The Conservation Reserve Program's land ranking and selection system could be tweaked to better meet environmental and budgetary goals, a new Government Accountability Office report suggests.
While the Agriculture Department's Farm Service Agency has made some progress when it comes to using more modern, science-based information and computer models for scoring soil erosion, water quality and air quality benefits, it should implement similar methods when weighing wildlife benefits and other scoring considerations, the report says.
Additionally, the agency does not currently have a process in place for regularly reviewing and improving upon its land selection methods, the GAO report found.
CRP was created in 1985 as a way to simultaneously deal with price-depressing crop surpluses that were hammering the farm economy while also reducing soil erosion on highly erodible cropland. The program now has three major components with varying rules and payment structures: the continuous, grasslands and general sign-ups.
General CRP focuses on retiring whole fields from production for 10- to 15-year periods, while continuous CRP targets smaller parcels through practices like buffers and filter strips. Grassland CRP allows farmers to graze the enrolled land. Grazing can only be done in emergency conditions under general sign-up rules.
In a response letter, FSA Associate Administrator Steven Peterson agreed that the agency should rank and select general and grassland CRP using a "more reliable, science-based approach" based on recent studies and models. But he said "extensive updates to the current scoring methods may require significant resources, analysis of impacts to the program, and may take considerable time." Additional funding may be necessary, he added.
Peterson agreed with GAO's recommendation to set up a system to periodically review its land-selection methods. The agency, he said, believes such a review should happen every 5 years in line with the current farm bill cycle.
He also agreed with suggestions that the agency should — if appropriate — make updates based on future periodic reviews and analyze and publish data on environmental benefits annually.
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