New House Ag Chair says CRP needs flexibility
Farm and Ranch December 28, 2010 The incoming chairman of the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, is not in any rush to work on the next farm bill, but that doesn’t mean the Republican lawmaker doesn’t have some ideas about what should be in it. For example, the Conservation Reserve Program. Lucas says the 2012 Farm Bill could include a provision allowing the USDA to reduce the size of the CRP in the case of crop shortages. Lucas: “When the price of grain gets to the point where perhaps it is stressful to the feed industry, makes it difficult to meet all of our other needs, perhaps we need to be a little more flexible with CRP acres to allow some of that better land that might have gotten in their originally, to be ale to come out. If we are too excessively restrictive with CRP and the demand for the products, in this case we will use the example corn for ethanol, for livestock feed and for human food, if the demands around the world exceeds supply, if we don‘t show flexibility in adding production capacity our competitors around the planet will just take up the slack. If we are gong to need more corn to meet the world demand I would just as soon see it come from an American farmer‘s operation and not from somewhere else around the world.” Lucas says land could be added back to CRP when the acreage isn’t needed. Nationally, there are currently just under 31 million acres of environmentally sensitive former cropland in the 25 year-old CRP program. I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net.
