Senate and House Farm Bill conferees met again Thursday evening,
after more than a week of private meetings designed to hammer out a
final agreement on the Farm Bill. The conferees cleared nearly all of
the major Titles of the Farm Bill.

Although we have yet to see the official language, based on the
discussions, rumors, and press and other reports the key conservation
provisions would appear to:

Cut the Conservation Reserve Program to just 32 million acres, from
39.2 million acres in current law (a cut of $2.5 billion over 10
years);

Continue the Wetlands Reserve Program, but cut it to 185,000 acres
per year, from the current 250,000 acres per year. A change in the
WRP payment structure that will stretch out when farmers get paid
would also make it much harder to attract landowners to participate
in larger restoration projects;

Continue the Grasslands Reserve Program, but at about 0.9 million
acres over five years, which is less than the 1.0 million acres
enrolled under the 2002 Farm Bill;

Continue the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program, but at the current
level of $85 million per year with no increase for inflation;

Increase funding for the Conservation Security Program, allowing it
to boost enrollment in this multiple-resource working lands program
to 80 million acres (from the current 16 million acres), and rewrite
major parts of the program;

Substantially increase funding for the Environmental Quality
Incentives Program, which provides cost-share for a variety of
conservation practices on working farms and ranches;

Substantially increase funding for the Farm and Ranch Protection
Program, which provides funding to protect open space but includes no
requirements that the contracts provide for wildlife habitat;

Provide about $372 million over five years for a new cost-share
program to fund conservation in the Chesapeake Bay watershed;

Create a new `Open Fields' program to provide grants to states and
tribes to reward farmers willing to open their conservation lands to
public access;

Provide a very weak SodSaver provision, which would reduce incentives
to break out native prairie, but only in a few states in the Prairie
Potholes region, and then only with approval from the state's
governor.

The tax and revenue Title of the Farm Bill has yet to be finalized,
but we believe that incentives for landowners who take conservation
measures to benefit rare and endangered species are included in the
final package, but we don't know about the funding level.

We will provide further details as information is released.

Duane Hovorka
National Wildlife Federation