Just saw an article regarding the drop in CRP acreage due to rising crop prices. This article was in the Milwaukee Journal and pointed out that some farmers were actually taking land out of CRP in mid-contract...penalties and all!!

This could be a big deal, especially for turkey and pheasant hunters. Not sure what this can do to deer hunting, but still, this could be a big deal.

I have a link on my website (see address below) on the "Other Stuff" page (tried to paste it here, but I'm on my Blackberry and can't get it to work).

With $4.00 + diesel, $450 for a sack of seed and $500+ fertilizer I don't think they can make money. Lots of it will be insurance crops and they won't care if it makes or not, yet everybody else will pay more.

They mentioned this in our region numerous times over the past couple of seasons. It seems that the rising popularity of bio-fuels has the gov. reconsidering unlisting manny of IL's CRP acres. This could indeed be very interesting for the species mentioned above.

Personally, I'm glad my contracts are about to expire. It used to be that the NRCS folks were somewhat reasonable, but lately they come out of the woodwork and point out that you have too many thistles, or bare spots, etc. It just doesn't seem worth the whopping $75 an acre they pay per year anymore.

As for farmers making money with high fuel and feed prices...I saw a figure yesterday that NET farm income has rose over 50% in the past two years. Not hard to see why farmers are willing to pay to get out of contracts with corn and bean prices as high as they are.

All you can do is offer them more than the crop would've paid for the same acreage. Any takers?

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