3.4 Million Acres Gone From CRP Since September - Much Being Plowed In TX, KS, CO, Dakotas

[hatrack]

TRIBUNE, Kan. -- Surveying undulating grasslands that disappear into the western Kansas horizon, retired farmer Joe Govert pointed out parcel after parcel no longer enrolled in a federal program that pays property owners not to farm environmentally sensitive land.

The arid, wind-swept ground stripped of topsoil by Dust Bowl storms has laid undisturbed beneath a protective cover of native grasses that took two decades to re-establish under the Conservation Reserve Program. But millions of those acres are being plowed again after the 2008 Farm Bill capped the program at 32 million acres.

More than 3.4 million acres nationwide were taken out of the program in September when the owners' contracts expired. Most of them were in Texas, Colorado and Kansas, but hundreds of thousands of acres also came out in Montana and the Dakotas. The environmental and economic repercussions could extend beyond the nation's Heartland with a greater risk of new dust storms, soil erosion and water pollution. Farmers also worry more grain will mean even lower commodity crop prices.

CRP pays landowners not to farm easily eroded land, while splitting with them the cost of establishing vegetative cover. The goal is to reduce soil erosion and sedimentation in streams and lakes, improve water quality and establish wildlife habitat. The program has created millions of acres of habitat for quail, pheasant, prairie chickens and other wildlife and established filter strips and forested buffers to protect streams, lakes and rivers from sedimentation and agricultural runoff.

EDIT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/04/AR2009110400459.html

Do we never, ever learn a FUCKING THING?

:argh:

[mattvermont]

1. I did my graduate research on CRP land

I studied the effects of CRP policy on grassland bird populations in the midwest.
It was sad to to go back years later and see thousands of acres back into crop production where
Dickcissels and Henslow Sparrows once nested.

[malakai2]

2. I feel the same thing from time to time

Two big things bother me.

First is when I consider what was there historically, and was completely gone before I ever had a chance to experience it. I'd be outright pissed if I was born in New Zealand or Madagascar, got the education I've had to date, and then went home and realized what I'd never see. Even as it stands here in the midwest...it's very difficult to imagine what the river systems, the tallgrass prairies, the oak savannas, and the big wetland complexes looked like as little as 200 years ago. I'm guessing Illinois was a lot more interesting when travelers there encountered bison, elk, pumas, wolves, whooping cranes, eskimo curlews, passenger pigeons, carolina parakeets, etc., and it wasn't just a big cornfield interspersed with feedlots, drainage ditches, and blighted cities. Hell, I know it was a lot more interesting...early European accounts paint a cool picture, whichever state you're researching, and obviously we're not even hitting at late Pleistocene conditions.

Second thing is watching the incremental loss in real time, and realizing exactly what's going on. I live out on the Great Plains now. I have a copy of the Lewis and Clark journal, and a lot of what's in there is identifiable today, but you'd have to be able to ignore some things on the current landscape. The list is rather long and depressing-impacts of ongoing oil development, loss of unbroken prairie to coal mines and farms and pastures, continued navigation and irrigation projects along the larger rivers, loss of floodplain habitats, erection of wind turbines in or adjacent to the few remaining "pristine" areas, mercury deposition-if you don't already work for a permitting agency, I'd suggest you don't start working for one. You get nice packages dropped onto your desk detailing projects that are going to render a place much less ecologically functional, and you go look at the sites before the projects start, then when you've ensured the projects comply with the letter of the law you sign off on them, and you don't ever go back to the sites because you really don't want to see what was lost.

What's particularly frustrating about the CRP losses is that we know better but we tear it up anyway.

[XemaSab]

12. Not to mention the elms and the chestnuts

Environmental consulting sucks.

Want to go be monkey-wrenchers? :popcorn:

[malakai2]

13. I was thinking more like Into the Wild

But I have no idea where that would be anymore, so monkey-wrenchers it is.

[XemaSab]

11. Henslow's Sparrows

:(

[mattvermont]

14. of course, you are correct

you bird nerds are such sticklers.. :)
I do get agitated with the Canadian Goosers

[malakai2]

16. Can't believe I sped right past that one

Henslow's sparrows were my grad study critter too.

[XemaSab]

17. Oh, sorry, I didn't mean it as a correction

I just meant that the whole topic of Henslow's Sparrows is a sad one. :(

[formercia]

3. But, we dump Trillions into the Rat Hole Military Industrial Complex

to build weapons, ships and planes that consume resources with little return in value.

[glitch]

4. The return in value is identical to the split in wealth, IMO.

The top 1% of the country receive the value to the MIC subsidy. The bottom 99% pay the costs.

[phantom power]

5. Yes, but we forget the most important lessons every 75 years or so.

[zbikerwy]

6. actually, we have learned

But much of the land can be farmed again without harming the environment, said Adrian Polansky, director of the Farm Service Agency overseeing CRP in Kansas. Modern agricultural practices, such as no-till farming, curb soil erosion. CRP also gives a higher priority for re-enrolling the most environmentally sensitive acres.

for the most part living in the past "lewis and clark era" will carry us thru to the future, It's not 1804 anymore. practices have changed since the thirty's, drasticly, and for the better, from soil conservation pre-planting to harvest practices. I'm sorry to say you seem to forget we have advanced technology on our side now that actually WORKS.

[malakai2]

7. No till was all the rage back before mechanized farming

Now people have this tendency to think we've just discovered no till, and everyone uses it. Truth is, farmers gave it up when they discovered they could plow from fence to fence, and when drain tile was introduced, they used that too. Truth too...up here in the northern plains, a lot of farmers DON'T use no till because exposed topsoil absorbs more solar energy and warms up faster in the spring. It's also easier to dispose of liquid manure by discing it into the field...well, it's either that, or face fines and jail time for applying it on the surface or volatilizing it. They're still plowing up virgin prairie in the Dakotas, and I don't care what metric you are using, those patches of soil are worse off under wheat and the associated pesticides than they are under native grass and forbs-or CRP mixes. Conversion to cropland impacts lots of other things on a landscape scale, from loss of breeding habitat for grassland birds, to lowering of the water table and drying of nearby wetlands, to pesticide drift onto nearby wildlife habitat, all the way down to pesticide contamination of aquifers and waterways to which the contaminated aquifers discharge.

You can compare a host of conditions from 1804 to conditions in the 1930s, 1970s, 1980s, and today, and track a whole host of unfavorable changes over time. Increased CRP acreage was one of the few positive changes since the 30s. Was.

[NickB79]

9. In what world does plowing up millions of acres of prime wildlife habitat not hurt the environment?

Yes, we can farm that land now with less loss of topsoil than in years past. What we can't do is provide room for much of any wildlife populations in those farm fields. Acre after acre of corn, wheat, or soybean monocrops is an ecological desert, and wildlife will suffer for the loss.

[excess_3]

8. food prices, are too low or too high?

subsidies to big corn,
too low or too high

paying farmers not to grow food,
is good or bad?

[mattvermont]

15. the problem is that

the farmers have not been growing "food" for a long time.
A diversified agriculture in the midwest would do wonders for wildlife and habitat.
Making alcohol and HFCS out of corn is a manufacturing occupation.
Doesn't have anything to do with food.

[excess_3]

18. food and fuel have become the same thing

corn is easy to turn into fuel.

sometimes, you can't stop people
from taking matters into their own hands

[pscot]

10. Intensive farming of marginal land

in an area prone to periodic drought: what could possibly go wrong?