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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.

8 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 ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Cant we farm without the soil blowing away

      Yes we can. The trick is to stop plowing. No-till is cheaper, less labor intensive, more profitable, and better for the soil. It also results in more carbon retained in the soil as humus. It is widely used, and adoption is growing.

    2. 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. Tense is everything... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Informative

    Tense is everything, and tense is something the title and summary screws up royally.

    Title says ...

    US Pays Farmers Billions To Save The Soil. But It's Blowing Away

    however the summary says the US stopped paying the farmers that money, because the farmers ceased to renew the enrolments...

    farmers decided not to re-enroll 15.8 million acres of farmland in the CRP when those contracts expired between 2007 and 2014

    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.

    1. 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.

  4. Re:Make some real money by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's probably for the best. Odds are that anyone growing weed couldn't plow a straight row anyway.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  5. Re:No-till is cheaper for who ? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Last year I visited a research farm near UC Davis. The fields were no-till, and rather than spraying the entire field with glyphosate, the used a targeted applicator and an optical sensor to recognize the weeds and put the herbicide directly onto the leaves. No glyphosate was wasted by spraying it onto the soil or the crop. This cut the need for herbicide by 95%, reducing the cost and the environmental impact. They hope to make the applicator so accurate that it can even be used with crops that have no glyphosate tolerance, since none of it will touch them.

    In a few years, this technology will be common, and plowshares will be melted down to make, well, maybe swords or something.