Conservation Reserve Program Participation and Acreage Enrollment of Working Farms
By
Dayton Lambert and Patrick Sullivan
Economic Research Service, USDA
Subject Code: Resource & Environmental Policy Analysis
Contact:
Dayton M. Lambert
Economic Research Service, USDA
Room N4087
1800 M Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036-5831
Phone: (202) 694-5489
Email: dlambert@ers.usda.gov
A Selected Paper submitted for the AAEA meetings in Long Beach, CA, July 23-26, 2006.
The authors thank Marcel Aillery, Carol Jones, and Keith Wiebe for useful comments on earlier
drafts of this manuscript. The views and opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those
of the Economic Research Service or the United States Department of Agriculture.
Abstract
Among Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) participants, there is a distinction between
farm households using the program to ease out of farming and those using the program to
augment production receipts. We find evidence that factors other than farm profitability and
environmental factors may influence program participation of farmers who continue agricultural
production. Program payments and farm size positively correlate with the amount of land
enrolled in the CRP, and characteristics of participants in land retirement and working-lands
CRP components are similar.
Key words: acreage supply, program participation, Conservation Reserve Program, land
retirement, working farms, working-land conservation
JEL Classification: Q24, Q28
1
Introduction
The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was authorized by the Food Security Act of 1985 to
retire environmentally sensitive land from agricultural production. In return for an annual rental
payment and partial reimbursement for the cost of establishing and maintaining approved
groundcover, participants agree to take cropland out of production for ten to fifteen years and
plant grasses, trees, and other conservation cover. S