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.
