I see both sides. The better the farm ground the more it will tolerate abuse. Iowa, I believe I read somewhere, leads the nation in poor water quality, and erosion loss of farmground. Let's be real, in a normal spring you can't even keep parts of Ames and Des Moines from being underwater! What are the costs of that as compared to a couple of rows of corn or beans? South Dakota is more able to be farmed sustainablly because the ground terrain, moisture, weather, and soil, for the most part is less forgiving, and nature won't tolerate the abuse, and will put you out of business. In Iowa a farmer will have an investmrent in his ground of 5,000 to 10,000 per acre, inputs for corn are approximately $300.00 per acre not including debt service and or cash rent. Even at 200+ bushels per acre, and 7.00 a bushel corn, that's a lot of risk. Concentrated hog and chicken "factories", are and will continue to be an enviornmental issue, not unlike the coal fired power plants, which Missouri, and now Kansas continue to authorize, or the mountain top mining, which destroys entire ecosystems. Again it comes down to sacrifice on someones part, ideally everyones part, but who volunteers to go broke first, or live without electricity,even though it kills the air quality and trees east of the Mississippi, or plant grass instead of intensely farm the upper midwest even though a chemical brew continues to grow an oxygen starved dead zone in the Gulf. We can add the entire high plains as well, as they continue to deplete the Ogalla Auqifer with irrigated corn where buffalo grass should grow. Maybe CRP isn't perfect, but there has to be some incentives as well as an economic cushion to ease us toward sustainability. It has to come from the Federal Government, which should have the foresight and national vision to do what makes sense for the entire country. I don't claim that as true currently, we have no statesmen, men or women with the stature and conviction to vote for what's right nationally, rather than pander to local lobby and big donors, who like things the way it is, and don't give a tinkers damn about damage or pollution a few hundred miles away. Now we have all benefitted from cheaper food prices with the current policy, we are now begining to suffer the consequences of our willingness to ignore and defer any measures which would add cost, reduce income, and place us on a sound footing going forward. It will require the same type of sacrifice, rationing, and commitment it took to defeat the Great Depression and win WWII. I personally, as one of the spoiled generation myself, question if we are up to it, until nature forces a calamity upon us, for our foolish ways.
