double trigger
Member
It would only take about 20% of what we spent on foreign middle east boondoggles the last 20 years to purchase 10-12% of "pheasantland" and seed it to grass. $200 billion would purchase about 60 million acres. PF and state game departments would cooperate to get this done. Problem solved. No need to have PF spend endless amounts of effort on fickle, unreliable CRP programs. This would be a permanent soil bank that's NOT an expense - it's a hard asset that "we the people" own. Anything short of this is pure folly and is spending money to watch the island of "pheasantland" slowly shrink, shrivel up and blow away.
Let's face facts: Pheasants are not native to North America nor do they survive in intensely farmed areas. Our intervention is required for them to flourish by injecting sufficient amounts of TALL grass to the landscape. This happened with the soil bank and with CRP. Just have to make it more "permanent" - but nothing really is infinitely permanent. This land, if it ever was truly needed, could again be sold off. Good place for us taxpayers to park our hard-earned cash. And the benefits to the soil, air and water go far beyond the benefits to hunters and rural economies.
This is a great post, and I would certainly be in favor of it. We need a more permanent, long-term solution to preserving grass lands that provide wide-ranging benefits to soil, air and water quality. Grass lands, and the wildlife that depend upon them to thrive, are always on a roller coaster ride based on the ups and downs of the ag market and land use policy. It is BS to have the grass lands on the auctioning block every time a new Farm Bill is developed - there has to be a better solution.
If preserving native prairie and grass land is important to this country (I absolutely believe it is) then let's find a way to purchase huge chunks of it and set it aside permanently - much like has been done with National Parks and wilderness areas. This may sound like a pipe dream and maybe it is, but large scale efforts like the American Prairie Foundation in Montana are already collaborating to purchase and set aside large chunks of land to restore native prairie in that state. Not saying that pheasant land should or even could follow that same model, but the idea of permanently setting aside grass land is the point here.