A Change at Ole Olson’s Farm

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Pheasant hunting changed forever when the CRP began back in 1985. What will the next quarter century bring for CRP? Its destiny is up to us. (Photo illustration member submitted)

From the day I became a hunter in the 1960s, I hunted Ole Olson’s farm in southern Minnesota’s Freeborn County. I shot my first goose on his wetland, which thankfully is now a Wildlife Management Area.

And since the day I became a hunter, the field across from Olson’s big white farmhouse was in corn or beans… that is, until one day in about 1986, I figure.

That autumn, I pulled up to Olson’s house and to my utter surprise and bewilderment, that field was covered in tall grasses.  I stopped and spooked a flock of pheasants into the field not 20 yards in.

I had permission to hunt the field, so I jumped out, walked them up and shot two right off the bat. I was elated. Such good shooting didn’t happen too often in that heavily farmed area.

Curious, I ventured into Olson’s dairy barn to ask him what was up. Why had he let his field go instead of planting it? “Have you quit farming?” I recalled asking.

“No,” he said wiping off a cow’s teats before affixing a suction milker, “the federal government is paying some farmers to plant our tough-to-farm ground to a cover crop.”

I had never heard of such a thing, but I never forgot it either. Thus was born my consciousness of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a effort that today, nearly 25 years later, has become synonymous with upland conservation, great pheasant hunting and the rise of Pheasants Forever – for our destiny’s have been, and remain, intimately intertwined.

I imagine many a hunter has had the same experience over the past quarter century of CRP success. Lately, pheasant hunters and others are also experiencing the shock of finding their favorite CRP turned back to black dirt. In some cases, this isn’t such a bad thing: many of those old CRP fields need to be disturbed and reinvigorated as habitat for wildlife. Now that new planting and management rules apply, new acres enrolled in the August 2010 CRP signup will be much more productive for wildlife.

Perhaps someday, I’ll make it back to Olson’s field, if just to drive by and see if the grass and pheasants are still there that so changed a young hunter’s life and the organization he came to work for these past 12 years.

Note: The first CRP general signup in four years starts on Monday, August 2^nd and runs through Friday, August 27^th. Learn more. Help PF commemorate CRP’s 25^th Anniversary by sharing your favorite CRP memories in our blog comment section.