Editorial: On the prairie, slow the plow

In a crescent that sweeps from Detroit Lakes to Mankato, Minnesota has thousands of acres of prairie grassland that should never go under a farmer's plow. These grasses provide habitat for endangered wildfowl, filter the state's groundwater, serve as a buffer against flooding and hold topsoil that would otherwise blow away in stiff prairie winds.

Yet in the last decade farmers have been plowing up this land by the thousands of acres, converting pastures and rangeland to row crops at an accelerating pace.

One reason is the boom in ethanol and other biofuels, which has made corn and soybeans hugely more profitable than they were five years ago. But another reflects a perverse wrinkle in federal farm payments. Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa want to change that. They have proposed a simple, sensible change that would protect prairie grasslands while saving money for taxpayers, and it should be part of the farm bill that Congress will pass this fall.

A new study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) shows just how bad the problem is. More than 1 million acres of pasture and rangeland were converted to row crops between 1997 and 2003 in the Northern Plains states alone.

Attractive commodity prices and new seed technology were two reasons for the change. But a big factor was federal disaster payments and crop insurance that took the risk out of cultivating land that, for decades, was regarded as too risky. "Farm program payments provide significant incentive to convert grassland to cropland because they increase the expected profitability of farming while lowering the associated risks," the GAO found.

Harkin points out that there are good reasons why farmers left much of this land in prairie grass for decades: The soils are poor, the land is hilly, the regions are subject to drought. If the only reason farmers are converting valuable grassland to crops is that the government has absolved them of the natural risk, that's not good enough. Peterson has proposed a rule that would make converted grassland ineligible for federal crop insurance for four years; Harkin would go further, making converted grasslands permanently ineligible for a variety of federal payments.

Farmers of the Great Plains are stewards of some of the most valuable wilderness in the United States. They will always face a tension between profit and stewardship, but government subsidies should not tip that balance in the wrong direction.