Down on the farm

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 17, 1999 | by Sean Paige

Meanwhile, taxpayers continue to pay millions annually to farmers who remove their fields from active production, as USDA continues its shift away from a focus on farming and toward an emphasis on conserving wetlands, curtailing urban sprawl and preserving small family farms for sentimentality's sake.

USDA recently announced the acceptance of nearly 5 million additional acres into its Conservation Reserve Program, bringing to about 30' million acres the amount of U.S. farmland idled by a program that guarantees farmers annual payments for 10 to 15 years for refraining from farming. Also, begun in 1992 as a pilot program, USDA's Wetlands Reserve Program by last year was paying 3,714 lucky farmers in 47 states to abandon their plows, placing their 665,000-plus acres of farmland out of production for 10 years, 30 years or in perpetuity. This year, USDA is authorized to enroll as much as 975,000 acres in the wetland program nationally and spend $98 million turning productive farmland back to nature.

Paying people not to go to work caught on in urban areas long ago, but the idea apparently took a while longer to win converts in rural America, where some semblance of the work ethic stubbornly persists. "In the beginning, there was a lot of doubt ... whether America's farmers would be willing to enter into long-term conservation easements with the federal government," said Bob Misso, who runs USDA's wetlands program. "But after a few projects, farmers started coming out of the woodwork."