General CRP sign up coming in March
Farm and Ranch January 31, 2011 If you have land you would like to enroll or re-enroll in the Conservation Reserve Program you will have the opportunity to do so during a general sign up that has been announced by the USDA. Coppess: “General sign up 41 begins on Monday, March 14th and will run through Friday, April the 15th. So everybody should keep those dates in mind.” That’s Jonathan Coppess Administrator of the Farm Service Agency, which administers the CRP program. He says the 2008 Farm Bill put a cap of 32 million acres on the Conservation Reserve Program. Coppess: “Right now we are just over 31 million acres. We expect about 4.4 million to expire on September 30th so we are looking at using this signup as well as the continuous practices to continue Secretary Vilsack’s charge to the agency to keep us as close to that 32 million acre statutory cap as we can.” Coppess says FSA expects to accept about 3.95 million acres from this sign up. Contracts awarded under this sign up will become effective October 1st of this year. It will not affect cropped acres for this growing season. Of the 4.4 million acres for which CRP contracts expire this September, 117-thousand of those acres are in Idaho, 104-thousand in Oregon and just under 89-thousand are in Washington. Under CRP eligible landowners receive annual rental payments and cost-share assistance to establish long-term, resource conserving covers on eligible farmland. I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net
