Grassland Reserve Program

No government bashing in our next story. A pretty nice report on the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service office in Idaho. You know I was recently involved in a Western Rangeland Convention held in Boise and there was a variety of speakers who were almost pulling their hair out over all the eco-attacks on them. You know the story according to some of these non-profit lawyer nuts…farmers and ranchers aren’t feeding the nation and the world, they’re destroying the planet.

 Well there’s a pretty good deal that NRCS has put together according to Spokesperson Clint Evans: “The grassland reserve program benefits the farmer, the rancher by allowing them to apply an easement to the deed on that land that basically insures that it will be kept in use for production agriculture  for the grazing of livestock in perpetuity if it goes into a permanent easement. There are options but the easements have been the most popular because in the Western United States where you have ranch lands and range lands that have been in families for generations, it provides them the opportunity to place a federal easement on it, they get a fairly nice compensation payment for the easement and it allows them to be sure that land is going to stay in production for all the generations of their family and whoever owns that land, it won’t get developed it won’t get turned into ranchettes or converted to cropland, things like that.”  

 In other words land passed down to children and maybe children will grow up to be ranchers and farmers.