Reprinted from an Aug 10, 2008 column in the Morgantown Dominion Post
By now you’ve heard more than you want to know about the impacts ethanol production has had on your food prices. With fuel prices going through the roof, the demand for ethanol has escalated. In fact in the fall of 2006 the U. S. Agriculture Department’s chief economist said that farmers need to plant 90 million acres of corn by 2010 (that’s 10 million acres more than they planted in 2006) just to meet the ethanol demand and still raise enough corn to feed cattle and to meet export needs. His promise of more corn production has come true.
Corn was worth less than $2.00 a bushel in 2005, $3.40 a bushel in 2007 and is now selling for $6.50 a bushel. A number of things affect food prices, but the soaring price of corn is one of them. Just this past year you saw a 5-pound bag of flour jump from $1.97 to $2.43 in 3 months. As farmers plant more corn, they plant less wheat, so cereal prices have jumped up. Higher corn prices mean higher costs to raise beef, keep dairy cattle, feed hogs, etc. The higher food prices makes one wonder whether the subsidized use of ethanol is really the way to go to curb fuel prices (did I say "curb" fuel prices? Slip of the tongue).
But this column isn’t about our food prices, so how is this huge demand for corn negatively affecting wildlife (and even fish)? Let’s do the fish side first. The price of corn is putting some catfish farms out of business. Catfish farming is major business across Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. News from www.businessreport.com states that farmers get about .70-.80 cents a pound for the catfish they raise, but their feed bills have jumped to the point that it is costing them .75-.90 cents a pound to raise catfish. Now catfish farming is big business with $445 million in sales in 2007, but with prices of corn, soybeans, and wheat going up because of the floods in the Midwest, and the high demand for ethanol, many catfish farmers are having to close shop.
But there is an even bigger potential negative to the boom in ethanol; the loss of land that is in the Conservation Reserve Program (known as CRP land). Without getting bogged down in too much detail, let me just say that since 1985 the "Farm Bill" has subsidized farmers to put some of their marginal, erodible, farming lands into the Conservation Reserve Program. These CRP lands are super for wildlife and have created huge increases in some species such as pheasants and waterfowl. When I was a kid, pheasant hunting in the Dakotas was huge. Thousands of hunters went there, spent big money, to hunt pheasants.
But in the 70's and 80's pheasant habitat we started doing more "clean" farming, where more of the land was farmed. No strips along the edges of fields, no fence rows, and eventually almost no pheasants. With the advent of CRP, the habitat was there and the pheasants came back and now provide a huge industry in the Midwest. For example, pheasant hunting brought in $219 million to the state of South Dakota in 2007. Over 100,000 non-resident pheasant hunters went to South Dakota in 2007 alone. Many hundreds of thousands also went to North Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and other Mid-western destinations.
South Dakota had 1.5 million acres of CRP lands and it pays tremendous dividends to the economy. But there are other benefits of CRP. According to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, CRP reduces soil erosion by 450 million tons a year. CRP has helped restore 2 million acres of wetlands and adjacent buffers; CRP protects 170,000 miles of streams; CRP produces 15 million pheasants a year; and CRP supports 2.2 million ducks per year in the Prairie Pothole Region.
It is obvious that the benefits to rural economies via hunting are huge. I’ve mentioned pheasant hunting and here is an example of how important hunting pheasants can be. One county in South Dakota saw non-resident pheasant hunters spending almost $16 million in 2007. Another was over $13 million, and another almost $12 million. Just think how important it would be if Monongahlia County had an industry that brought in $16 million a year, and lost it . . . for any reason. Or Preston County losing an industry that brought in $13 million a year? That loss would be huge.
Now farmer sign contracts to keep lands in CRP and these contracts run on a ten-year cycle. Many started in 1987, and re-upped in 1997. However, with corn prices so high, the question is whether farmers will re-enroll their lands into CRP. I found one reference that states that around 80 percent of farmers with CRP lands, re-enrolled those lands for three years beginning in 2007. However, another report stated that one million acres of CRP lands were plowed under in the past 12 months. Another report stated that millions more will go under if corn, wheat and soybean prices remain high. And a July 2006 North Dakota State University study concluded that 3 billion gallons of ethanol could be produced every year from 60 percent of CRP lands in 19 states. Sounds like someone wants that conversion to take place.
The cap on the amount of acres of CRP land that could be enrolled in 2007 was 36 million. The 2008 "Farm Bill" lowered that cap to 32 million acres, so it appears that indeed we’ve lost millions of acres of wildlife-rich CRP land. (Note, the state wildlife agencies thought that CRP was important enough that the cap should go up to 45 million acres in the 2008 "Farm Bill").
The "Farm Bill" has gotten more and more complex over the years. But there are many provisions of this bill that affect wildlife and the environment in positive ways. In addition to the CRP, there is the Wetlands Reserve Program, the Conservation Stewardship Program, the Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program, the Grasslands Reserve Program, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and the Agricultural Water Enhancement Program.
The bottom line is that farmers want to take advantage of the price of corn and produce as many acres as they can. Makes sense. Will this mean a decrease (beyond the lower cap already established) in CRP acreage and thus a loss of wildlife and the income it produces? I don’t know. I do know that overall, "conservation" funding in the "Farm Bill" goes up every year, but how this will all translate into pheasant and waterfowl habitat, given the price of corn, still remains to be seen. Let’s put it this way. Most wildlife folks in the big CRP states believe that wildlife there will take a big hit as CRP lands are converted to corn and other grain.
Next week we’ll take a look at waterfowl production in the United States and see just how the future looks for our ducks.
