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US Pays Farmers Billions To Save The Soil. But It's Blowing Away (npr.org)

Posted by msmash on from the their-issues dept.

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.

6 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Corn by unixcorn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Corn by unixcorn · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Farmers rent their land to the CRP program. When the lease is up, the farmers can do what they please. With the promise of skyrocketing corn prices, it made it more attractive to farm the land rather than leaving the land in the program at the end of the lease. It's simple economics and farmers are business people. No taxpayer dollars were wasted.

  2. Government is just subsidizing bad practices. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you want the farmers to save their soil, you've got to let them go bankrupt.

  3. Re:sounds like a shakedown by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You're barking up the wrong tree. The number of family farms are few in comparison to the corporate-owned farms. It's the corporations that are raking in every available tax break. Previous generations of my family were farmers. When I expressed an interest in going to a community college with an agriculture program in the early 1990's, my father told me to forget about it as family farming was a dead end. I went to a community college known for its technology programs.

  4. You can save soil by making soil by butchersong · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Tense is everything... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Buy the land, don't rent it. If you rent it, you can't complain when the house you build on the land is torn down after your rental period expires.