildlife.” That’s probably true. But that doesn’t mean that we need to defend the CRP. The program was doomed for something like this from the get go. Because the CRP relies on the idea that farming land and conserving it are mutually exclusive, it encourages a choice—when that choice has to be made, farmers are going to farm.
The conservation goals of the CRP could be better met by farming CRP land in a sustainable way that delivers real profits to farmers. The USDA and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the arm that administers the program, would be better off putting CRP money into programs that encourage farmers to graze cattle or sheep rotationally or use other sustainable farming practices appropriate to the land types and concerns of each farm. This is the only way to make the program sustainable.
On my farm, I have never taken money from CRP or any other USDA program. Nonetheless, I would wager a bet that on average my land boasts greater species diversity than most CRP land. Admittedly, most farmers are not like me, and they don’t keep running lists of the birds nesting on their land or stop to watch the dung beetles in their fields. We must understand that the primary motivation for most farmers to put their land into CRP in the first place is financial. When the balance isn’t right, they will pay the penalty and pull their CRP land back into detrimental commodity production. But what if they could still use that land to make a profit from something like rising beef prices, continue to receive payments for sustaining that land from the CRP program, and have guidance on the management of that land from conservationists? It would be a win-win all around without the forced choice to farm or not to farm.
Farmers farming is the best bet for conservation. We just have to ensure that farming is sustainable, varied, and sensitive to the landscape.
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