A voluntary program offering landowners the opportunity to protect, restore, and enhance wetlands on their property. The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) provides technical and financial support to help landowners with their wetland restoration efforts. The NRCS goal is to achieve the greatest wetland functions and values, along with optimum wildlife habitat, on every acre enrolled in the program. This program offers landowners an opportunity to establish long-term conservation and wildlife practices and protection beyond that which can be obtained through any other USDA program.
The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), enacted in 1985, provides payments to farmers to take highly erodible or environmentally sensitive cropland out of production for ten years or more to conserve soil and water resources. It is the federal government's largest private land retirement program. The program is administered by the Farm Service Agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), with technical assistance provided by USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service. CRP has several subprograms, the best-known of which is the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP). Congress reauthorized and amended the CRP through FY2007 in the 2002 farm bill and increased the CRP enrollment cap from 36.4 million acres to 39.2 million acres. Congress also added wildlife resources as a CRP objective and allowed participants to extend certain contracts up to 15 years. Along with a "general sign-up" in 2004 for landowners to submit bids to enroll acreage, USDA also announced two CRP initiatives: one to enroll 250,000 acres of bobwhite quail habitat and a second to enroll 250,000 acres of non-floodplain wetlands. Landowners may apply to enroll in these initiatives any time through December 31, 2007, or until the enrollment caps are reached. Between 2007 and 2010, 28 million acres under CRP contracts will expire, with 16 million acres in 2007 alone. In June 2006, USDA announced that contracts for approximately 13 million acres were renewed. An additional 1 million acres were also added under the latest general sign-up. Reenrollments for contracts expiring 2008-2010 were announced in late summer 2006.
The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) is a voluntary program whereby the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides technical and financial assistance to active farmers and ranchers to address natural resource concerns such as soil conservation, water quality and quantity, nutrient management, and fish and wildlife habitat. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is working with these landowners to maximize the environmental benefits gained for the expenditures made in the program. Funding has expanded significantly under the 2002 Farm Bill, with the amount of annual funding authorized reaching $1.3 billion by fiscal year 2007. The EQIP has been used to implement a wide variety of practices that are considered beneficial to many species of fish and wildlife. The NRCS is also beginning to use EQIP to address the needs of declining and other at-risk fish and wildlife species. Few data are available that document fish and wildlife response to EQIP. Program implementation to date is summarized, and recent information on planning of practices with the potential to benefit fish and wildlife resources is examined.
