Excerpt
THE Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and conservation compliance provisions of the 1985 Food Security Act have had a dramatic impact in Colorado. As of May 1989, landowners in the state had enrolled more than 1.8 million acres in the CRP. Baca County, in southeastern Colorado, has the greatest number of acres enrolled of any county in the United States, according to Agriculture and Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) records.
The CRP has received mixed reviews in Baca County. Known historically as the geographic center of the Dust Bowl and for its continued high rates of soil erosion (2), the county exceeded the 25 percent county acreage limit during the third CRP sign-up in August 1986. As of May 1989, operators had 601 CRP contracts on 266,851 acres.
Baca County is characterized by high temperatures, high winds, and erratic precipitation. The challenge of establishing permanent vegetative cover on CRP acres is a major one. At Springfield, the average annual air temperature is 52.8°F, the range of average wind speeds per month is 4.0 …
Footnotes
Stephen O. Myers is a district conservationist and P. Lorenz Sutherland is an area agronomist with the Soil Conservation Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Springfield, Colorado 81073, and Lamar, Colorado, 81052, respectively.
- Copyright 1989 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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