A commitment to conservation, USDA is spending billions to help American producers implement climate-smart agriculture.
Data just released from the agency shows the Conservation Reserve Program paid out more than $1.7 billion dollars this year.
There are more than 660,000 CRP participants on 23 million acres of land. The number of acres enrolled in CRP has grown 21 percent in the last two years.
The states with the highest payments are Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Missouri.
Sen. Chuck Grassley weighed in on the program’s impact in his home state today.
“The demand for food and we have this limit that you’ve been put up to 28 million acres— that may be a little bit high. We’re going to have continued to have CRP because there’s some land that because of erosion or low productivity should not be put in crops and also for the benefit of sportsmen, hunting and all those things. So, CRP is part of farming as it has been for the last 30 or 40 years, maybe even 50 years. And we’re going to keep it around and I’m glad that Iowa wants to participate. We just want to make sure that it’s geared to not putting home farms into the CRP. We want to make sure that there’s a higher priority for low productive land and more environmentally fractured, fragile land, going into CRP as opposed to ground that has a CRP rating of high 70s, 80s, and even into the 90s.” the Senator explains.
Since 2021, the Farm Service Agency has introduced new incentives and some increases in rates.
