Crp Eligibility Seems Haywire

If the Clinton administration cares as deeply as it claims about clean air, clean water and wildlife habitat, it must reconsider the undeserved slap in the face it has delivered to Washington state’s farmers.

For a decade Washington’s air, streams and wildlife have benefited tremendously from the federal Conservation Reserve Program. Indeed, CRP is a nationwide success story, with strong support across the political spectrum - from conservationists, hunters, fishermen and farmers.

CRP has restored prairie grass and wildlife on a million acres of ecologically sensitive farmland in Washington state. The program pays farmers to return the land to a natural state.

But most of this land may soon be plowed under - causing, among other things, a worsening of the Spokane area’s dust storms.

This spring, the Department of Agriculture revised formulas that determine whether a farmer’s land qualifies for CRP. The goal was to cut CRP’s cost. In most states the cuts were modest; in Oregon and Idaho, 80 percent of the land farmers offered for CRP were accepted. But in Washington, only 21 percent was accepted. That’s a radical change, one that will cause an ecological loss as well as a sudden economic hardship for farmers who made a commitment to this program’s fine goals.

Instead of maintaining the land in natural grasses and shrubs in exchange for a modest federal payment, they’ll either have to cultivate it again or sell it, if they can, to pay the taxes and avoid foreclosure. Some have planted trees and shrubs as well as prairie grass. Busting sod is expensive and in the first years, even with luck and a high wheat price, costs will be high. To recover those costs, farmers will have to keep plowing this marginal land for years.

This would be bad for the region, and it certainly does not fit the high-flown eco-rhetoric of Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman. He praises CRP for bringing back scarce bird species from the brink and converting marginal farmland into a resource rich in wildlife and clean water, with soil that stays in place. South of Spokane, steep hillsides that had grown bald beneath the assaults of wind, water and modern monocultural farming have become grassy havens for exploding populations of deer, game birds, songbirds and other wild creatures. To the southwest in the Columbia Basin, land so dry it only can produce a crop every two or three years has blossomed in the same way.

If the U.S. Agriculture Department wants 80 percent of this land tilled again, it is at odds with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s campaign to reduce particulate pollution from dust storms.

Congressman George Nethercutt says there was a unique, damaging methodology in the way Agriculture Department staff rated the CRP eligibility of this state’s farmland.

Whatever the explanation may be, it is beyond dispute that something was haywire in the way the new federal criteria applied here. Unless the error is corrected farmers and the environment will be injured.

Worse, property owners will conclude that it’s foolish to be a partner with federal government in the long-term conservation of private lands, because the regulations are too fickle to trust.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board