By ANN HINCH
Assistant Editor

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — For Indiana farmers who lost alfalfa and other hay to the ravages of spring frost, a dry summer would be insult on top of injury. That combination, however, is not enough to move the Farm Service Agency (FSA) to release potential grazing and haying land from its Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).

“Even though we have a need for haying and grazing land, the CRP will only be released for drought conditions” and not in combination with the April freeze, explained Gail Peas, Indiana FSA conservation program specialist.

Peas, county FSA agents and the Indiana State Department of Agriculture (ISDA) are hearing from concerned farmers who want to open up CRP land for hay harvest and livestock grazing. CRP is a program in which farmers and other landowners enroll acreage for wildlife habitat protection, with the understanding that in exchange for lease payments from the federal government over 10 or 15 years, they are not to farm the land and must maintain grassy cover on parts of it.

Hoosier landowners have enrolled 315,317 acres in CRP; according to Peas’ office, just over 174,000 could be eligible for haying and grazing if FSA were to approve their usage – which can be done under certain criteria. (If FSA does release the land, farmers taking advantage will receive a 25 percent cut in their CRP lease payment on that acreage.)

Geographical data were not available to determine how many CRP acres are concentrated in southeastern Indiana, which seems hardest hit by dry weather at present.

Conditional release

Livestock producers in her area are beginning to feed winter hay stores now, or will be in the next couple of weeks, said Washington County FSA Director Tracy Soliday.

Farmers are facing a 50 percent hay loss in her county, between sparse, spotty rainfall and April’s freeze, hay prices have gone “way up” lately.

“Just mowing my yard, it didn’t have the grass clippings on top that it usually does,” she said. “Unless we get some major rainfall, we’re not going to get a second cutting (of hay).”

Washington’s eight contiguous counties – Lawrence, Orange, Crawford, Harrison, Floyd, Clark, Scott and Jackson – are facing similar problems, according to Soliday. While April rainfall was normal, March, May and June were more arid. In addition, in February the ground was “very wet” and, ironically, farmers trying to feed hay to livestock damaged pastureland to produce new hay crop.

If Washington County goes dry into July, Soliday said February’s precipitation can be disregarded in calculating rainfall shortage toward requesting the CRP land release for grazing. This ties in with Steve Brown’s explanation of the two ways FSA will consider such a release.

Brown, executive officer with Indiana FSA, said if an area falls at least 40 percent short of its average rainfall in the current month and over the four previous months, its FSA county committee can appeal to the state committee.

The state, said Peas, would convene a meeting of government and private wildlife agencies to solicit at least four (two of each) to support a request to the Washington, D.C. FSA office for release of eligible land.

“There’s no point doing this until we have a county that’s reached the minimum requirement,” she said.

Government agencies might include ISDA or offices within the state Department of Natural Resources. Private organizations might include Quail Unlimited, The Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited or the like. ISDA Director Andy Miller said his office is in contact with FSA and is monitoring the situation.

Alternately, once a county reaches a D3 “extreme” designation on the U.S. Drought Monitor (on which USDA is a partner), Brown said the state FSA committee can authorize release of haying/grazing land without federal approval. At present, the lower two-thirds of Indiana is designated D1 – moderate – and the upper third, D0 or simply “abnormally dry.”

The catch

Even under a D3 designation, there is a further catch to getting haying land released from CRP. Between April 1 and Aug. 1, FSA forbids any use of eligible land unless approved by Washington, because of hatchlings. “You cannot touch CRP land until the end of primary nesting season,” Brown said.

“We are very cautious about releasing land at this time, given the impact on other factors” requiring the existence of CRP land in the first place, added John Johnson, federal FSA deputy administrator for farm programs, referring to nesting birds.

Johnson, with FSA since 2002, said this kind of land release has been limited during his tenure and, to his knowledge, was only approved once or twice during the Clinton administration.

In the Farm World coverage area on the Drought Monitor, Ohio is divided much like Indiana, while Illinois and Michigan are largely unaffected or D0. Iowa isn’t considered dry.

Much of Kentucky is now D2 and most of Tennessee is either D3 or D4. Drought conditions are worse even further south; Johnson said there is a request pending from either Alabama or Mississippi to open CRP grazing land before Aug. 1.

Brown, who grows corn and soybeans in Warren County – just north of the upper D1 edge cutting to the northeast across Indiana – said, “A couple of days of rain would fix a lot of the hay concerns.”

This farm news was published in the June 27, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee.