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Kingston,Mi | All of these enhancement programs have the sense of "Apply, Lather, Rinse and Repeat", having worked in our soil conservation district then with the SCS/NRCS from 1975 till 2011 with a 5 year break to work as a tire changer, I have seen similar well intentioned efforts before.
While I worked at the tire store, they developed a plan to reduce sediment delivery to Saginaw Bay. Your land had to drain to the Bay directly thru drainage ditches or county drains, if your land drained to a river that drained to the Bay or directly to Lake Huron, you got the middle finger. You could get 3 years of incentive payments to minimum till if a certain amount of residue was left after planting, Nearly every farmer whose land qualified bought and used a chisel plow and cashed the checks.
I came back to the district just as the 3 year program was running out, the farmers had returned to fall plowing. We ask them "why, did your yields decrease? no, did it cost more per acre to minimum till? no, did you have more weed pressure? no". So why did you go back to full fall tillage? The answer was "you quit paying, we quit playing.
A few years later, phosphorus became an issue with some fields at 1200 ppm. So a plan was developed to demonstrate nutrient and sediment management to improve water quality. Notice the additional priority of nutrient loss reduction. Same criteria for inclusion, mostly the same farmers, mostly the same chisel plows but now they needed to soil test besides proving they reduced sediment loss. All the usual suspects cashed the incentive checks then when the 3 year limitation kicked in, complained that they no longer qualified for continued minimum tillage incentive payments.
Then came an early carbon credit market, the State Department of Agriculture leaned on the soils districts to help implement. It was going to pay so well that you would farm just for the payments and the crop would be an added bonus. The projected per acre payment per ton of carbon sequestered had a straight trend line, down. Turns out that carbon sequestration efforts else where (tree planting on other continents cost less per ton), so the polluters bought the cheaper credits.
Edited by BOGTROTTER 2/4/2021 12:22
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Land O' Lakes and Mircosoft want your Carbon
