If the axiom is true that one acre of prairie grass can grow one pheasant, a major new initiative costing nearly $800 million would produce enough new buffer strip vegetation in Minnesota to add 100,000 ringnecks to the outdoors landscape.
The proposed five-year program, to be funded 80 percent by federal sources and 20 percent by the state, was formally pitched this month to U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. If state officials are accurate in their projections, an agreement will be reached quickly and the first of more than 3,000 land deals will be signed this spring.
In terms of funding, it would be the largest Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) ever created between a single state and the federal government. Its purpose is to simultaneously address water pollution and make up for lost wildlife habitat in 54 counties in southern and western Minnesota.
"This would be the largest CREP ever done," said Bill Penning, a conservation section chief at the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources (BWSR). "It's CREP on steroids."
For the Dayton administration, the project will feed two primary conservation goals: cleaning up heavily polluted streams, rivers and lakes in farm country and reviving the state's pheasant population. If launched on time, it would precede the implementation of new buffer-strip requirements passed by the 2015 Legislature at the governor's behest.
While the new law prescribes minimum strips of filter vegetation between farm fields and waterways, the CREP buffer strips will be wider and more diverse. Besides hosting pheasants, the buffers will provide habitat for deer, wild turkey, badgers and other nongame species such as meadowlarks, bobolinks, snakes, bees and butterflies.
"They are done in a way to allow for wider and larger parcels of grassland," said Tabor Hoek, an official with BWSR, the lead state agency on the project. "We are not about achieving minimums with CREP."
Minnesota has partnered with the USDA's Farm Service Agency (FSA) twice before on less expensive CREPs. The first, also covering 100,000 acres, was a success. But the second ran into trouble and fizzled because it was not well received by farmers at a time when grain prices were high.