Subsidies Spur Crops on Fragile Habitat

Dec 7, 2008      Washington Post

By Dan Morgan

HIGHMORE, S.D. -- The ducks arrive in early April, zeroing in on thousands of shallow ponds fed by melting snow amid a vast prairie. As the pintails, mallards and blue-winged teal make nests in the grass and feed their young on abundant aquatic insects and freshwater shrimp, a 276,000-square-mile area reaching across five states and into Canada is transformed into one of the world's greatest habitats for migrating birds.

Now this swath, known as the Prairie Pothole Region because of the depressions formed long ago by retreating glaciers, is threatened by the steady advance of farming. Spurred by federal subsidies and two years of surging commodity prices, farmers increasingly are digging up the grass to plant crops, raising concerns among cattle ranchers, hunters and environmental groups about the future of land where Sioux hunters chased grazing buffalo a mere century and a half ago.

Today, signs of change are clearly visible. Emerald fields of ripening crops stand out against a sea of tawny grass in which a single square yard can hold 100 plant species. Rock piles tell the tale of fields cleared to make way for corn, soybeans, sunflowers or wheat.

Whether U.S. taxpayers should be underwriting these changes has emerged as a controversial issue in farm country and in Washington.

With rainfall in this part of South Dakota averaging only 17 inches a year, conservation groups say most farmers would not risk the start-up costs of plowing and preparing the ground without crop insurance, on which the federal government pays close to 60 percent of the premium.

"If there was no insurance, you'd have to sit down and study it," acknowledged Kevin Baloun, who operates a large farm in Hyde County. "You might think twice about it."

Efforts to curtail this subsidy ran into stiff opposition during deliberations on the recently enacted farm bill.

The House and Senate both voted to deny or delay crop insurance on fragile land that had never been farmed. But last-minute lobbying by some farm organizations and crop-growing interests limited the restriction to five Great Plains states -- North and South Dakota, Montana, Iowa, and Minnesota.

And the restriction will apply in a state only if the governor opts for it. So far, none has.

"Basically, the provision was gutted," said Lynn Tjeerdsma, a former aide to Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.).

Grass once covered the prairies from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains, but tens of millions of acres were lost as farming moved west. While a recent drop in record crop prices may slow the process for a few months or years, cattle ranchers, hunters and environmentalists fear they are fighting the tide of history.

The environmental pressures have only grown with unprecedented changes in American agriculture brought on by increasing demand from foreign countries and the biofuels industry. In South Dakota alone, about 425 square miles of grassland were turned into farmland between 2002 and 2007, according to state and federal data.

"Once you plow and plant, you can't ever duplicate what's lost," said Jim Faulstich, 58, a local rancher and vice chairman of the South Dakota Grasslands Coalition.

Hyde County is at the center of this latest range war. It was not until late in the 20th century that farming began making major inroads here; weather and wind punished settlers who tampered with the fragile soils. Harlan Stoley, a retired farmer here, can recall the "black blizzards" of dirt that rose from fields plowed during the Dust Bowl era.

But new drought-resistant hybrids and modern agricultural techniques that leave more of the scarce moisture in the soil have made farming an increasingly viable proposition.

At the same time, 16 ethanol refineries built or planned for South Dakota have created a booming market for corn.

About 10,000 acres of grassland and pasture, roughly 15 square miles, was converted to farming this year in Hyde and adjacent Hand counties, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Land being used to grow corn and sunflowers -- whose seeds are refined into oil or sold as birdseed -- has tripled since 1990 in those two counties.

Fighting the trend is an array of hunting and conservation groups. The political circumstances in the West have forced them to try to protect the grassland without making it a national park or a federal preserve. "There is still strong resistance in the West to extending federal ownership of land," said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group.

Scott Stephens, director of conservation planning for Ducks Unlimited, estimates that the Prairie Pothole Region of the Dakotas and Montana could lose an additional 3.3 million acres of native grassland to farming over the next five years if prices stay high and federal policy does not change.

Pat Comer, an ecologist with NatureServe, a nonprofit scientific research organization, said the concern is less with the total acreage lost than with the fragmentation of bird habitat. "We're beginning to affect habitat needs," he said.

Farmers take issue with that.

"There's always going to be grass in this country," said Troy Baloun, a cousin of Kevin Baloun who farms outside Highmore. Farther north, he said, the ground is too rocky and hilly for farming, and grass abounds.

The farming expansion clearly has been a boon to Hyde County's economy, which includes two grain elevators, a thriving farm equipment dealership and an aerial chemical-spraying service that keeps five AT-402 Air Tractors busy during the growing season.

Land prices have risen sharply in step with commodity prices and the biofuels boom. As the cost of renting or buying land increases, cattle ranchers feel pressure to rent their grassland to farmers, or dig it up themselves for crops that may return more revenue per acre.

"Times change; nothing stays the same," said Warren Solberg, a retired farmer. In the 1980s, it was "still pretty much prairie all the way from town," he recalled. "Now it's pretty much crops."

Troy Baloun typifies the new breed of farmer who views the prairie with a businessman's eye.

This year he has turned hundreds of acres of virgin sod, first removing rocks with a front loader, then moving in with a chisel plow and a disc harrow -- machinery that chops up the soil and readies it for crops.

"With these prices, you just can't pencil it in with cows," he said. "If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense."

If prices stay strong, he plans to plant wheat, corn or sunflowers in the newly turned ground next spring. He figures it will qualify for crop insurance.

To some, such farming is happening with too little thought to the long-term impact. Driving the gravel roads north of town, Faulstich points to field after field that has been converted in the past decade.

Faulstich shows off one field that his son seeded with prairie grasses such as switch grass, purple prairie clover, yellow coneflower and purple mountain vetch. The results have been spotty. "You can't replicate nature's way," he said.

Under a 1991 federal program, about 1 million acres in South Dakota have been placed under federal conservation easements that prohibit plowing and ban haying before the end of the bird-nesting season. In return, the government pays the landowner 25 percent of the land's assessed value.

But the government money set aside for easements covers less acreage today because of rising land values, said Harris Hoistad, manager of the Huron, S.D., wetland management district for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Another government effort to protect land, the Conservation Reserve Program, has also come under strain. The federal government pays landowners an annual rent to keep idle fragile land that is of marginal use for farming. But the payments have not kept pace with the rents that landowners can get from farmers.

"There's a lot of farmland out here that shouldn't have been broken," said Troy Baloun. "If they want to stop sod-busting, they should make the program juicy enough. A lot of people would put it back in grass."

The new farm bill directs the USDA to increase the Conversation Reserve payments but reduces the number of acres authorized for coverage under the program from 39.2 million to 32 million.

Against this backdrop, conservationists sought during this year's farm bill debate to curtail the incentive for sod-busting that they say exists in the crop insurance program. A final compromise allowed governors of Prairie Pothole states to deny the subsidy on new grassland conversions. But environmentalists say it is doubtful that any governors will go against the farm lobby.

Farm groups argue that it would be a serious mistake to cut insurance on land conversions at a time of rising food prices and growing worldwide demand for commodities.

"If this is enacted, the ability of our agriculture to grow and compete with other states will be severely limited," said Lisa Richardson, executive director of the South Dakota Corn Growers Association.

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