This week the federal government begins the second of two efforts to encourage American farmers to enroll in a soil-conservation program, hailed by some as the most important program of its kind in the last half-century.
Starting Monday, the nation`s farmers have until May 14 to agree to take erosion-prone land out of crop production in return for government payments.
In other words, farmers who don`t get good yields of corn, wheat, soybeans or whatever on poor land can take that land out of production of those crops and plant it with soil-conserving grasses and legumes for 10 years and get paid for doing so–courtesy of the taxpayers.
The program is authorized by the five-year 1985 Food Security Act, which was signed into law earlier this year by President Reagan.
The soil-conservation provisions of the law set a goal of idling 40 million to 45 million acres of the nation`s most erodible cropland by 1990.
The law specifies that farmers who might want to take some of their marginal land out of crop production should offer bids to the government on how much money they would accept to idle the land.
Under the law, the first round of bidding occurred March 3 to 14. Government officials acknowledged that the number of farmers who signed up for the program was disappointing.
In that period, farmers submitted bids to idle 4.8 million acres of land. The U.S. Agriculture Department accepted bids for only 838,356 acres on 10,307 farms. That was well below the national goal, set by the federal law, of idling 5 million acres this year.
During the March sign-up, only 540 Illinois farms joined the program.
Richard Lyng, the recently appointed U.S. secretary of agriculture, attributes the poor March sign-up total to the possibility that many farmers thought they could tap the taxpayers for a great deal more money than the budget-conscious Agriculture Department could spend.
In other words, there were a lot of greedy farmers who thought they could palm off their poor-yielding land on the taxpayers for more money than the land would produce in crop income.
”Many of the bidders asked unrealistically high compensation for removing the land from production,” Lyng said.
Noting that the Agriculture Department had turned down many of the exorbitantly high March bids, Lyng said that some farmers may have a better idea of what the government will accept when the second round of the sign-up for the program starts this week.
The soil-conservation provisions of the 1985 farm act are designed primarily to encourage farmers to take marginal croplands out of production and control soil erosion. If the law succeeds in cutting crop production, it may also help to provide higher prices for grain and other farm commodities.
Farm economists, however, are skeptical that farmers will idle enough land to eliminate crop surpluses. For example, they say, about 7 million acres planted with wheat are highly erodible, but about 21 million acres of wheat would have to be taken out of production to avoid an increase in surplus wheat stocks.
