CRP General Sign-Up Numbers Released

On Friday Ag Secretary Vilsack announced out of the 4.5 million acres offered nationwide under the Conservation Reserve Program general sign-up the U.S. Department of Agriculture accepted 3.9 million. USDA Farm Service Agency Program Chief Rod Hamilton shares Washington CRP numbers.

HAMILTON: Here in the state of Washington we had about 228 thousand acres offered and about 224,700 were accepted, so that’s a pretty high acceptance rate. We had 1462 offers - an offer is an individual tract by our system but an individual offer, so it would end up being one contract, and 1438 accepted so that’s a little over 98 percent acceptance.

The reason for such high numbers?

HAMILTON: We had 6.5 million acres expiring and the expectation was that particularly in corn country prices are good enough, rents are up quite a bit and that there would be a lot of ground that would not be re-offered in the program, nor would there probably be a lot of new ground offered. So, I think in order to keep a significant amount of ground in the program they had to lower the cut-off score below what we’ve seen in previous sign-ups. And I think the other thing, in dry land wheat, particularly in lower rain fall areas, the economics have not improved that much and that’s probably why we had a higher percentage of our expiring ground re-offered and a larger amount accepted.

The largest amount of acreage both expiring and re-offered in Washington were concentrated in Douglas, Adams, and Lincoln counties.

I’m Lacy Gray and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Northwest Ag Information Network.