Crp Allotment Sparks Backlash Washington’s Rate Of Return Was Lowest Among Big Agricultural States

Washington placed dead last in the nation’s bid to enroll 16.1 million acres in a popular program that pays land owners to idle environmentally sensitive lands, according to federal records released Friday.

The finding immediately drew the wrath of politicians and farm groups who questioned the fairness of the newly reformed federal Conservation Reserve Program.

“Our farmers deserve better than this,” Democratic Sen. Patty Murray said.

Ken Lisaius, spokesman for Rep. George Nethercutt, a Spokane Republican, blamed the Clinton administration for inconsistencies in its environmental policies.

“The EPA calls for stricter air quality standards in Spokane, while the USDA exposes some of the most wind-sensitive acreage” surrounding the city, Lisaius said. “It’s as if neither agency knows what the other is doing.”

Even officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which manages the conservation program, suggested that errors within the department may have artificially lowered the cropland enrolled in Washington.

“Obviously there is a problem in the calculation,” said Larry Albin, state director of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, who vowed to investigate the matter.

The conservation program is widely praised by environmentalists and farmers for creating wildlife habitat and banking highly erodible soil for future generations.

But in the latest signup for the program, the USDA accepted just 172,000 acres in Washington, or 21 percent of the 819,400 acres that farmers and landowners offered.

About 784,800 of the 1.02 million acres currently enrolled in the program expire this year. That will leave just 405,700 acres in the program in 1998.

Farmers on Oct. 1 will idle the accepted acreage for 10 years, seeding it to prairie grass.

Washington’s rate of return was the lowest among the 30 agricultural states offering more than 100,000 acres, USDA records showed.

North Dakota ranked highest with a 94 percent acceptance rate. In the Northwest, Idaho was 83 percent; Oregon, 82 percent.

Washington’s poor showing means that land idled under the conservation program will drop by 600,000 acres next year. The bulk of that is spread across the Columbia Basin Plateau west of Spokane and the Palouse region to the south.

The change will expose a huge chunk of land to wind storms that frequently blow toward Spokane. It also will force farmers to plow fragile land back into wheat or barley, creating greater risk to their business.

“It’s going to have a major economic impact in lower producing areas,” said Jonathan Newkirk, Washington State University Cooperative Extension economist in Ritzville. “The price of wheat has to be pretty high to match the conservation reserve payments.”

Nationwide, the average payments will be $39.40 per acre, down from $50 in the current program, USDA said.

However, Newkirk said he was not surprised by the outcome of the bid. Under new reforms pushed by Midwestern congressional leaders, Washington cropland simply didn’t get credit for its vulnerability to wind erosion, he said. Moreover, Washington farmers, who own some of the most valuable cropland in the nation, likely bid too high compared with other regions.

“When you compare us to North Dakota or Montana, you see that growers in Washington started their bids at a much higher rate,” he said.

Gretchen Borck, with the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, called the acceptance numbers a “gross miscalculation” that the organization will challenge.

“There’s going to be a lot of environmentally sensitive land coming out,” she said.

, DataTimes