USDA Questioned About Prime Farmland in Conservation Programs

Brownfield Ag News | By Larry Lee

A Minnesota Congressman is concerned that USDA’s conservation programs might be encouraging farmers to idle prime productive farmland.

Minnesota Representative Brad Finstad is a farmer and former USDA State Rural Development Director.  He commented during a House Ag Subcommittee hearing Tuesday while asking Farm Service Agency Administrator Zach Ducheneaux if Conservation Reserve Program reforms in the 2018 Farm Bill are achieving the goal of limiting competition for prime farmland. “We’re seeing CRP rates compete with or exceed land values per acre of farm ground. It’s making it difficult for farmers to secure new ground and maintain current leases for land.”

Ducheneaux says the CRP incentives offered through the Farm Service Agency give producers a meaningful choice and the choices farmers make are not for FSA to dictate. “Our job is to get the opportunity out there in front of them so that they can make the best choice, now on the side of those that need to acquire that land, we work to refine our credit opportunities so that we’re ideally positioned for those beginning farmers.”

Finstad says conservation programs need to consider the advancements in science for soils and precision agriculture, and he’s concerned about removing prime farmland from production. “Some of the most fertile prime farmland that we have, every time we take an acre of that out of production, we lose that and we become more vulnerable and really, food security is national security.”

Finstad says farmers work every day to protect water and topsoil, not because the government tells them to do it but for the next generation of farmers and families.