CRP benefits to wildlife backed by agency

State wildlife managers are working to help farmers sign up for a federal Farm Bill program that’s been dramatically successful in providing wildlife habitat since signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1985.

A new round of enrollment for the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) started Dec. 1 and runs through Feb. 26.

CRP pays a yearly rental payment in exchange for farmers removing environmentally sensitive land from agricultural production and planting cover species that will improve environmental quality. Some of the voluntary programs address wind and water erosion and related air and water quality.

In recent years, more emphasis has been given to seeding CRP land to specifically benefit wildlife. Programs in southeastern Washington seek to boost production of upland birds.

“We’re hopeful that farmers will pick up some additional acreage in this signup,” said Mike Kuttel Jr., Farm Bill coordinator for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. “CRP can be a year-round benefit to birds.”

Higher prices for farm products in recent years resulted in acreage coming out of CRP and going under the plow as contracts expired.

The number of CRP acres in Montana fell from 3.5 million in 2007 to 1.7 million in 2014.

With wheat prices considerably lower than they were a couple of years ago, some farmers have considered putting acres back into the federal program.

However, Washington state sign ups are still short of the maximum allowed by Congress.

The 2014 Farm Bill set a cap of 25 million acres in CRP across the country for 2016. Operators had enrolled 23.3 million acres in CRP through December.

The current acreage cap for CRP in Washington is 1,791,456 acres,which amounts to 25 percent of the state’s croplands. Washington had the seventh-most acres of CRP in the nation with 1,208,680 acres enrolled as of Oct. 1

Washington’s CRP acreage has dropped 16 percent in the past five years, Kuttel said, noting the state had 1,458,000 acres enrolled in 20ll.

To offset costs for landowners interested in enrolling in CRP, the state Fish and Wildlife Department is using funding through the hunter-funded pheasant enhancement program

Most of the pheasant enhancement funding from a portion of the small game hunting licenses had originally been used for releasing pen-raised birds at designated sites for hunters.

In recent years, the amount of money for releasing pheasants has been reduced to make more money available for creating better pheasant habitat for wild bird production, said Sean Dougherty, department small game section manager.

New CRP signups are being encouraged to use improved seed mixes that studies have found to be more favorable to upland birds.

“There’s what we call the pollinator mix, which bumps up the number of flowering plants,” Dougherty said.

Department staff has done research in Whitman County to help determine what mixes encourage more insects that are vital to the survival of pheasant chicks.

Research elsewhere has shown that bugs, an important source of protein, comprise about 90 percent of a game-bird chick’s diet for the first two weeks of life.

These invertebrates continue to be the primary dietary component for the first eight weeks of development before pheasant chicks transition to the adult diet that involves more grains and broad-leaf plants.

“Some of that work should be coming into fruition with new plantings,” Dougherty said, noting that as CRP signups decrease, wildlife managers are trying to emphasize CRP that provides better quality habitat.

The agency also has a grant application to improve plantings of forbs and shrubs in thousands of acres.

The federal Farm Service Agency handles CRP enrollment, while Kuttel is a state employee who works with the agriculture community on fish and wildlife conservation.

“We have state private lands biologists in the field to go out and build relationships with ag producers and offer technical assistance,” he said. “The results are beneficial to wildlife.

About nine private lands biologists are working in Eastern Washington and five on the West Side, he said.

“They’re also a resource for folks to implement benefits for fish and wildlife while maintaining working lands,” he said.

“Farms are bottom-line businesses,” he said. “They need to make a living.

“In some cases, doing these conservation programs may not pencil out, but a lot of these producers have a great conservation ethic and fish and wildlife are important to them.

“Some enroll just because they think it’s the right thing to do. The Farm Bill conservation projects help reward them for the loss of income on that ground.”

Producers know about the general CRP signup, but they may not necessarily be aware of some finer points, Kuttel said.

Washington can enroll up to 5,000 acres in a CRP program to provide habitat buffers for upland birds. “So far there hasn’t been a lot of interest, but it would be a really valuable tool.”

An upland bird buffer could be defined as a permanently vegetated border 30-120 feet wide around farm fields. “It has to have at least three native grasses and three forbs for upland bird forage,” he said.

“The landowner gets a signing incentive payment of $120 per acre. The Farm Service Agency pays up to 90 percent of the seeding and then a rental payment after that.”

This and other CRP programs are important to Washington’s upland game birds especially in the state’s pheasant focus area that includes Whitman and portions of Garfield, Columbia and Walla Walla counties.

As of mid-November, CRP enrollment in these counties was 121,687 acres in Whitman, 29,120 acres in Garfield, 35,657 acres in Columbia and 125,679 acres in Walla Walla.

In addition to Fish and Wildlife staff, producers also get technical and financial assistance from conservation districts and the USDA Service Center.

Another new option is the CRP Grasslands Program intended to prevent conversion of grasslands to cropland or development. Nationally 2 million acres are available for this program.

Producers can continue to hay or graze the acres enrolled as long as activity is outside the primary upland bird nesting season. No cropping history is required.

CRP continues to be extremely important to sage-grouse in Washington, Kuttel said. More than 447,000 acres are enrolled in CRP in Douglas, Lincoln, Grant, and Yakima Counties, which are the core of the sage-grouse distribution in Washington.

A component of CRP called State Acres for Wildlife Enhancement (SAFE) has been very popular in Douglas County in particular, with more than 64,000 acres enrolled.

SAFE provides additional financial incentives for producers to plant and maintain native vegetation needed by sage-grouse, including bunch grasses, forbs and sagebrush.

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service has a program called Voluntary Public Access and Habitat Incentive Program.

State Fish and Wildlife officials used a past grant from this program to add 80,000 acres to the Hunt by Reservation only program in southeastern Washington and improve more than 3,000 acres of CRP by interseeding forbs and legumes, Kuttel said.

“WDFW recently received nearly $1.4 million of VPA-HIP funding and will dedicate $660,000 of it to improve cover on 1,000 acres of CRP and provide upland bird hunting access on 60,000 acres in the Pheasant Focus Area,” he said.

The rest will be used to encourage access for hunting deer, turkey and waterfowl in areas from Puget Sound to northeastern Washington, he said.