Guebert is an Illinois-based agricultural columnist and writer.
When Farm Journal’s late staff economist John Marten explained the-then new American Conservation Reserve Program in the mid-1980s, he did so with a clever memory tool.
“CRP isn’t complicated,” Marten said, “if you remember the four Ws: West, Wheat, Wet and Windy.”
CRP will be called many things, he noted, “but, in the end, it is a set-aside program mostly for western wheat growers and some midwestern farmers cursed with either wet or windblown farms.”
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Marten was spot on. By 1990, CRP held 29.2 million acres, much of it four W land. In 2007, the 22nd year of what was to have been a 10-year program, 60 percent of CRP’s acres was in nine mostly wheat states.
That background and those numbers are crucial elements in the Bush administration’s recent decision to allow “emergency” CRP haying and grazing this summer and its hand wringing on whether to allow farmers and ranchers early, no-penalty withdrawals from CRP next year. That latter idea is pushed by livestock producers being swiftly bled by record feed prices.
Neither choice, however, addresses the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and its lead-footed driver, ethanol, a massively bigger force behind today’s high grain prices than the idled 37 million acres in CRP.
Projections show ethanol needing four billion bushels of corn to fuel American cars and trucks in 2008. That’s two times our projected exports and nearly as much as will be fed to livestock.
This incredible unforeseen demand, backstopped by $140 crude oil and federal RFS mandates, is the elephant in today’s CRP debate that everyone sees and no one talks about. Why? Mostly politics.
“The Bush administration is absolutely committed to ethanol,” says one Capitol Hill watcher. As such, the White House will look at any tool, other than cutting the RFS, to lower grain prices, including CRP, to keep the biofuel rocket roaring while, hopefully, lowering food prices.
Given where the bulk of the CRP land now lies, any scheme to push eight to 10 million acres of CRP back into production promises little, if any, relief from today’s tall corn and soybean prices. Almost all is Four W land; it simply can’t grow the grain necessary to address the shortfall.
There are legal hurdles, too. If the White House orders early, no-penalty “outs” of CRP for 2009, it probably faces a court test like its late-May announcement for “emergency” CRP grazing and haying.
Before grousing that greenie weenies are partially responsible for the $17 million-per-day losses hog producers are eating and $13 million-per-day losses cattle producers are enduring, remember it was president Bush who promised the hook and bullet boys, CRP’s staunchest defenders, that he’d never touch CRP in 2004.
But this debate is not about broken campaign promises, lawsuits or even CRP. It’s about ethanol, the elephant in the room that is turning all the furniture, as well as lives of most American livestock producers, into kindling. Tinkering with CRP instead of debating RFS is a foolish, costly mistake. Livestock producers are paying for it now. Everyone will pay for it later.
