Another option to keep some CRP land with an expiring contract in the CRP

Washington Ag Today February 17, 2010 For farmers with Conservation Reserve Program contracts expiring this fall, who may not get a chance to re-enroll in the program, the Continuous CRP could be an option. Rod Hamilton with the Washington State Farm Service Agency office recently spoke to some farmers about that.

Hamilton: “Again it depends a lot on where you are located is potentially you could roll portions of that land over to Continuous CRP. Continuous CRP are these smaller practices. We don‘t have to wait for a sign up. We take sign ups continuously. Some more common examples are grass filter strips, grass waterways, buffers along streams. Obviously for those kind of options you have to have water for and in a lot of eastern Washington those practices don’t fit. We don’t have much water out there.”

Hamilton says there is also a Continuous CRP practice called the “contour grass strip” used primarily in the Palouse.

Hamilton: “If you have a whole field in CRP and you want to take out some of it but leave maybe the steepest ground the hilltops, you can enroll it into this Continuous CRP practice called contour grass strip. You can get quite a bit of acreage into those practices depending upon the lay of the land and NRCS will have to take a look at it and decide what lands meet their standards to meet this buffer.”

Contracts on about 85-thousand acres of CRP expire in Washington this fall.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

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