By Mark Watson, Panhandle No Till Educator

The Natural Resource and Conservation Service provides farmers and ranchers with many different types of conservation programs. Many of the programs assist producers in establishing conservation practices that improve the soil, water efficiency and quality, or rangeland in their operations. Some provide economic incentive to help purchase equipment that will benefit the producer and the environment.

In crop production a popular conservation program has been the Conservation Reserve Program, which retires crop land to grassland taking the crop land out of production. Much of this land is on highly erodible soil. The CRP program is administered by the Farm Service Agency.

EQIP, which is the Environmental Quality Incentive Program, is a program designed for cost share on all types of conservation practices such as irrigation practices, engineering practices such as terraces and dams, livestock waste facilities, and incentives for adopting management practices including no till farming.

There is a new conservation program available statewide this year that is aimed at rewarding good conservation practices called the Conservation Stewardship Program. CSP rewards producers who practice good stewardship of the land while still leaving the land in crop and livestock production. There is no cost share in CSP. To my knowledge this is the first conservation program that rewards producers for conservation practices they have already adopted on their active crop and livestock production acres.

I happened to be in Washington D.C. with the US Pea and Lentil Association when this program was introduced. I don’t remember the details but somehow our group was invited to the room where Senator Harkin from Iowa was introducing this new conservation program. At the time the program was called the Conservation Security Program.

Senator Harkin’s idea was to reward producers who are good stewards of the land with these conservation payments. Senator Harkin also was concerned with our compliance with the World Trade Organization as far as crop subsidies were concerned. His vision was to use these conservation payments in place of direct payments to help our nation come in compliance with the World Trade Organization rules.

The program was first installed in the state of Iowa as a pilot program. It eventually spread to other states in small increments and was confined to water sheds where there were concerns with water quality or water quantity.

In the 2008 Farm Bill the program was changed to the Conservation Stewardship Program and was expanded nationwide. The goal of the program is to reward crop and livestock producers who have adopted good conservation practices on their farms and ranches and are willing to improve on their existing practices.

In Nebraska the first sign up period for the Conservation Stewardship Program has recently been completed. There were 2,900 applications which would enroll 2.7 million acres into this new conservation program. Nebraska was allocated only 540,000 acres for the program, far short of the acres that were offered for enrollment.

This shows that there are many producers willing to improve upon and adopt more conservation practices on their farms and ranches. This also shows the need for additional funding for these types of conservation programs. If additional funding were available to assist farms and ranchers in adopting conservation practices I feel this would be money well spent.

Increasing funding for conservation programs would help lay a foundation for future generations that the natural resources, the soil, water, and grasslands would be preserved and protected. It would also encourage producers to maintain and adopt solid conservation practices and better enable them to be truly good stewards of the land and water.