TED MONOSON Washington bureau | Posted: Tuesday, April 1, 2003 12:00 am
WASHINGTON - Montana farmers will receive the lion's share of federal refunds for harvesting hay from or allowing livestock to graze on environmentally sensitive lands that they had taken out of production.
On March 28 the Agriculture Department started to issue more than $16.4 million in refunds to farmers who responded to the 2002 drought by making use of land that had been enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).
Montana farmers and ranchers will receive $4.2 million in payments, while Wyoming farmers and ranchers will only receive $204,451. The difference reflects the popularity of CRP in Montana and Wyoming's abundance of federal land and dearth of farmland.
"The CRP in Wyoming is along the eastern border," Wyoming Stock Growers Association executive vice president Jim Magagna said. "In the West you mostly have federal lands."
Although Montanans are happy to receive a fourth of the refunds, they say the large payment reveals that the program has gotten out of control.
Throughout the nation 33.9 million acres have been enrolled in CRP. Montana is second in the nation, behind Texas, with 3.4 million CRP acres, while Wyoming's CRP acreage is 278,775.
Under the program, farmers and ranchers receive federal payments for agreeing to take land that is susceptible to erosion or flooding out of production.
The Agriculture Department responded to the 2002 drought by allowing farmers to harvest hay from or allowing livestock to graze on land that was enrolled in the program. Farmers and ranchers who chose to open their CRP land had their federal payments reduced by 25 percent.
Wyoming Republican Sens. Mike Enzi and Craig Thomas criticized the 25 percent reduction and noted that farmers who donated hay from CRP lands did not have their payments reduced. They called for the Agriculture Department to waive the 25 percent reduction.
"Wyoming is experiencing a severe drought," Enzi and Thomas wrote in an Aug. 16, 2002, letter to Farm Service Agency administrator James R. Little.
"These conditions should warrant a waiver of the 25 percent rental fee reduction for those livestock producers that utilize their own CRP land." Although the request was rejected, legislators included a provision in a massive spending bill that provided farmers and ranchers with refunds.
Those refunds are what farmers and ranchers will find in their mailboxes.
Ralph Peck, director of the Montana Department of Agriculture, said that the opening of the CRP land provided a lifeline to ranchers last summer, while not severely harming the land. Peck said that in some regards permitting haying and grazing helped the lands.
"It gets all the old dead growth out of there," Peck said. "It's not something we want to do every year, but it helped us survive."
The opening of CRP lands last year provided some short-term relief, but Peck and others are concerned that in the long-term the program threatens the viability of rural communities.
"We're very concerned with the number of acres that are being put in CRP," Montana Farmers Union president Del Styren said. "It's a good thing, but they have gone too far. Farmers are putting the land in CRP and take the money and go to Arizona."
Peck shares Styren's concern that the program is reducing the number of farmers in Montana and harming rural communities.
"It's had a major impact in Montana," Peck said. "The folks who used to buy inputs no longer do. Main Street Montana has really felt the impact."
Montana State University Prof. Jim Johnson said that the number of acres enrolled in CRP has played a role in the decline of rural communities. He said that the drought and low commodity prices have also had a significant impact.
"There are a host of factors that have led to the decline of rural areas and CRP may be one of them," Johnson said. "It is neither the primary cause nor the sole cause."