The Hull family has partnered with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Service Agency (FSA) Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in Vermont to conserve sensitive riparian areas on their dairy farm by establishing forested buffer zones and installing high-tensile fence, stream crossings and other water handling equipment. Photo © USDA / Flickr through a Creative Commons license

This article by Kris Johnson for The Nature Conservancy is reminiscent of a post on paying for ecosystem services published here five years ago, where watersheds that would otherwise be affected by agriculture are better protected with incentives from conservation programs. From Cool Green Science today:

Ask someone in the rural Midwest what the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) does, and a likely answer is: “It pays farmers not to farm.” But, research recently published in the journal Ecosystem Servicessuggests a better answer would be: It pays farmers to grow clean water.

It’s a better answer because with nutrient pollution threatening drinking water supplies, impacting boating and fishing on lakes and rivers throughout the Midwest and causing a persistent “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, figuring out how to produce clean water is a critically important challenge. And the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is key to solving it.

A centerpiece of US farm policy for more than 30 years, the CRP supports voluntary retirement of “environmentally sensitive” agricultural lands by providing annual payments and other incentives to farmers who restore enrolled lands for the duration of a 10- or 15-year contract.

The program has been implemented across the US, at its peak in 2007 restoring approximately 37 million acres. The CRP was created to support conservation and lands enrolled provide numerous environmental benefits including creating wildlife habitat, minimizing soil loss, and reducing nutrient loading.

Yet despite this evidence of the benefits of CRP, support for the program is declining as recent federal legislation reduced the acreage cap for the program allowing a maximum of 24 million total acres to be enrolled. In addition, high crop prices are prompting many farmers to allow their contracts to expire, resulting in millions of acres voluntarily exiting the program as well.

But reductions in acres restored by CRP cover couldn’t come at a worse time.

According to the EPA nearly half of our nation’s streams and rivers are impaired largely as a result of nutrient runoff from agriculture. Nearly a third of streams in agricultural areas of the country have nitrate levels that exceed safe levels, endangering drinking water supplies of private wells and major cities throughout the Midwest.

The costs of treating this impaired water are so high that the water utility in Des Moines, Iowa filed a federal law suit against the upstream agricultural counties that the city feels are responsible for their impaired water. And in August of 2014 500,000 people in Toledo went without water when a nutrient-fueled algal bloom made water from Lake Erie too toxic to drink.

To address these challenges we must use every tool in our tool box to improve water quality in the Midwest and across the country, and our recent research shows that lands in CRP provide water quality and other benefits that more than pay for the cost of payments to farmers.

Specifically, our group of researchers from The Nature Conservancy, the University of Minnesota and theArmy Corps of Engineers found that even modest increases in CRP acres in a pilot watershed in Iowa significantly decreased loading of nitrogen and phosphorus. Our analysis determined that increasing CRP acres compared to the baseline would also reduce flood damages, improve air-quality, and sequester carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Read the rest of the original article here.