HENRY — For nearly 20 years, Carolyn Eck and her husband rented out their pastureland for cattle grazing northwest of Watertown, near Warner Lake. The land has not been tilled since before Eck moved to the property in 2003, she said.

It wasn’t until 2018, when cattle had mowed down the pasture like every other year, that Eck believed something was amiss with her land. When she looked out upon her pasture, she was devastated.

“I just thought, ‘Something isn’t right.’ It looked almost barren, starved. I don’t know the accurate way to describe it,” Eck said.

The following year, Eck enrolled 140 acres in the federal Conservation Reserve Program, which encourages landowners to protect environmentally sensitive land by not farming it.

Those enrolled in CRP enter a 10- or 15-year contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and receive an annual rental payment. In exchange, CRP participants plant species that create habitat for wildlife and improve the land’s overall health and quality.

Roughly four years into her contract, Eck said her CRP land has welcomed more wildlife and has acted as an educational tool on rehabilitation for farmers and environmental groups.

With a 37% decrease in the number of national CRP acres since 2007 and a continued need to preserve environmental health, landowners and several members of Congress hope to see program reforms in the next farm bill.

Under legislation that’s pending in Congress, future CRP participants could receive more than double the current payments. They also could receive more financial assistance in managing the land.

The CRP Improvement Act, which Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota and Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota re-introduced in January, proposes several changes:

• Raise the current annual payment limitation of $50,000, which was set in 1985 when the program started, to $125,000 to account for inflation and increasing land prices.
• Partially reimburse farmers for establishing infrastructure needed to support livestock grazing on approved CRP land, such as fences and water distribution.
• Assist landowners in paying for mid-contract management activities, which are actions that landowners undertake to disturb the land. According to the USDA, management activities mimic events like storms, grazing and fires, which support the growth and diversity of native plants by naturally disturbing the land. However, the CRP Improvement Act would not help with costs related to haying or grazing management.
• Permanently install State Acres for Wildlife Enhancement (SAFE) under Continuous CRP. SAFE is a CRP initiative in which farmers establish wetlands, grasses and trees to create habitat and food sources for threatened or endangered wildlife species. Owen Fagerhaug, South Dakota’s Farm Service Agency conservation program manager, said a limitation prevents USDA from enrolling more than 25% of a county’s eligible cropland acres in CRP. However, if the county agrees, the USDA can waive that limit to enroll land in Continuous CRP, which targets specific conservation practices, such as wetland buffers. If the bill passes, SAFE acres would also be able to bypass the county CRP acreage limit.

Currently, the CRP Improvement Act sits with the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. The bill was referred to the committee after Thune and Klobuchar re-introduced it in January.

If Congress cannot come to an agreement by the 2018 Farm Bill’s expiration, it could extend the current farm bill for several months while members decide the fate of the 2023 Farm Bill.

Conservation centered

South Dakota currently has the most CRP acreage it has had since the program’s inception in 1985 and is among the highest nationwide.

South Dakota had 2,104,715 acres enrolled in CRP as of May, accounting for 9.15% of total CRP acres in the U.S. The Rushmore State now has the third-largest number of CRP acres, behind Texas and Colorado, according to USDA data.

Still, Fagerhaug said South Dakota counties are not near the 25% acreage cap.

“(CRP) is a program to help environmentally sensitive land, improve wildlife habitat, soil erosion, water quality, wind erosion and just conservation in general,” he said.

Fagerhaug said the term “environmentally sensitive” encompasses varying resource concerns that must be addressed to improve a landscape.

“That could be a buffer area around a wetland to help improve the water quality. That could be some field windbreaks or farmstead shelter belts to improve wind erosion, provide livestock shelter,” Fagerhaug said.

Pete Bauman, a South Dakota State University extension natural resources field specialist, said CRP leads to a host of environmental benefits. CRP incorporates diverse plant species that attract pollinators, which in turn attract insects that bring in baby chicks, he said.

“We can use these lands without abusing them, and we still reap the benefits of the water quality, erosion control, wildlife habitat,” Bauman said.

Big impacts

CRP also encourages South Dakota to claim ownership of its downstream impact on neighboring states, Bauman said.

“If you want clean water, you don’t want it to run off a soybean field. You want it to soak into the ground. If it goes into the ground, it’s a filter. The ground becomes a filter. If (water) runs off the ground, the ground becomes a source of pollution,” said Dennis Hoyle, a third-generation Edmunds County farmer and long-time CRP landowner.

Hoyle, who has been a board member of the South Dakota Soil Health Coalition for eight years, has witnessed the difference in CRP soil firsthand.

After a heavy rainfall, he drove through his neighborhood and found sloughs filled with water that had run off the fields and into the wetlands. When he stopped by a section of his CRP land, he encountered a much different scene.

“I could have walked through that slough. I barely got my socks wet. Because (the water) stayed put. The land absorbed it,” Hoyle said.

Rehabilitation, wildlife conservation and education motivated Eck to enroll in a 15-year CRP contract.

“Along the way, there’s always something that we can learn from the land and so it’s important. I think that’s how I see it as an educational tool,” Eck said.

While many conservationists support CRP for its environmental effects, some critics say the program has several downfalls.

A 2012 research paper published by the Council on Food, Agricultural & Resource Economics, or C-FARE, notes that many of the studies on CRP’s economic impact on rural communities occurred during the first 10 years of the program.

Several of the studies the paper lists from the 1990s found that CRP had negative impacts on rural economies.