Bipartisan bill aims to incentivize water conservation in drought-prone farmlands of US West

With hopes of incentivizing water conservation in the country’s drought-prone regions, two lawmakers on Thursday will introduce bipartisan legislation seeking to expand the flexibility of voluntary cutback programs.

The bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), would explicitly direct the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to allow dryland farming on fallowed acreage for which landowners receive compensation through a federal conservation program.   

Bennet and Marshall plan to present their bill at a Thursday morning hearing of the Senate Agriculture Committee’s Conservation, Climate, Forestry and Natural Resources Subcommittee, where they respectively serve as chair and ranking member.

The initiative at the heart of the bill is the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP), which enables ranchers and farmers to receive a yearly rental rate from federal and state entities by removing environmentally sensitive land from production.

Rates are currently “soil-specific” and are updated based on county and whether the land is irrigated or non-irrigated cropland, according to the USDA.

While each CREP is unique based on regional needs, areas vulnerable to drought — such as Colorado, Kansas and across the West and Great Plains — primarily use the program to encourage voluntary water cutbacks on farmland, according to the senators.

But Bennet and Marshall have expressed concerns that CREP has not always worked as intended — leading producers to seek out more flexible rules that allow for alternative conservation practices and fairer compensation.

Although the 2018 Farm Bill included a provision to allow dryland farming on former irrigated acres retired through CREP, the USDA has yet to implement this measure, a statement from the lawmakers explained.

Meanwhile, payments on these acres remain insufficient to encourage CREP participation in regions where water conservation is critical, according to the senators.

For example, they explained, Colorado’s Republican River CREP is supposed to help Colorado satisfy its commitments under a 1943 water allocation agreement the state shares with Kansas and Nebraska.

But in recent years, the Republican River CREP has faced difficulties enrolling enough farmers to meet the program’s goals, the lawmakers stated.

“Producers are hesitant to permanently retire their water rights and take their land out of production as a result of lower payment rates in certain areas of the Republican River Water Conservation District,” they noted.

At a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing in March, Bennet said that agricultural programs like CREP contain “misaligned incentives” that don’t necessarily achieve the conservation that they promote.

Because rates vary according to the value of the land in question, farmers in southeastern Colorado’s “Dust Bowl region” are getting bids of $13-15 per acre, while those in more fertile parts of the country are receiving about $300 per acre, according to Bennet.

Existing rates “are not going to create the result that anybody wants,” he told The Hill shortly after last month’s hearing. 

“People are going to make a different choice,” the senator said at the time.

Bennet and Marshall’s bill, dubbed the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program Improvement Act, would seek to modify CREP in several ways, the statement from the lawmakers said.

In addition to directing USDA to allow dryland agricultural uses on CREP land, the legislation would add both dryland crop production and grazing to the list of appropriate conservation practices for the program.

The bill would also allow continuous cropping systems, like alfalfa, to be eligible for drought and water conservation CREP agreements.

To ensure fairer payments to producers, the legislation would require annual payments for drought and water conservation CREP agreements to be equal to the difference between the irrigated and dryland acre payment rates.

That payment formula would be retroactive for existing drought and water conservation agreements, and producers would be able to choose their payment allocations — instead of a fixed payment per year for the 10–15-year contract period, according to the bill.

Lastly, the legislation would waive CREP payments from the $50,000 annual payment limitation under the Conservation Reserve Program, a federal umbrella program that includes CREP.

“The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program Improvement Act will provide the flexibility farmers and ranchers need to conserve water on working lands under CREP, while providing them with fair compensation for retiring their water rights or limiting their water use,” the lawmakers said.