Recent articles in Ducks Unlimited magazine have lamented declining federal support for waterfowl habitat, which is predicted to only get worse with the passage of the new Farm Bill. Although the Bill “contains some positive elements,”
one article states, “when evaluated in its entirety, it is a step backwards for waterfowl, grasslands, and wetlands. Key conservation programs were either reduced from previous levels or rendered ineffective by program rules.” For example, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which had been a major success, will be severely undermined by the bill. Landowners participating in the CRP program are paid by the Commodity Credit Corporation to leave all or part of their property unplowed, providing nesting areas for pheasants, ducks, and other species.
The decision to reduce the current 39.2 million acres of CRP land by 18% was not made out of a dislike for ducks, however, but in response to rising global and domestic grain prices, and the demand for ethanol. Biologist working for DU believe that, as corn and wheat become more valuable, if the CCC cannot pay higher rent prices for land, farmers will continue to drop out of the program.
An especially important place on the map, for waterfowl, is the prairie pothole region (PPR) of the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, and Eastern Montana, where millions of birds are hatched every year. This area has been put in jeopardy not only by the Farm Bill itself, but because of crop insurance subsidies. According to a study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), South Dakota farmers who broke ground on unplowed terrain receive twelve times the amount of federally subsidized crop insurance payments that other farmers got. DU tried to combat this incentive to farm native prairie by including the “Sodsaver” provision, which calls for the withholding of disaster payments and other subsidies from anyone doing so. The changes to the bill were accepted, but the teeth were promptly pulled from the provision, when it was agreed that those states involved would participate only if their governors decided to. If all five governors choose to ignore the crop insurance loophole, 3.3 of the 7.4 million acres of CPR land in those states could be lost. This equates to the loss of hundreds of thousands of individual birds.
The affect of the Farm Bill on the prairie pothole region will be dramatic. That is, until one takes into account the other place a duck spends its time -- the marsh. There are currently 105 million acres of wetlands in the contiguous US, down about 54% from what we had in 1950. For the past couple of decades we’ve lost 80,000 acres annually. The Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP) is similar to the CRP, and has been just as successful, with about 2 million acres having been enrolled in the program over the past 18 years. Unfortunately, due to lower property appraisals, many participants have been pulling out of the WRP program.
On the positive side, the new Farm Bill extends tax breaks through 2009 for landowners who donate portions of their land to conservation. Then there’s the new program called Open Fields, which provides incentives to private landowners who let people hunt and fish on their property. And the new bill helps out the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Program, to which some $372 million was allotted to go toward conservation efforts that will be greatly appreciated by critters with feathers, fur, or fins.
Although there is a downside to the new Farm Bill that will have an almost immediate and noticeable impact on waterfowl populations, things could have been a lot worse had the voices of sportsmen not been heard. About 14,000 DU members and supporters either wrote letters to their representatives or visited Capitol Hill, and it made a huge difference.
We cannot go on forever though, thinking that those excise fees and taxes will always be enough, especially when hunter numbers are declining, and especially when we have administrations who gut the the budgets of federal and state wildlife departments.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opinion/05berry.html
This piece was published nowhere, and written a long time ago.