Let's begin with a hypothetical.
Pretend you're a farmer taking inventory of your land and future operation. It's January, and you're debating what to plant come spring. On one section of land, you've decided to plant corn. On another, soybeans. On still another, wheat, or sunflowers, or some other crop-depending on the price the market will likely pay.
Now pretend you have a quarter section of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acreage, the contract of which is ready to expire in the near future.
The big question: Do you try to reenroll your acres, or do you opt out of CRP and plant additional commodity crops? What would you do-take the guaranteed money (CRP is a great safety net) or plant and play the commodity futures?
That's the question many farmers are facing in what some are calling the Golden Age of agriculture. High commodity protections, subsidy protections and several other factors are conspiring against conservation-minded farming. Simply put, today's bullish farm economy is too lucrative for many farmers not to, well, farm, and the consequences to wildlife and maintaining other ecological values are enormous.
“All the stars have lined up, and we're seeing production on scale that we haven't seen before,” said Carl Madsen, a diehard hunter and angler who retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in early 2000. “Now we're seeing all of this CRP going back into production, and that's going to have big consequences for wildlife.”
In Madsen's home state of South Dakota, America's undeniable pheasant capitol, more than 300,000 CRP acres in 2007 (out of 1.5 million) have been put back into agriculture production. In a couple years, another 800,000 acres could be removed from the federal program. In addition, numbers from the Farm Service Agency and compiled recently by the North Dakota Game and Fish Department show this: contracts on nearly 420,000 CRP acres in 2007 expired and have gone back into agricultural production, roughly double of what the FSA had predicted. Several other states are also losing CRP acres as contracts expire, and wildlife officials are starting to voice their worries publicly.
Blaming farmers for this plant-or-bust trend would be too easy. They are merely following market and federal government signals, the latter of which is busy promoting crop-based biofuels without contemplating the future ecological fallout. Too bad, because history (remember the dirty '30s?) has shown us what the fallout can be.
George Vandel is the assistant director of wildlife for the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks. A serious hunter and angler, Vandel is an astute observer of farmland conservation, and he says the best hope for wildlife interests is to concentrate on the future. And the future, he hopes, is cellulosic ethanol, which would put grass (and other fibrous materials) back on the ground.
Vandel said a new energy bill passed by Congress says that 21 billion gallons of ethanol made from cellulose feedstocks must be part of the nation's fuel supply by 2022. “If we can figure out the logistics and the details of harvest, cellulosic ethanol has great potential for wildlife production,” he said. “But that's down the road, and in the interim we are probably going to pay a price on the wildlife side.”
Many wildlife officials believe CRP is longer a viable program, given current farm economics. Even if a new farm bill allots 39.2 million acres into the program (as the House and Senate bills do), most officials agree that farmers will bypass the program because of high commodity prices. In other words, CRP rental rates can't compete with land rental rates or farmers farming the land themselves.
For some wildlife officials (and no doubt hunters will follow), the loss of CRP acres is a harsh reality to face, given the program's documented successes over 20-plus years. That's why they are looking to the future and banging the drums for cellulosic ethanol.
Converting prairie grasses and other plant materials into ethanol could be this generation's “man on the moon” moment, officials say. Still, some people say it can't be done, that converting prairie grasses et al. into fuel and mass producing it for commercial production is a pie-in-the-sky dream.
But the advances in environmental technology say otherwise. Few people would have ever thought we could turn blue-green algae into methane, but we are. Few people would have ever thought we could turn decomposing garbage into natural gas, but we are.
So why can't we turn a stand of prairie into moonshine and use it as fuel? I believe we can, and if the federal government ever signals that's the direction we need to go as a nation, we will.
Meantime, we hunters and anglers we'll have to the swallow the harsh medicine of a short-sighted farm policy.
And there's nothing hypothetical about that.
|
