Md. CREP committee working towards
addressing some farmer concerns
12/10/02
By MARK POWELL
Ducks Unlimited and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation are pulling out of their commitment to fund cost-share for landowners enrolled in Maryland’s Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program.
The decision, discussed last week at a meeting of the state’s CREP Advisory Committee at the Bay Foundation’s headquarters in Annapolis, is a result of declining income at the non-profits.
Ben Alder of Ducks Unlimited, which has its offices on Kent Island, said monetary concerns are behind the decision. The cost-share — of varying percentages on different conservation practices — helps landowners do the work required when installing buffers along waterways which CREP promotes.
Both organizations have been advocates of CREP as beneficial to water quality by keeping excess nutrients out of the Chesapeake, and as promoting habitats, such as wetlands, for wildlife.
Mike Schultz, vice president of public affairs for the Bay Foundation, said his organization had informed the state and federal agencies involved with CREP that the environment group would suspend its cost-share funding retroactive to June 15, 2002. “We think its a great program,” Schultz said, adding that the Bay Foundation is suffering from a lack of donations as a result of the economy’s slump.
“We’ve laid off 30 people,” Schultz said.
Beebe Shortall of the USDA-Farm Service Agency said hundreds of landowners are affected by the Ducks Unlimited and Bay Foundation decision. Most of those landowners do not yet know that the cost-share dollars previously available to them from the two environmental-conservation organizations are no longer available. Schultz agreed that some landowners who signed up between June now will expect the cost-share. It is unclear whether the Bay Foundation may come up with the funds to help those landowners.
Although state and federal officials had no clear idea at presstime of the amount of money involved in the cost-share since June 15 until now, estimates put it at nearly $1 million.
Schultz said the Bay Foundation has already spent $2 million for cost-share on CREP and helped landowners put in 35,000 acres of buffers. “It’s been an extremely successful program,” Schultz said. “It has simply outstripped our ability to do cost-share.”
The cost-share is a relatively small part of the financial benefit to landowners who enroll in CREP. The rental rates paid to landowners to participate are usually considerably more than the agricultural rental rate.
That issue is at the heart of discussions on the CREP Advisory Committee which is now drafting a new agreement between the state and federal governments on the program. The advisory committee includes federal government representative Steve Connelly, Maryland Farm Service Agency executive director, and Royden Powell III, assistant secretary of the Maryland Department of Agriculture, and Department of Natural Resources officials. Farmers and environmentalists are also represented.
Farmers from the Eastern Shore have complained that CREP was taking farmland away from them as landowners took federal and state dollars to put large buffers around streams, rivers and ditches.
While some environmentalists have disagreed with that view, it appears now that many on the advisory committee are working towards a compromise that will allow for smaller buffers and, perhaps, lower rental rates so as not to compete with tenant farmers for productive farmland.
Several on the panel suggest that the Lower Eastern Shore particularly should have smaller buffers than the 300 feet encouraged by wildlife proponents.
James Farmer, a Charles County attorney and a leader of the state’s Quail Unlimited organization, said, “300 foot buffers around ditches is probably inappropriate. There’s no justification to have more than 50 foot buffers there.”
Farmer, a Democratic Party fundraiser whose name was floated by the Baltimore Sun’s outdoors writer as a potential secretary of natural resources in the new Ehrlich Administration, said the concerns raised by Eastern Shore farmers need to be addressed in the new CREP memorandum of agreement. “It’s not worth the animosity this is creating in the farming community,” Farmer said.
Farmer is credited with pushing CREP buffers to the current 300 foot maximum, something he says is necessary to provide good habitat for wildlife.
Over the next few weeks, members of the CREP Advisory Committee will develop a draft memorandum of agreement on the program. Two meetings on the document are set for Dec. 16 and Dec. 18.
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MDA’s Royden Powell III presented to the advisory committee results of an agriculture department survey of CREP participants. Among the findings were these:
• About half of those enrolling in the program are not production farmers themselves;
• the Lower Eastern Shore has a more of the 120 foot to 300 foot buffers than other parts of the state;
• most CREP buffers are on Class II and Class III soils and more Class I and Class II soils have been enrolled recently than in earlier years, and,
• it’s clear increasing incentives have increased enrollments.