USDA Announces New CRP Signup; Will Prairie-nesting Ducks Benefit? Not likely

Let’s start with the illusion of good news: The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for the second time in as many years, has announced a new general Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) signup for interested landowners.

The USDA would like to enroll 4 million acres into the program, so says Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The new acres will be put on the rolls in October.

Now the bad news: Roughly 4.4 million CRP acres are set to expire in 2011, which means a net loss of roughly 400,000 acres. What’s more, over the next few years, a slew of expiring CRP contracts will occur in the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR), AKA the duck factory of the Dakotas and parts of Montana and Minnesota.

Translation: Prairie-nesting birds (game and nongame) in general and ducks in particular will lose thousands upon thousands of acres of indispensable grassland habitat, the consequences of which will affect hunters, especially duck hunters throughout the U.S., in the years ahead.

The Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers and ranchers to idle environmentally sensitive lands and plant them to grass and other cover types, is the most sweeping beneficial volunteer conservation initiative ever hatched by the federal government. It’s only rival is the Soil Bank program of the 1950s.

The program, now in its 25^th year, is an incubator for prairie ducks and is largely responsible for the U.S. producing more ducks than prairie Canada in the last two years—a seismic shift in the waterfowl world. (see story)

According to research conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, CRP has added more than 2 million additional (or incremental) ducks to the fall flight each year since 1992. The program has also created hundreds of thousands of habitat acres for pheasants, quail, prairie chickens, nongame prairie birds and other wildlife and established grass and forested “buffers” that protect streams, rivers and lakes from sediment loads and noxious agriculture runoff.

Not even the ecologically blind could dispute the program’s importance, but its long-term fate rests with Congress and a host of mitigating factors.

One such factor: the massive federal U.S. deficit, expected to mushroom to about $1.5 trillion. The estimated deficit already has policymakers from both major political parties calling for cuts to the next farm bill.

And if history is a guide (and it will be), the cuts will center on conservation, not commodity programs. That means CRP, the most expensive conservation measure of all, will be chum to congressional sharks.

I’m told CRP’s national allotment, which was slashed in the last farm bill from 39 to 32 million acres, could be again and that the USDA is seriously considering CRP land for “biofuels” production.

The latter is an intriguing proposition, but without details, it’s only a meaningless trial balloon. More on that topic in later posts.

In the end, the USDA is doing what it does best: straddling the fence on the future of CRP. In an Associated Press story, Jonathan Coppess, administrator for the Farm Service Agency, trotted out the old, tired “strike a balance” theme between conservation and production as the agency plans for CRP’s future.

“We need to do our best to focus the limited dollars we have to make the best investment,” said Coppess.

Doesn’t exactly warm a duck hunter’s heart, does it?

To read more about the importance of CRP, see my column from the winter 2009 issue of Delta Waterfowl magazine.