I haven’t written about CRP in a while, because there hasn’t been much to write about for new acres. This has more to do with the Farm Bill expiring and being extended…again, than any of the recent happenings. I hope that by writing about it maybe I can speak it into fruition. We have no idea on what the procedure for new acres is going to be this year but there legally has to be a general and grassland CRP signup. Also, all the expiring continuous contracts will be given the chance to re-enroll.
I know there are still many people who are unaware how CRP grazing and haying rules have changed. There is always much to write about on how we are trying to improve the diversity in these grass stands for habitat (Switch grass and Cedars are not the ideal picture of habitat). I was able to conjure up some CRP acre numbers from my source at the state, so I wanted to throw them out as food for thought. There is the old adage the statics don’t lie but liars use statistics. We are currently almost at the CRP acreage cap nationwide of 27 million acres which may seem like we are in a good place but if you look around does it seem like we have CRP like the 90s? There’s more to it which in itself isn’t bad, but it seems unlikely that the CRP acre cap is going to be increased if… if we get a new farm bill and that very much is not a good thing.
Currently the national total for CRP enrollment is around 26.4 million. Leaving around 500,000 to 600,000 to work with for new acres which when spread throughout the country isn’t much if you think about the 2.2 million acres enrolled last year. I’m throwing a lot of numbers out this week but stay with me. The most interesting part to pay attention to is the breakdown of specific CRP acres. “Wait a minute there are different CRP acres?” Sure are. I will go more thoroughly into them some other time, but we have General CRP which is the original, Continuous CRP which we take advantage of in South Dakota, and Grassland CRP.
Yes, we have 26.4 million acres of CRP in the nation, but over 10 million of that is Grassland CRP. This is impressive since we only started enrolling this type in 2020. General CRP accounts for 7.7 million acres and Continuous 8.35 million acres. This means that just over 16 million acres is what most of you would consider CRP in traditional form. Do not get me wrong here I believe that the Grassland CRP program is great and could really help get us to better pasture and range health but when its acres are lumped in with traditional CRP acres it skews what is going on. If we look at it this way, we are by far at our lowest enrollment of traditional CRP even though the total enrollment of 26.4 million seems ok on the surface.
The reason of course that even conservation groups aren’t lobbying hard for an increase to the CRP acreage cap is that it is expensive. What I question is that if 10 million of the acres are the much cheaper (it’s range and pastureland) Grassland CRP, how is this not brought into the thought process? Truth be told I don’t think anyone is looking at the breakdown like this, even the conservation groups. The huge enrollment of Grassland CRP wasn’t foreseen and now there isn’t a good answer beyond increasing the acre cap which if we have cheaper CRP taking up 10 million acres shouldn’t we be able to do without actually increasing the total cost of the program?
Like I said before, I know Grassland CRP to be a great program but it’s robbing Peter to pay Paul. Don’t think for one second that there isn’t a path to get new CRP acres enrolled. It just means that once we have direction for the year, to be in constant communication with FSA, NRCS, or myself. There are undoubtedly acres up for reenrollment that will decide not to. It’s not ideal as I want to see grass acres expand throughout the country but given the circumstances, I’m ok shifting acres from other states to South Dakota. Just because we are close to the cap doesn’t mean we can’t still increase acres. Next week I will break down the South Dakota numbers and the Jerauld, Kingsbury, Miner, and Sanborn County numbers.