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US Pays Farmers Billions To Save The Soil. But It's Blowing Away (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares an NPR report: Soil has been blowing away from the Great Plains ever since farmers first plowed up the prairie. It reached crisis levels during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when windblown soil turned day into night. In recent years, dust storms have returned, driven mainly by drought. But Shook -- and others -- say farmers are making the problem worse by taking land where grass used to grow and plowing it up, exposing vulnerable soil. This is where federal policy enters the picture. Most of that grassland was there in the first place because of a taxpayer-funded program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture rents land from farmers across the country and pays them to grow grass, trees and wildflowers in order to protect the soil and also provide habitat for wildlife. It's called the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP. Ten years ago, there was more land in the CRP than in the entire state of New York. In North Dakota, CRP land covered 5,000 square miles. But CRP agreements only last 10 years, and when farming got more profitable about a decade ago, farmers in North Dakota pulled more than half of that land out of the CRP to grow crops like corn and soybeans. Across the country, farmers decided not to re-enroll 15.8 million acres of farmland in the CRP when those contracts expired between 2007 and 2014.
Use the land to grow weed. You don't really have to plow it.
Farming got more profitable when the government fully embraced ethanol. Farmers plowed under land to grow more corn to supply the government-funded ethanol plants that needed to go into gasoline by government mandate. Now the government is blaming farmers for farming and wanting to change the rules.
If you want the farmers to save their soil, you've got to let them go bankrupt.
Tense is everything, and tense is something the title and summary screws up royally.
Title says ...
however the summary says the US stopped paying the farmers that money, because the farmers ceased to renew the enrolments...
The title makes it sound like the farmers are taking the money and eschewing their responsibilities and allowing the soil to blow away - they aren't, those responsibilities expired when the money stopped flowing.
farmers want an increased government handout so they hold the land to ransom. They already expect their children to be bequeathed jobs for life. If they exacerbate the soil erosion they reason the gov. will just give them yet more money to truck the soil back from wherever the wind took it.
Nullius in verba
Ethanol does not contain as much energy per kg as gasoline--it takes more to drive equal distances compared to gasoline. And in a world full of hungry people, ethanol diverts agriculture away from food. It requires government mandates and government subsidies.
In North America, it is not economically viable on its own. Cheap ethanol from sugar cane is available from Brazil, cheaper than we can produce it ourselves. However the high artificial tariff on imported ethanol eliminates that option. The solution is to end the ethanol mandate, and use Brazillian ethanol. But Monsanto, ADM, Bayer, et al have a lot invested in politicians to prevent that from happening.
Without the tax incentives, farmers will find something else grow.
. . . "grass", ya know, like the type that goes into "funny" cigarettes.
The farmers will make enough money with that, and won't need any taxpayer money.
Hey, and then the government can "tax the grass", and actually make money on the scheme.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Tilth is farmers' fault. There are zero-tilth agricultural methods. Clearing is suppliers' fault. They effectively force farmers to clear woods around their property that would slow winds because it also harbors animals that might shit on the lettuce, or what have you. Instead of doing due diligence and actually inspecting produce, they just want to be able to handle it like it's made of plastic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Don't worry about it, we don't need to take care of anything in the environment. Jesus gave us the Earth to rape for profit. I mean, how can we possibly affect the planet? It's so big! Even if we do end up fucking it up, we only move up the start date for the end times, and God will bail us out with the rapture. Not only will we be super rich, but then we get to go to heaven! Bonus!
Stop subsidizing corn for corn syrup and ethanol. Make antibiotic use in grain lots illegal. Re-introduce large herds of ruminants to the areas that are no longer profitable to grow grains on. You know, like the Bison and others that actually created the great plains.
The article is not about the US paying farmers, but about farmers refusing to use the program.
Note, the problem is the poster. but NPR that used a stupid headline.
Which is a pity because the article is pretty informative, including it's conclusion: The government should be purchasing rather than renting the land. They have the money, it rarely makes sense to rent unimproved land if you can afford to own, and the problem is not going away.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Washington bureaucrats got paychecks and pensions. Congressmen used other people's money to buy votes. So the 2 main objectives of the program were wildly successful.
Silicosis is a health hazard of breathing windblow soil. Label the windblow soil as a pollutant and hold the farmer/polluter responsible for its production.
http://www.lafarge-na.com/MSDS_North_America_English_-_Soil.pdf
http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/dust-nothing-to-sneeze-at-scientists-say/
Anyone with insights as to what could be done to solve this, or why only growing grass and not plowing is the only solution?
- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
...will be People.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Keep seeing the world suffering in places from lack of food. Yet we can pay farmers for not growing? I'd rather subsidize them for at least growing something and maybe guaranteeing to make it worth their effort. I live in the midwest and it's ridiculous how much land is idle.
Monsanto's glyphosate, along with insecticides, are typically staples of no-till farming.
Yes, it is cheaper to produce grain with no-till chemical techniques, but what kind of long term damage to society will result?
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
They are doing it all wrong. They keep tilling the dirt under and spraying pesticides and herbicides which kill all of the beneficial bacterial in the soil and the "weeds" that keep the soil from blowing away. Then they come back and pour more chemical nutrients into the soil because they have killed everything plants need to live that resides in the soil.
The commercial farmers, while they make a ton of food, will never understand how to farm properly.
Why could not windbreaks installed everywhere permanently? If you do not chop them you do not need subsidize them every year. Windbreaks worked well everywhere else.
the days of the family farm are gone, a lot of this is just soulless corporate agriculture
Free vasectomies and tubal ligations.
For a background on how bad it's gotten (and by extension how bad it can get), this is about the best, most engaging history of the last time I've come across.
Either the land is in CPR and not being plowed, but being paid for the conservation effort.
Or they took the land out of CPR and are no longer being paid, but because they are plowing soil is eroding from wind.
The headline makes it seem like we're paying them to plow CPR lands.
We have been here before. Timothy Egan wrote a book that I highly recommend called "The Worst Hard Times" that fully describes how the prairie was "mined" for its ability to grow crops—an ability that was created over millennia of the creation of soil by the sod, the plants that were there and by the animals that freely roamed the Great Plains.
From the book:
The fact that the Great Depression coincided with this man-made ecological disaster deepened its effect. One of the solutions was to do the agricultural subsidies, that were supposed to cause land to lie fallow for years and build up and protect the soil. What we have is subsidies that are set too low to keep farmers happily accepting them or we have too much greed.
But here is where this hits me, personally. My father was born in Eastern Kansas in 1931. As a little boy, he was subjected to the recurrent dust storms. Again, from the book:
My dad's family all got something pulmonologists called "pulmonary fibrosis." One of his sisters died of it. My dad was on a CPAP machine, which is commonly used by people with COPD—smokers who didn't quit and who need oxygen as they get older because their lungs are half-destroyed. He needed the machine to get a good night's sleep. He had a raspy cough all his life.
Three years ago, my father slipped on some ice and fell and broke six ribs. Now, that's like the "proverbial breaking one's hip" that is a life-changing event for an older person, but they do survive this. My father was in the ICU for 19 days and just could not live. He died on his 83rd birthday and a good 60% of his reason for death was the dust from those storms when he was a young boy.
This is what we are creating with greed, folks. Mark my words, when the drought comes (and it will with global warming) we will see these dust storms again.
Here is a link to the book on Amazon. Please note, this is not meant to be an endorsement of Amazon, it is an endorsement of the book and the author's work: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
There is another factor not covered. At least in Minnesota there used a be a property tax exemption for land that was under CRP. You would pay a significantly reduced property tax vs farmable land. They removed this exemption about 10 years ago now, and since that as CRP expires farmers would rather farm it, then pay the taxes as if they were farming it -- but without the associated yearly income.
yeah, bullshit. "Cover crops" worked in the 1800's when corn was planted with a 1 yard spacing. No way you could pay property taxes, much less for seed corn with that now.
I think most of the grassland was there before taxpayers existed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Grow less food and feed crops. Turn the land back into grassland and graze cattle. Eat the cattle. Vegetarians BTFO.
Have gnu, will travel.
Make America Dusty Again
Table-ized A.I.
A lot of my family is from the heartland, and according to what i've heard, a big part of the problem is that the CRP program was fraught with fraud from the beginning.
Land owners who where ostensibly not actually farming would plow up big tracts of their grassland, then apply for CRP, get their money, and then just ignore the land, which let invasive weeds take root in place of native grasses, as well as dust blowing off of newly plowed, and then unused land.
You can see it yourself traveling through a lot of the great plains, land that is just sort of weedy and barren, and was clearly plowed at some point, and totally ignored now.
Makes a lot of people in those parts really heated to see the land be abused and wasted that way, when it could have been at least used for cattle grazing, (which would better reflect the bison usage of the plains) but instead got plowed under and ignored.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Broad acreage tillage is probably the single biggest contributor to carbon released into the atmosphere.
"Name one ecosystem that is better off for having agriculture moved into it?" Toby Hemenway http://bit.ly/1pnapoW
Mark Shepard on Restoration Agriculture - Abundance of Ohio River Valley pre-agriculture (during Jefferson administration). http://bit.ly/1cbC2uU
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
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