Conservation programs hurt Conservation?

This is something I've been thinking on lately. Do conservation programs like CRP actually hurt conservation efforts? Agriculture land prices are being driven higher and higher to the point every tree line, swampy area or even entire forest are cleared for more acres, meanwhile federal and state govts are paying people to not farm land that is already cleared and tillable.

Are these programs doing more harm than good long term?

Hmm interesting thought experiment.

$5 corn is a trees worst enemy imo. Doesn’t matter how much ground some farmers/company’s have. Some will do anything to get one more pass with the planter.

When I see them tearing out a shelter belt I wanna stop and say “You know somebody’s grandpa planted those, and grandma most likely pumped water into a metal bucket and watered them all by hand.”

Most conservation managers have college education but no common knowledge or experience. We have thousands of acres of WMA but still no pheasant or quail.

Too many bush hogs & not enough drip torches.

Too many predators and not enough trappers. If todays’s fish and game departments are unable to manage a species through restrictions and regulations, then that species is out of luck. Big game management is often able to be managed by regulation and restriction. Small game - not so much.

I say the programs do more good than harm, especially in highly erodible areas. With the cost of land, rent, taxes, machinery, seed, fertilizer, insurance, and then playing the lottery with Mother Nature, you need to utilize ever inch of ground. If these areas are better protected for the environment, they should be permanent easements that are well paid for. What good does it do to take highly erodible land out of production for 10 years, then plow it right back up?

Well said Gary. I told Greg Wagner NG&P manages their checkbook, not the game and fish. If they can’t come up with good ideas on their own, they should just copy SD! LOL

we are in a change economy with programs working against each other often
is CRP bad , no

but look at this example 2 farms a few miles from each other

one farm program was paying a dairy farmer to get out of dairy to raise the price of milk , so he had to send his herd to slaughter and scrap all his milking lines

at the same time a few miles away a new guy was getting funds to start dairy farming as it brought new people into agriculture he had to buy all new milking equipment and build a herd from buying from other paces.

lots of money changed hands , lots of equipment and animals went to waste but it boosts the economy , sort of

"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results", (Milton Friedman)

So true.

You are CORRECT^^^^^. Especially here in the South.

Been noticing a lot more slashing and burning going on in the last 20 years out here and in my travels I have not seen much CRP going on during that same time. The rules are so lax with CRP it does not need to be much of an issue before emergency cutting is allowed that seems counter productive to me.

This winter I will be able to drive for miles and not see a blade of grass sticking out of the snow in the majority of sections in my county. Unless there’s a natural barrier to stop equipment from working the ground most of its being planted. Still some guys around that plant for wildlife but they are rare the farming here has gone from fence post to fence post more and more. The days of potholes being left alone are gone protecting them is not enforced now the buffer along a fence line is no longer a practice today.

No habitat no critters it’s not just one thing it’s everything now.

I notice that more and more in SD lately too LD. Seems like on dry years they disc cattail slews until they are gone or the disc hits mud.

My guess is SD has seen their glory days of pheasant hunting gone by already. The center of corn production is moving west and north. Soon it will be the corner of Iowa, Minnesota, SD as the center of production if it isn't already.

seems a shame we waste most of that corn putting it in a gas tank

if we didn't burn it we wouldn't have any shortage of it for human or animal feed

around here, decent farmland is being converted to "solar farms"...nothing "sustainable" about THAT!

so far they started with al the fields that flood in a wet spring here.

3-4 inches of water won't matter a few weeks of the year with all the panels 4-5 feet off the ground

make for a every good ground.

they have the entire thing fenced 10 feet high if they could graze sheep in there it could be sustainable wool and muton

Good conservation practices the life blood of not just the wildlife that benefit from them They are also designed to protect water quality soil erosion from both wind and water .A place that is so barren that it will not support wildlife will also become a problem for good crop production The thing I keep thinking is the conservation measure where put there for a reason That reason still exists but the current generation has lost sight of why the methods used to maintain the land are no longer on the minds f the people changing the landscape with the idea more money will come with removing what had been added decades before We keep needing to re;earn what had to be learned years ago If you try to farm a swamp it wil l result i a failure at some point No conservation is not the reason for the problem Greed and not using basic common sense is why we continue to try to-do what nature is not designed to do Will we ever learn ??

Conservation doesn't mean conservation like we were taught 20+ years ago

Subsidized farming practices don’t help either. With the government dolling out $ the way they do, it only incentivizes the big boys to gobble up as much as they can, regardless if it is productive farm land, knowing they will be ok in the end. The days of utilizing the fertile ground only are past it seems.. I don’t blame the farmer, just our crazy government…. When our government is involved, no matter what, they mess things up…

Corn mash still makes good feed in the feedlot. Corn fed beef.

True Gary, but it is so rich that they have to use it sparingly.

For the most part I feel CRP benefits conservation more or wildlife more than it is detrimental to conservation. Yes farmers are tearing up tree and stone lines but those areas are very small when compared to the large expanses that most CRP blocks form. With predators hunting edge, a tree line between two fields is almost all edge instead of a large block of grass and other forbs where predation on nesting birds and other wildlife is much less as they are protected much more by the expanse. Same thing seen in a large rat marsh with lots of vegetation and water compared to narrow streams which are almost all edge for most predators.

Bryce

There are so many other grains that would be more beneficial for the soil and perennials that would produce far greater yields. Corn, in its most abundant state and supplied by seed producers looking to make a quick large buck, is a crop over used and unhealthy for the huge heard of livestock it supposedly feeds

I'm not a farmer but I've been seeing hedgerows, random clumps of trees in fields and other features getting wiped out and turned into field. Didn't really think you would get much more production out of those areas and it's taking away alot of habitat. My wife's side of the family operates a pretty big farm so I asked what's up with all the slash and burn, they said Wisconsin taxes changed and the rate increased on unfarmed "farm land".

