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Consevation Reserve Program (CRP)

cutterone

Well-known member
With shortages in grains and high feed prices one solution to increasing crop acreage, pasture and hay availability could be to open up more acres from CRP. What are your thoughts on this program and this possibility? Should subsidy payments for CRP be increased to adjust to current cash rents? Is this program abused with payments to parcels that would never be used for crops and therefor "free bucks" to some landowners?
 

mrj

Well-known member
cutterone, in my observation, the so called 'sportsmens groups' have very strong influence on the CRP program. They see it as a place to hunt without charge, as there is a government program supporting the landowner. Not sure they gain that access everywhere, but they DO try!

Re. abuse of the program, that, too, varies, IMO. Originally, it was dependent upon the local gov't. officers to make the decision as to what was accepted and was not. Some made it difficult as possible for the land owner, accepting only small plots out of a larger field, rather than the entire field (and I'm not talking 'large' farm), some farmers abused it by getting marginally erodible land into the CRP, then actually breaking up grassland that was even rougher (more erodible) than that they put into CRP, to make up for the 'lost' crop land.

Whatever the program is written, whatever the rules,whatever the penalties, there will be some people who figure out how to 'work' the program to give themselves a financial benefit over those who play fair, stretch the rules, and twist it into something not intended, before the ink to print it has dried!

The up side is, there has been a repair of sorts to much land that should never have been farmed. There has been some small benefit to limited use as hay or pasture in severe drought areas, along with the questionnable uses in less damaged areas. POSSIBLY that small benefit is worth the unfairnss and outright graft most such programs seem to foster. But ONLY if that land is not allowed to be tilled again, IMO.

mrj
 

Mike

Well-known member
One CRP program that especially irks me is the CRP "Pine Planting" program.

The program paid the landowners up to $40 per acre annually to remove land from farming and plant pine trees, starting in 1985.

The paper industry has benefitted big time because the price of paperwood has fallen to all time lows with the abundance of pines.

This land will probably never be converted back to farmland. Stumps.
 

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