The Upland Almanac – July 2019

Purchase by check from Ernie Foster

632 Cambridge Street, Worcester, MA 01610

E mail: [email protected] (508) 410-6826

50 years of wanderings, reflections,

and recommendations of a Grouse hunter.

Revised Edition 2017

WINGS^ of^

THUNDER

STEVEN MULAK

REVISED EDITION

New England

Grouse Hunting

Revisited

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the 1985 Farm Bill, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP)
was born. The program had broad support from conservation
organizations that remembered the wildlife heyday of the Soil
Bank days as well as the agriculture community looking to
stabilize the industry. Over a series of reauthorizations, CRP
was expanded with an average enrollment cap of around 40
million acres in the 1990s, and additional Farm Bill
conservation programs were created. Over time, the
pheasant population rebuilt to the next boom seen in
the early 2000s.
However, another agricultural push has taken
place in the most recent decade. Between 2006 and
2012, about 1.4 million acres of grassland were
converted to cropland. Nationwide there was a
decrease of about 13 million acres enrolled in CRP
between 2007 and 2016, and the Farm Bill of 2014
dropped the nationwide CRP enrollment cap to just 24
million acres. In South Dakota, CRP enrollment that
had topped 1.7 million acres in the 1990s dropped to
around 977,000 acres in 2017. At the same time, the
U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2017 census showed
South Dakota’s harvested croplands at an all-time high
of 16.4 million acres.
There has also been a dramatic shift to growing
more corn and soybeans – the production of each
nearly doubling in the past decade – and significantly
fewer acres of small grains like wheat. This is
significant for two reasons. First, while pheasants
certainly eat corn and soybeans, the smaller grains
are more to their liking. Second, corn and soybeans

are part and parcel of the “fencerow to fencerow” farming

concept, meaning less interspersed habitat.

Finally, severe weather swings of blizzards at the end

of 2016 followed by extreme drought in much of the state

in 2017 created poor nesting conditions, and SDGFP’s 2017

estimated pheasant population (the most recent available) was

Between 2006 and 2017, there was a nationwide decline of nearly 13 million acres in the

Conservation Reserve Program. (Graphic/U.S. Dept. of Agriculture)