Federal Conservation Program At Risk

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer is considering a plan to scale back one of the country's most successful conservation programs. For more than 30 years, the Conservation Reserve Program has been paying farmers to protect swamps, native grasslands and other environmentally important lands found on their farms.

Some 450,000 farmers participate in this program, but if the country's food producers have their way that number will start falling soon. In recent years, these companies have been hard hit by the sharply rising price of corn. They want the government to help them out by making it possible for farmers to plant corn in the conservation reserves.

"Corn prices are triple what they were a year ago," says Jesse Sevcik, of the American Meat Institute. "We think there should be an opportunity for farmers to opt out (of the reserve programs) and respond to market signals."

Spokesmen for the Department of Agriculture say Schafer is considering such a plan. Environmentalists such as Neil Shader, of Ducks Unlimited, say that is a scary prospect. Shader says it is far more important to maintain the conservation reserves than it is to find space for more cornfields.

"The conservation reserve program is the most successful land conservation program in history," he says. "This is the Holy Grail of conservation."

Shader says the nation's conservation reserves prevent more than 400 million tons worth of erosion every year. They also put huge numbers of birds into the skies above the country's so-called "prairie pothole" region, which includes parts of North Dakota, Minnesota, Montana and Iowa.

Those reserves add 2.2 million ducks to the fall migrations every year, Shader says.

"That's equal to the number of ducks that are harvested each fall from Maine to Florida, all along the Atlantic coast," he says.

It is not just the nation's food producers who want bigger corn crops, however. It is also the nation's ethanol producers, who buy more than a quarter of the corn crop every year. That's why Schafer tried to give livestock owners some relief last spring by opening about two-thirds of the nation's conservation reserves to limited grazing and hay-making.

Environmental groups complained in court about this move, arguing that Schafer should have filed an environmental impact report for attempting it. Last week, a U.S. District Court Judge in Seattle agreed and put the program on hold.

But Marci Hilt, a press officer at the Agriculture Department, says Schafer is now considering a more ambitious set of changes. They would let the nation's farmers turn the reserves back into fields and pastures without returning the money they were paid to protect them.

Economist Tom Elam, of the consulting firm Farm Econ LLC, says that's an offer many farmers will be unable to refuse, partly because the money they make maintaining the conservation reserves isn't much compared to the money they would make by planting crops such as corn.

"The value of the potential production off that land has double or tripled" in recent years, Elam says. "The economic pressure's on the farmers to get their land out of the program so that they can start to farm it."

Environmental groups say such a change would mean fewer birds and much more erosion, for starters. They also say it would not even start to put a dent in the price of crops such as corn. Duane Hovorka, of the National Wildlife Federation, says that's because lands protected by the conservation reserves aren't likely to produce big bumper crops.

"It's not the level deep-black soils that you have in some locations," he says. "It's environmentally sensitive, but it's also economically marginal."

Spokesmen for Schafer's office say a decision could come any day now.