You see some groups that are doing the work and some you hear about but you seldom see what they improve in the way of habitat really. That might be more of a local thing in some places but why have large tracts of land not been purchased over the years to guarantee hunting access to more people. I think the lack of quality hunting access has cost us a lot of sportsmen over the years.

When I hunted in IL and IN some public type hunting areas were trampled down from the traffic with little to nothing to be found to hunt.

a friend of mine does 100% pasture raised beef no corn. he used to do corn
there is a marbling difference that you can see in one of his old steaks to one of his new steaks I was there the day he had his first batch of pasture only meat come back from the butcher about 8 years ago and cooked it up . I could see the difference but those steaks are very good better than anything I have gotten from a grocery store.

the only tool he uses most days besides when making hay or moving hay is an atv his girls ride out on the atv roll up the wire and move the previous wire to the next position

a bunch of step ins with a hot perimeter fence

the pastures go many years with out being reseeded , no tillage , no fertilizer

most of his fuel consumption is moving bales and making hay.

it would take putting up some fence but anything that grow corn well will grow pasture great.
anything you didn't want to fence could be cut for hay for winter.

imagine how much that would change the landscape pasture grass as far as the eye can see instead of corn fields in some stage

planting season and harvest season wouldn't be massive tractors & combines and working through the night , a steady flow of tractor trailers moving grain.

just go move a wire every day make sure the waterer is full

the same pasture mix feeds deer very well also.

shelter belts wouldn't be a thing of the past you want a little row of trees for the cattle to find some shade in.

think about how that could transform the conservation side also

Grass raised beef with no corn fattening tastes like green grass cow poop.

That is honestly how they are supposed to taste. Cows were never supposed to ingest corn, their rumen isn't built for it. Hence they are naturally fattened by corn.

Ag land in WI has been taxed at a low rate for decades. Recreational land is much higher. A tree line or stone fence line between two fields 30 foot wide and 1200 feet long is not taxed as recreational land. It is part of the ag land of the farm. Farmers are burying those to make larger fields to make their large and expensive equipment more efficient and also all rows along those edges yield less and they work to maximize yields also. Many farmers around our area sell off those woods to hunters and those hunters pay 3-7K per acre and also the taxes on the value which in many cases is many times far more than the ag land which sells for 5-12K.

If huge areas where put into managed grazing as some suggest the amount of wildlife supported by a grass based crop would be much less then is there in a diversified, corn, beans, wheat. alfalfa rotation like we have in most of our area. With miles of high tensile electric fence and grass the deer, turkeys, rabbits, squirrels etc. are much less. I have worked with several grazers that have noticed that change when they became mono crop with grass The other issue with grass is when it freezes it flattens right to the ground and provides little food and cover compared to legumes which freeze and stand up better or corn, bean and wheat fields that if no tilled or chisel plowed leave cover and food on the surface.
The main reason CRP was created was to take highly erodible or sensitive acres of crop land out of row crops. That is the major conservation emphasis for the program. Benefits for wildlife is secondary but with proper management within the rules can be good as well.

Bryce

If i remember right the crp program's purpose was to conserve soil, not wildlife.

Wildlife benefitted from is was a perk.

Maybe that's what it was sold as but the glut of corn and 1.80 prices probably played a bigger role in the development. Remember Bob Dole said this was the last, best program proposal ever needed or something like that. The only thing that's happened is the outlay in program funds has gone up.

During the Reagan presidency one of his cabinet members Earl Butz came up with the slogan Farm from fence row to fence row Meaning get big or get out It changed the thought process of many farmers And it is now that the farmers are suffering the losses that have come with that idea of how to farm Farmers went from being stewards of the land to CEO'S sitting in an office building in another state making decisions concerning farmland in other states The only thing that was important was profit And how the decision affected conservation and wildlife never even gets a mention during those meeting with the now argi/business people in control And every loses

Talked to rancher in NW SD that bragged about how CRP paid for a lot of his place when land prices were very low so the CRP payments back then paid off a lot of his land notes. Tough country very rural back then still is might of been pre REA days or not much after that.

This is what we are seeing. Huge farms coming in and clear hundreds or thousands of acres of woods and making it tillible. At the same time we are paying people not to farm farm land. People from the metro buying a 40 and putting a house on it should not be getting CRP payments for not farming

You have a good point And also remember the big argi business is standing with their hand out waiting to collect off the various programs they can collect on One of the biggest farmer near me has been able to receive over a million dollars in government programs over the last 10 years Those that could use the help are not big enough to collect anything but small amounts And that is the flaw in the] whole stinking mess that the current farm bill is

CRP can be beneficial to many different species of wildlife. Native grasses rather than fescue and brome are the keys. As far as I know, CRP contracts still allow up to 10% of a field to be converted to food plots (I did this two years ago on the farm that I managed). It's easy to add this into the CRP contract. In production agriculture, money talks. Wildlife usually only becomes valuable when people pay to recreate on the land. I remember when I was a teenager in the 70's, I asked a farmer to trap on an 80 of timber and rough ground that he just purchased. This tract was in west central Illinois and was certainly not the norm for land use at that time. I was told "to get them all" as he had made too much money and was going to clear off the land because of taxes. Needless to say, that news was devastating. I think that was a watershed moment for me and I decided to pursue a career in the conservation field. I still get a pit in my stomach when I see land being cleared. When I was growing up, my dad was a fat cattle buyer and one of my degrees is in agriculture, so I get it. Landowners are the stewards of the land; I get that too. It all comes down to how much they value the wildlife that lives on that land.