Sen. Roger Marshall helped introduce the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) Improvement Act last week. This bipartisan bill would provide farmers and ranchers with the flexibility needed to conserve water on working lands, while fairly compensating them for retiring their water rights or limiting water use. Sen. Jerry Moran was a co-sponsor of the bill.
CREP, part of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), leverages federal and non-federal funds to target significant state, regional or national conservation concerns. Traditionally, it has provided farmers and ranchers with payments to remove land from production to help address these concerns. Each CREP is unique, and in drought-prone regions in Kansas and other states throughout the West and Great Plains, CREP primarily is used to voluntarily reduce water consumption on farmland. However, the program has not always worked as intended and producers have continued to seek more flexibility.
The proposed legislation specifically would improve CREP by adding dryland crop production and grazing to the list of appropriate conservation practices; allowing continuous cropping systems, like alfalfa, to be eligible for drought and water conservation agreements; ensuring fairer payments to producers by stipulating that annual payments for agreements would be equal to the difference between irrigated acre payment rates and dryland acre rates.
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