Bismarck, ND, July 25, 2006 - Hundreds of thousands of acres of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) land will plummet from the North Dakota landscape over the next 8 years, says the national conservation organization Ducks Unlimited (DU). Such a dramatic change across the state is likely to have dire consequences for cattle producers and wildlife alike, especially in drought years like this one when ranchers are looking to CRP land to feed their cattle.

“I have not seen heat and moisture stress this severe since 1988,” said Blake VanderVorst, agronomist for Ducks Unlimited. “Farmers and ranchers with livestock will need all the hay and assistance they can obtain to survive these extreme conditions.”

The U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently opened up CRP land statewide across North Dakota to emergency haying and grazing. Under USDA rules, only 50 percent of a field can be hayed or grazed, meaning nearly 1.7 million of the 3.36 million acres of CRP currently in North Dakota will now be available as livestock forage.

“CRP provides a critical forage reserve for ranchers during drought emergencies like this year”, said Scott McLeod, DU North Dakota biologist and farm bill specialist.

But this reserve may not be around much longer. Contracts on 2.77 million acres of North Dakota’s CRP will expire between 2007 and 2010. McLeod says Farm Services Agency’s (FSA) plan for contract reenrollments and extensions will result in only 29 percent of North Dakota producers being offered re-enrollments with updated rental rates. The bulk of North Dakota producers are being offered short-term contract extensions of 2-5 years.

CRP is expected to be reauthorized in the next Farm Bill, which will soon be crafted by Congress, but more changes to the program are needed in order to maintain the current acreage in North Dakota. Due to gradual changes in the scoring process, North Dakota producers no longer rank very high nationally during general signups making the full-scale replacement of expired acres very unlikely.

While DU is concerned about the loss of CRP because it is credited with adding an additional 2.2 million ducks to the fall flight each year, the organization is equally concerned about the livelihood of North Dakota’s cattle producers. “Cows and ducks require the same resources; grass and water,” McLeod said. “Without a healthy livestock industry, there is no economic reason to keep the millions of acres of native prairie that’s the real backbone of duck production.

“I hope our elected officials will not only be focused on maintaining CRP, but also on directing more acres back to North Dakota and the rest of the Prairie Pothole Region”, says McLeod. “Otherwise, sportsmen and producers will both be looking around, wondering what happened.”

With more than a million supporters, Ducks Unlimited is the world’s largest and most effective wetland and waterfowl conservation organization. The United States alone has lost more than half of its original wetlands ­- nature’s most productive ecosystem - and continues to lose more than 80,000 wetland acres each year.

Look for Ducks Unlimited on the World Wide Web at www.ducks.org.

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