When wildfire roared through southern California last year, the fiery destruction captured nationwide attention. People still talk about the forest fire that destroyed nearly 800,000 acres in Yellowstone Park in 1988.
Destruction on a similar scale is under way on grasslands in prairie states. But it's happening quietly, without spectacular flames.
Hundreds of thousands of acres that have been in the Conservation Reserve Program are being pulled out of the program. Typically those acres are covered with native grasses and vegetation that provide excellent habitat for pheasants and other wildlife. Soon many will be fields of corn and other grains.
"The CRP in Nebraska and throughout the Midwest is the most successful conservation program we've ever had," said Tim McCoy, agricultural program manager for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.
One goal of the CRP program is to provide landowners with a financial incentive to stop raising crops on marginal and highly erodible cropland.
That incentive has dwindled. Prices for corn and other crops have skyrocketed, while CRP payments have failed to keep pace.
In Nebraska more than 90,000 acres were pulled out of the CRP program between Sept. 30 and Nov. 30. In Minnesota at least 80,000 acres are gone. In other states the totals are even higher: Iowa, 128,000 acres; North Dakota, 250,000 acres; and South Dakota, 300,000 acres.
In all the totals for those states are almost 850,000.
Ducks Unlimited dramatized the loss of acres in North Dakota by pointing out the loss of acres was equivalent to a strip of land three miles wide from the state's southern border to Canada.
"They are burning and plowing and haying those acres right now," Kevin Kading of the North Dakota Game and Fish Department told the Minneapolis Star Tribune last October.
Conversion of the CRP acres means more demand for water for irrigation, more erosion and other negative effects on the environment.
The trend is expected to continue as more CRP contracts expire. Two Iowa State economists estimated that corn prices at $3 a bushel almost half of the 2 million CRP acres in the state would go back into production. Lately the price of corn has been near $5 a bushel, due in large part to demand for ethanol production.
Organizations like Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever recognize the threat to wildlife habitat, and have been lobbying Congress to raise CRP payments in the new six-year farm bill.
Interim Agriculture Secretary Chuck Connor has suggested a CRP-type program that would allow biomass crops like switchgrass that could be harvested after bird's nesting season.
Drafting of the farm bill is now in its final stages. If efforts to reshape the CRP program for a new era are inadequate, millions of acres of grassland wildlife habitat will disappear before most people are even aware it's happening.Lincoln Journal Star
