CREP not affecting rental rates
10/29/02
By MARK POWELL
University of Maryland agricultural economist Dr. Lori Lynch said her research indicates that the state’s Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program is not affecting cash rental rates.
That finding, delivered to the state’s CREP Advisory Committee, runs counter to conventional wisdom in the state’s farming community. Farmers, particularly on the Eastern Shore, have stated that CREP annual rental rates — more than $100 an acre with additional signing bonuses — are taking land away from them.
Southern Maryland farmer Earl “Buddy” Hance questioned Lynch’s conclusions.
“Rental rates aren’t going up, because we can’t increase the amount we pay,” Hance said. In other words, farmers are paying all they can afford to pay to rent land and the CREP rental rates are too high to compete with, dropping them out of any bidding war that might be reflected in Lynch’s research.
In a later interview, Lynch said the small amount of land actually going into CREP is not enough to result in any kind of overall increase of cash rental rates,
Lynch’s presentation started off a morning-long CREP advisory committee meeting at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Annapolis headquarters. The committee is in the process of drafting a new agreement between the state and federal government on CREP. CREP is designed to pay landowners to set aside strips of land along waterways and plant trees or grasses on that land for 15 years. Such projects are promoted by environmentalists as ways to improve water quality by limiting runoff of nutrients from farm fields. Wildlife enthusiasts say the filter strips provide habitat to species that include bobwhite quail and other upland game birds.
The CREP agreement being worked on by the advisory committee to the state agriculture department, Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the USDA, has become a focus of controversy as farm groups want changes to reduce the impact on tenant farmers losing land to CREP and wildlife conservation groups want larger areas put into filter strips.
The state has a goal of putting 100,000 acres into CREP.
While farm groups continue to worry that productive farmland is being lost to CREP, Lynch’s research questioned that belief. “Somerset County has lost the most farmland to CREP, about 5 percent,” she said.
Worcester County has about 4 percent of its farmland in CREP, St. Mary’s County and Dorchester County are next, with slightly less than 4 percent. Talbot County is next with less than 3 percent. The percentage falls off after those counties.
The CREP advisory committee also heard a discussion of Lynch’s study of an economic threshold for Maryland agriculture. That study, funded by the Maryland AgroEcology Center, will be released in its entirety at University of Maryland’s ag outlook conference, Nov. 6, in Annapolis.
Lynch found that Maryland agriculture does not have a critical mass issue — a point at which the economic losses of farming and farmland go so far as to make farming not viable with a resulting precipitous decline in farms. Carolyn Watson, an assistant secretary of DNR, asked if the state was threatening farming by putting land into CREP.
Lynch said, “My results show there is no threshold.” (A recent report put together by the University of Maryland on the state of agriculture in Maryland does allude to a critical mass existing in the state, however.)
“Critical mass implies that agriculture is doomed,” Lynch said. While in fact, she said, counties with significant loss of farming have reversed courses and farmers have adapted and thrived.
At the end of its meeting, the CREP advisory committee listed concerns and successes of the program. Over the next several meetings they will work to address the concerns, including a relatively new one with the potential for increasing mosquito populations and the threat of West Nile Virus to horses and people.A major concern addressed by many on the committee was to create equity for tenant farmers. Mike Slattery of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said, “We need to find a way to compel landowners and tenant farmers to work together.”
One idea was assign maintenance fees on CREP lands to tenant farmers, paying the farmer to maintain the CREP.
Jim Newcomb, conservationist with the Dorchester County Soil Conservation District, said many of the landowners he works with have to be coached through the process and have little or no experience in maintaining CREP buffers. And, many don’t have the necessary equipment.
Ned Gerber of Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage said agricultural interests have to understand there are methods to allow for “natural succession” of plants in buffers that may be seen as unwanted by farmers. Gerber added that he wasn’t talking about noxious weeds.
Another growing consensus appears to be developing in the group that CREP incentives and priorities should be different in different parts of the state. Ducks Unlimited and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation have developed recommendations for areas that should be given higher priority. Based upon habitat for waterfowl, the higher priorities would be on the Eastern Shore.