CRP and The Fridge Test

View of the author's family farm in western Minnesota.

In another not-so-distant lifetime, I was a small town weekly newspaper reporter sitting in a corner conference room listening to some big wig from our paper’s parent company talk about our new marketing campaign coined “It’s About You.”

I found the executive’s presentation to be stuffy and insincere. My editor boiled it down for this greenhorn scribe.  A successful rural newspaper, he maintained, could be gauged by citizen’s refrigerators. While you’re out gathering stories and doing interviews, see how many clippings grace the fridge, and you’ll know exactly how well you’re doing your job.

During the next month, Pheasants Forever will become Ground Zero for the CRP general signup. We often speak in macro-level terms when it comes to CRP, measuring acres and pheasants produced/harvested in mind-boggling “millions.” Considering the nationwide scope of the program, the 2 million pheasant hunters in this country and the 125,000 dues-paying Pheasants Forever/Quail Forever members we’re trying to appeal to, highlighting big bullet points is the easy thing to do. The enormity of it all can seem a bit stuffy and insincere at times.

But it’s not. We understand what the Conservation Reserve Program is to most people. It’s a few thousand extra dollars in a farm family’s pocket. It’s less stress not worrying if that hard-to-farm parcel will pan out this year. It’s feeling like in this big ag/corporate/consumer-driven world, you’re doing your part with what you can. It’s where the boots hit the ground for the pheasant opener every year. It’s two dozen pheasants and a deer for the freezer.

I grew up on a farm where CRP dominated the landscape in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Dad and his buddies still talk about cosmic pheasant numbers during that time. The ‘80s pushed Dad and Grandpa out of farming, and though Dad’s exchanged his Wranglers for the navy blue pinstripes of an insurance man, he’s still a farmer at heart. He’d love to have the entire section-sized farm in CRP again, but the economics of today just don’t make it possible. The fraction CRP acres that remain are a source of pride and joy, recently re-planted with help from one of Pheasants Forever’s habitat teams.

“Gary has been cutting the grass in the crp, but the tractor’s hydrolics are suspiciously close to dying,” my mom wrote to me in an email last week, “He’s half done and has to get it in to be fixed. But, the birds and insects are Crawlin’ in the meadow. We were both thrilled on our walk the other night to see the fruits of Pheasants F. labor. “

CRP is more than just a talking point at Pheasants Forever, and my circumstance is anything but unique. But enough about me, this CRP general sign-up is about you. The CRP backdrop in that fridge-worthy post hunt photo 10 years from now will tell us how well we’ve done our job.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 and is filed under Conservation, Pheasants, Pheasants Forever. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.