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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.
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.
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
Yeah, but try to end the scam, and Senators from every corn-growing state in the Union will scream bloody murder.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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/
- US Dept. of Agriculture
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Anyone with insights as to what could be done to solve this, or why only growing grass and not plowing is the only solution?
I don't get the distinction. A "family" owns a farm. One of the daughters goes off to the big city and gets one of those fancy business degrees. Comes back and tells the family to incorporate in order to protect their personal assets (the family home). She also advises them on how to properly deal with futures, investing the proper amount of resources in equipment, how to deal with debt and other such matters...one being, how to take advantage of tax breaks which duly elected representatives put in place for them. It is now a "corporate-owned" farm, but ran much more like a profitable business.
How is that a bad thing?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
How is that a bad thing?
How many millions of dollars does this "corporate-owned" farm spend lobbying in Washington?
- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
...will be People.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Please, kill yourself.
The Slashdot solution for every inconvenient reality.
It's not necessarily that Ethanol is a poor energy choice. It's also based on what the Ethanol was made from, and apparently corn is the least effective product to use for Ethanol. Sugar cane is the best to use by far.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
"Family farms" and corporate-owned farms are the same according to that report, so long as a majority shareholder does some work or has a relative that does some work on the farm.
By that measure, nearly every multinational corporation is a family business.
You know fully well what people mean when they say "Family-farm" yet chose to ignore the contents of the report for a severely lacking headline summary that reinforces your biases. At least you could have read the report you linked to which shows that your claim, using terms as they are expected, is wrong.
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
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.
I just figured your experience in life must be so painful that if someone encouraged your death you might just do it.
That may have been the case when I was a teenager. "Harold and Maude" changed my perspective on life. I have every intention of living, no matter how inconvenient that is for everyone else.
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/06...
"Speaking at a symposium at Iowa State University on May 2, the day the census came out, Vilsack said the U.S. faces an "eroding middle" when it comes to farming, and that a small number of large farm operations "produces the vast majority of the nation's food." "
"However, three quarters of all U.S. farms gross only $50,000 a year and currently account for only 4 percent of product sales. But one analyst doesn't see that as a problem."
Just 4% of farms account for almost all u.s. sales.
The definition of farmer includes many tiny and unprofitable "farms" that are really more hobby or retirement plots than real farms. It's $1000 gross sales (so you can lose money every year and still be classed as a "farmer".)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
Your claim seems to imply that those large farms aren't family ones. The facts are clearly spelled out at the previously provided link:
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
It's not necessarily that Ethanol is a poor energy choice.
Ethanol is kind of a vicious bastard of a fuel [additive]. It is strongly hygroscopic and will attract water from the air, which then leads to corrosion on any surfaces which are not coated to prevent it. This is especially a problem for carbureted engines in which fuel is retained inside the carburetor, because they typically involve a variety of metals and then you get blooms of corrosion around all of the friction points, where surface coatings tend to wear off.
It's also based on what the Ethanol was made from, and apparently corn is the least effective product to use for Ethanol. Sugar cane is the best to use by far.
How are you defining "best"? I would argue that the best plant-based feedstock for making biofuel is algae, because you can grow it at most latitudes with little energy input which is not direct solar in the form of photosynthesis. It produces feedstock for both ethanol (or more ideally, butanol) and biodiesel (or again, more ideally, green diesel) fuels from air and dirty water, of which there is no real shortage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think most of the grassland was there before taxpayers existed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We could do smaller farms and hire flocks of chickens for pest control and help with fertilization (oh hire a few cows too, they can help clear grass on the fallow fields and further help with fertilization)
seems to have worked pretty well historically; vs essentially strip mining the soil and relying on petroleum for fertilizer.
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
"A 2013 Department of Agriculture report, for instance, found that, in 2001, farms of 1,000 acres or more accounted for 5.6 percent of all farms and controlled 46.8 percent of all cropland. In 2011, those large farms still represented 5.6 percent of all farms, but now they controlled 53.7 percent of cropland." (source).
So it is true that "small farms" (i.e. under 1,000 acres) "operate nearly half of farmland", but that number is going down quickly.
A "family farm" can still be a farm of over 1,000 acres. Kind of like the Trump "family business".
What is a "farm"? "any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the reference year." So it includes land that could, theoretically, produce agricultural income, even if the owners never had any intention of donning a pair of overalls. These aren't the farms of the poor; they're the yards of the upper-middle-class.
emphasis on the fallow part. idea is to rotate the field (letting cows/whatever graze on it prior to replanting)
what part of that is wrong?