NSAC's Blog

CRP Signup: Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel

May 27, 2022

For more than 35 years, the Farm Bill’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) has paid farmers and landowners to take highly erodible and other environmentally sensitive lands out of crop production and enroll them in conserving practices instead. Through CRP, USDA pays farmers to set aside land for grass or tree cover for a period of 10 or 15 years. This May, the Farm Service Agency announced that it had accepted over 2 million new acres into the FY22 CRP General Signup. This included more than 1.75 million re-enrolled acres, over 85% of the total accepted.