Rich Landers: Conservation Reserve Program deserves nurturing

When it comes to building homes for wild creatures, a sportsman with a shovel is no match for a farmer with a plow.

Everyone should admire and support conservation-oriented groups that recruit volunteers for building fences, tapping springs and planting shrubs to boost wildlife habitat. Their hearts, fundraising and muscle are invested in the right place.

But given a season in the field, no volunteer group, or government agency for that matter, can do more for wildlife than the American farmer.

That’s why the Farm Bill, which is up for renewal this year, is the nation’s most important wildlife conservation package.

About half of the land area in the lower 48 states is in agricultural, ranching or private forest production. Billions of dollars have been spent in the past 20 years on programs that encourage farmers to follow more ecologically sound practices or to retire underproductive or fragile land altogether. Wildlife has benefited dramatically as these programs help stem last century’s massive demise of many habitats.

This isn’t to suggest that every dollar has been well-spent.

For some farmers, the programs have been more like retirement plans rather than conservation packages. In many cases, the government-enforced conservation measures themselves were not well thought out in terms of their benefit to wildlife.

However, the bottom line is impressive:

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) alone has transferred nearly 36 million acres of former farmland into wildlife habitat. That’s about 16 percent of the crop and grazing lands in the lower 48 – more land than the combined acreage of the National Wildlife Refuge system and all state-owned wildlife areas, excluding Alaska.

When the current Farm Bill was passed in 2002, it included an 80 percent boost in funding for conservation programs, some of which were borne from the success of CRP. Other vital Farm Bill conservation programs include:

Conservation Security Program – financially rewards farmers for using ecologically sound practices on their land, such as reducing pesticide use or creating buffers around waterways.

Forest Stewardship Program and Forest Land Enhancement Program – help family forest owners to develop management plans and conserve forest land for wildlife.

Grasslands Reserve Program – pays landowners to restore and protect grass, range and shrub land through either 30-year or permanent easement.

Wildlife Habitat Incentive Program – pays costs up to 75 percent on habitat improvement for rare and declining species on private lands.

Wetlands Reserve Program – pays farmers to remove flood-prone areas from production for 30 years, or indefinitely, and restore them as wetlands.

The emphasis on restoring wildlife-rich wetlands has been an unmitigated success to help re-wet portions of the lower 48 states, which have lost more than 50 percent of their original wetlands.

However, CRP – the original Farm Bill wildlife conservation program adopted in 1985 – continues to be the heart of the Farm Bill by paying landowners to remove highly erodible or otherwise environmentally sensitive land from production for 10-15 years.

The federal government pays farmers to stop farming underproductive land.

Wildlife gets more high-quality habitat.

Sportsmen get more opportunities to hunt.

The resulting increase in hunting and wildlife viewing activity has funneled billions of dollars into rural economies.

Jerry Snyder, a Ritzville-area farmer and legislative coordinator for the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, is the first to agree that CRP leaves room for improvement.

But after a recent lobbying trip to Washington, D.C., Snyder said he will be happy if Congress simply holds the line.

“Washington Wheat Growers don’t want to change the rules or regulations, just leave it the way it sits,” he said.

“There’s a lot of discussion about moving CRP to the Midwest. That would take away funding available for this region. With corn prices so high, it’s hard to imagine it taking off in the Midwest, but it’s very important to us here.”

Considering the variability in wheat prices and the costs of producing it, CRP has become an element for survival of many Northwest landowners, not to mention the deer, pheasants and Hungarian partridge that hang on to farmers’ shirttails.

“This is especially true in Douglas County, where land that is relatively unproductive in the first place has been virtually taken over by restrictions for endangered species like sage grouse and pygmy rabbits,” he said.

The competition for CRP funding is stepping up. Demand for enrollment is about three times the amount of authorized acreage.

South Dakota has used CRP to create a pheasant Mecca that’s become a pay-to-hunt cash cow on private lands throughout the state. Landowners and business have a huge economic stake in preserving it.

To bid more competitively for CRP money, many Washington farmers earned points by promising to allow some public hunting without charge on their CRP lands.

That means Washington doesn’t have billboards and state-sponsored tourism promotions touting the “product” produced by CRP.

But never underestimate the value of land that’s properly prepared and left alone.