South Dakota’s ag-industrial complex isn’t completely committed to destroying the environment. Offer South Dakota farmers enough socialist interventions, and they’ll make South Dakota fourth in the nation for taking environmentally sensitive land out of production:
The Conservation Reserve Program has sent $129.5 million to South Dakotans. That trails Iowa ($402.5 million), Illinois ($172.7 million) and Minnesota ($150.8 million).
The program, known by the abbreviation CRP, pays landowners to maintain grass, trees and other plant species on enrolled acres, which helps prevent soil erosion, filters runoff that enters waterways, and establishes habitat for wildlife.
The program also helps fight climate change. Some farming practices can release plant and soil carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, where it acts as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas. Consistent plant cover pulls carbon dioxide out of the air and stores it in the soil [staff, “South Dakota Ranks Fourth in Payments from Conservation Program,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2023.10.17].
Now if we could just get the USDA, or maybe GOED, to hand out some cash to support an oat-milk processing plant in South Dakota to promote water conservation and reduce CAFO greenhouse gas emissions….
Related Green-Socialist Complicity: Racota Valley Ranch, the Noem-Arnold family’s ag enterprise, didn’t take any CRP payments in 2020 and 2021, but the Environmental Working Group figures that from 2000 through 2019, Racota Valley Ranch accepted over $390,000 in conservation payments, 8% of the corporation’s $4.8 million in farm subsidies received from 1995 through 2021.
I find it, however, much “less than excellent” that Cory needs to spend his valuable blog space attempting to teach a state full of “stubborn Germans” that modern socialism is a worthy and valuable endeavor.
Just look at your lives, friends. You’d be a “third world state” without the help we liberals send to Washington in order to bail out your stubborn refusal to ‘pay your own way”.
PS … proclaiming yourselves a “low tax state” is haybilly dog-whistle for “Ha ha ha. We found a way to skip out on our obligations to America.”
Don’t forget the double dip…leasing your CRP to out of state hunters, who will spend $800-$1000/day, and more, to stay in your lodge.
For a state where Republicans want to abolish the US Department of Education because it breeds Marxist queers the support coming from USDA is welcome because it slaughtered 1.75 million creatures in 2021 including 400,000 native species like wolves, cougars, bears and bobcats.
In 2022 We, the People killed 216 feral cattle through APHIS but we also shot, trapped or poisoned over 56,000 coyotes or about 153 every day.
Funded by the 2018 farm bill and reported for 2022 the rogue agency killed 26,371 beavers, over 14,000 red winged blackbirds, 478 armadillos, 244 badgers, 450 black bears, 515 bobcats, 820 red-crested cardinals, 204 cougars, nearly 20,000 brown-headed cowbirds, 4,300 American crows, nearly 11,000 white-tailed deer, over 19,000 mourning doves, some 4,000 ducks including those that feed on invasive zebra mussels, over 6,000 egrets, 540 American kestrels, over 3,000 foxes, some 20,000 gulls, 1,200 jackrabbits, over 2,000 hawks, 600 herons, 3,000 iguanas, 74 javelinas, 1,182 yellow-bellied marmots, 1,700 muskrats, over 8,500 black-tailed and Gunnison prairie dogs, nearly 8,300 raccoons, almost 11,000 common ravens, 4,400 striped skunks, 1.2 million European starlings, 1,600 mute swans, 137,000 feral swine, 440 wild turkeys, 380 snapping turtles, over 14,000 vultures, 220 wolves and 2,300 woodchucks.
I like CRP or at least programs like CRP which let marginal farmland, that should not be plowed and cropped in the first place, lay fallow, allow native forbs and grasses to reinhabit the prairie, and provide valuable habitat. Our war on various furbearing “predators”, and birds of the sky remain a mystery to me. Ask Governor Noem….about the only eradication effort I could agree with would be a thinning out of Canada Geese who make many a sidewalk and green expanse vert slippery. Governor Noem built a large wall around her Governor’s Mansion property to keep them out. governor Janklow just power washed the debris.
There was a time when farmers could actually go broke in South Dakota. The only way now to fail at farming is get too greedy and commit fraud against the government gravy train. Seriously.
Correction: get CAUGHT AND PROSECUTED for fraud against government gravy train..
CRP keeps some soil in place but funnels tax dollars to 90 year old absentee land owners in order to do it. Active farmers (who also get tax dollars in other forms) are not prone to participate in what’s become a land retirement program, writing off potential for any future improvements. They would likely also find the income from CRP does meet their needs in a leveraged situation.
Correction: does not meet their needs