Mary Chris Barth knows how important it is to control the soil in the panhandle of Oklahoma. She’s the child of parents that grew up in the Dust Bowl. When farmers started planting fence row to fence row in the 1970s and removing the native plants from the soil, she remembers farmers trying to control the dust. Barth, the president of the Beaver County Farm Bureau and a farmer in the area, says some of the soil should have never been touched.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture created the Conservation Reserve Program in 1985 to help prevent soil erosion. The program pays farmers to cover their land with vegetative cover for 10-15 years. Today, with more than 20 million acres, it’s the biggest conservation program for private land in the country. But lowering payments in some areas are causing some farmers to opt out of the program.

Barth says CRP was a salvation for many farmers at the tail end of the farm crisis in the 1980s. The pay used to be good — about $40 per acre in Beaver county. Now, it’s down to $18. The rates are determined by an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture through a survey administered by the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

“It's just dropped and dropped and dropped,” Barth says. “A significant portion of it will not be renewed this go around just because of the cost.”

Read the full article about falling enrollment in the Conservation Reserve Program by Seth Bodine at Harvest Public Media.