How will changes in Title II of the 2018 Farm Bill affect CRP Acreage?

Abstract

The 2018 Farm Bill, added new regulations under its conservation title that have made changes to various conservation programs. For the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) rental payments have been lowered to 85% of the average county rental rate for general signup and 90% for continuous signup. The acreage enrollment cap has also been increased by 3 million acres (from 24 million to 27 million acres). This paper aims to examine what effect these policy changes in the new bill could have on CRP acreage. Mainly, we first seek to understand how the rental payment will affect CRP enrollment by estimating a reduced- form supply function of CRP acreage. We then discuss how the policy changes may impact the overall goal of the program. Elasticity estimates show that CRP acreage with respect to aggregated crop prices is -0.07 and elasticity of CRP acreage with respect to CRP rental payments is around 0.18.