Let’s hope profit opportunities from the agricultural shortages Putin has caused don’t reverse the positive trend in CRP enrollments in South Dakota. Joshua Haiar reports that South Dakota’s acres under contract to the Conservation Reserve Program have boomed 55% over the last two years:
Paying farmers to keep their land out of production restores soil health and correlates with better downstream water quality. The Conservation Reserve Program also locks more carbon dioxide in the soil, which is a more efficient way to mitigate global warming than planting and harvesting a bunch of corn, hauling it to Ringneck or Glacial Lakes, cooking it into ethanol to burn in cars, and piping the carbon dioxide up to North Dakota for burial. That climate benefit is part of why the Biden Administration expanded CRP last year to raise enrolled acres from 21 million to 25 million and why the President this year is proposing an additional $2.4 billion in CRP funding to raise that goal to 27 million acres.
It’s probably too little too late. There’s a red flag warning for the confluence of the Big Sioux and Missouri Rivers at Sioux City today as fuels dry, soils blow into Minnesota. Another farm bill laden with subsidies and ecocide is being drafted, Republicans are begging the Biden administration to bequeath enough cash to expand the Lewis and Clark boondoggle and moral hazard still trumps self-reliance.
A few days ago topsoil was blowing East and along county blacktop M-12 you can see drifts of topsoil in some ditches.
Will this Biden CRP expansion offset the new federal authorization for higher ethanol gasoline blends?
Rob Peter to pay Paul.
Paying farmers and ranchers to do the right thing! Why haven’t they done the right thing without the government, that they hate, paying them?