To enroll in CSP, landowners need not participate in any other USDA commodity, conservation or insurance programs. . Courtesy of NRCS G reen payments. American farmers and ranchers can be forgiven if they react a little cautiously to the idea. Good thing-because the 107th U.S. Congress that convenes this month is the one that will approve the next farm bill. And there is a growing assumption among agricultural policy makers that conservation will play its biggest role in a farm bill since 1985, when the Conservation Reserve Program and conservation compliance entered farmers' lives.
Government incentives are probably on the way.
Those pushing for the concept of expanded conservation programs are not just the usual mix of environmental activists, he notes. They include old-line traditional conservation groups. Count in the National Association of Conservation Districts. Some legislation approved in the last Congress provides clear evidence of a growing bipartisan consensus that farmers and ranchers should be given serious financial incentives to put more conservation on the ground. Introduced late in the last Congress, it is sure to be dropped into the hopper early in the new Congress, and it could make the CRP seem like a minor conservation effort.