[MCN] Billion$ wa$ted: US Conservation Reserve Program could do lots of good, but...

[Lance Olsen]

Excerpts:[bold added]
When crop prices are low, farmers move sensitive land out of production into the reserve program, or CRP, which pays them annual “rent” on the retired acres. But when prices rebound, farmers can pull those acres out of the CRP and return them to row crop production. Between 2007 and 2014, this revolving door let farmers take nearly 16 million acres out of the CRP, negating the environmental and public health gains taxpayers paid more than $7 billion to achieve.
Using data compiled from the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, EWG mapped the total cropland that was taken out of the CRP by county, as well as the investment lost to taxpayers between 2007 and 2014, when crop prices were soaring.   

Environmental Working Group
http://www.ewg.org/release/here-today-gone-tomorrow-usda-conservation-program-sensitive-cropland-wastes-billions-tax <http://www.ewg.org/release/here-today-gone-tomorrow-usda-conservation-program-sensitive-cropland-wastes-billions-tax>
 
Includes county-by-county mapping across US shows economic and environmental costs of current CRP policy error in Montana

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“Policy and management have focused primarily on ... fire suppression and fuels management. 
These strategies are inadequate to address a new era of western wildfires …. We propose an 
approach that accepts wildfire as an inevitable catalyst of change and that promotes adaptive 
responses by ecosystems and residential communities to more warming and wildfire. “
 
Schoennagel et al. Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes. 
PNAS Early Edition
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1617464114

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