Millions of Marginal Acres Back In Production

Des Moines Register:

U.S. farmers converted an estimated 7.2 million acres of wetlands and fragile lands to cropland from 2008 to 2012, the Environmental Working Group reported Tuesday.
The findings come as Congress plods along on crafting a five-year farm bill that would end the $5 billion in direct payments given to farmers regardless of need, in favor of expanding popular crop insurance programs subsidized by the federal government. Crop insurance traces its roots back to the 1930s when the program was established in response to the Great Depression.
“The data strongly suggest that over-subsidized crop insurance policies are greasing the wheels of conversion to row crops,” said Craig Cox, EWG’s senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources. “The government is picking up too much of the risk of plowing up and planting fragile land, all at a cost of billions of dollars to taxpayers and untold environmental degradation.”

Also:

Using mapping and geospatial technologies, EWG found that in Iowa only two counties — Taylor and Adair — saw between 2,500 and 5,000 acres of wetland and wetland buffers converted to cropland.
But almost 40 counties in Iowa — including most of them in the lower third of the Hawkeye state and a group in the northeastern part bordering Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois — had highly erodible land converted to cropland from 2008 to 2012. The amount of land shifted to growing crops varied, but most counties experienced a conversion of between 5,001 to 15,000 acres.
From 2008 to 2012, 5.3 million acres of highly erodible land, most of it grasslands, were plowed up to grow crops in the United States. Iowa, South Dakota and eight other states accounted for 57 percent of all the area converted from highly erodible land to cropland. About 40 percent of the land was used to grow corn and soybeans, EWG said.

Short-term thinking will kick us in the ass.