The problem with the CRP is that it is NOT the Conservation Reserve Program as originally formulated in the mid-1980s. I have participated since the first bidding period. If I had the option to exit from my existing 10-year contract without penalty I would do so. The problem is that ONLY farmer-landowners have any REAL vested interest in setting aside their privately-owned productive farmland in long-term conservation practices...meanwhile, everybody and his mother (meaning little old ladies in tennis shoes) want their thumb print on the program.
Going back a few years, I would receive a nasty letter from the USDA every late-June telling me that if I failed to mow my noxious weeds by the first of July in compliance with state law, the government would fine me and take away all the prior year's rents and tie me on the railroad track. Then out of the clear blue I started getting letters telling me that if I mowed my noxious weeds on my CRP before August 1st the same penalties would be levied. Thus a problem: Noxious weeds like Canada thistle head out by the 4th of July. and if not cut go to seed and spread the problem all over the neighborhood (hence the local noxious weed laws). What to do???
Enter the little old ladies in tennis shoes who have as their "do-good" contribution to the decline of common sense the crusade against townships, counties, and states mowing the sides of the roads where they believe the deer and antelope, rabbits and raccoons, pheasants and quail ought to play. These aged nutcases lost their tall-grass-on-the-side-of-the-road battle and have since gone to war with the farmers as "whistle blowers." Using the Freedom of Information Act they obtain the lists of farmers with CRP acreage and patrol the county roads looking for some hapless farmer who, incidental to mowing his non-CRP weeds, goes after a patch of thistle on his CRP land. And how did this come about?
Pheasants Forever, using the $$$ clout generated by their fund raising banquets, convinced the regulators in Washington that farmers are stupid "evil doers" who absent the regulatory 180 degree about face on noxious weeds, would go out and do "recreational mowing" to the detriment of nesting pheasants, as if $200,000 tractors don't depreciate as a function of running time; as if diesel fuel didn't cost real money, and as if farmers had nothing to do with their time but mow fields like they were suburban lawns. Thus Pheasants Forever bit the hand that fed...and continues to do so...and Last Dollar says:
"...please lets not turn this into a whining session..." as he comes on here whining for his self-aggrandizing political agenda, such like:
"...3) Call for authority to continue SAFE and CRP upland bird buffer habitat programs..." this being the buzz words for Pheasants Forever telling farmers how to manage their own CRP land; and
"...4) Call upon the USDA to implement an "open fields" Public access program immediately..." Under this logic, we all should have squatter's rights to all those homes where the federal government is involved in a sub-prime workouts and/or FNMA loan guarantees.
Methinks that Pheasants Forever overbid its hand by having bit the farmer's hand that feeds, resulting, consequently, in pheasant hunters (the enemy) being denied hunting access by farmers who know how the Catch-22 mowing regs came into being. Last Dollar's call to lobby for an "open access" Public access program (whatever exactly that means) is grasping for straws. The USDA is not going to tell landowners that they must open their land to interlopers with guns...if anyone thinks this is going to happen perhaps I can interest you in some ocean-front land I have for sale here in Illinois...or maybe a bridge in Brooklyn.
Now let me tell you about Quail Unlimited (QU): These people got to the regulators with their half-baked agenda and put their thumb print on some of the most idiotic regs in the history of government in the "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave." Get this! After I bid some of my land into the CRP (at half of what it would rent for), the USDA changed the contract after the bargain was struck, and I was told to sign the one-sided revised contract or "suffer consequences."
QU got an ex-post-facto change in management practices retro-ed into the contract that required me to disc up 1/3rd of my perfectly good and long-established upland bird cover each year to supposedly benefit quail, and I was also supposed to burn off 20% of the cover each year. Why? Because this was considered good quail management in Georgia. My local USDA functionary asked the pointed question: "Who's going to put the fire out?" Yet I was told by the local USDA chief honcho that I would be fined if I didn't sign the bogus contract. Fortunately my credentials go beyond farming...and I was at our kid's place in Virginia when this was a hot topic.
Wife Nancy dropped me off at the Rayburn Building in D. C. and I had a "heart to heart" with my congressman. As a former lobbyist I had with me the usual documents that got circulated and a day later my phone started ringing...and the "poison pill" regs were withdrawn. I had the option to withdraw my bid because the USDA had, in effect, voided our contract by unilaterally changing it, but I elected to go ahead with it because I felt that my 82.5 acres were best used for side-hill conservation to prevent erosion and possibly nurture birds.
I get $75 per CRP acre ($6,188 each October) and the land would rent to my tenants for $150 if devoted to corn or beans or winter wheat. Thus some may see the CRP as paying me $6,188--others may see me giving up a like amount in the name of conservation. As I said above, if I could opt out of the CRP contract without penalty I'd do so, not because of more rent, but because of the grief of dealing with our USDA regulators/regulations and people like Last Dollar, who I suspect has none of his own dollars at risk. EDM
