The best conservationists are the ones who own the land

As every farmer knows, if you don't plant, you don't get paid. There's not a lot of future in keeping farmland out of crops.

Agriculture Canada reports that even though crop carry-overs from the previous year are at near-record lows, near-record plantings and a rising Canadian dollar are expected to put downward pressure on prices for most cereal grains.

For the farmer, that means more pressure to get the most production from the land that you've got.

Here's a picture from the U.S. midwest that crossed the globe Tuesday. The Associated Press has interviewed one farmer who bought a golf course, to convert it to cropland.

South of the border, corn and soybeans are the flavour of the day, and high prices are encouraging farmers there to tear up windbreaks, clear out old buildings, drain wetlands, plough over conservation areas — and even push down headstones to plant over a pioneer cemetery — in order to cash in.

Estimates there suggest if you can keep corn production costs to $5 a bushel, selling at the current price of $7 a bushel (last year it reached $8) can make you money — if you have a lot of acres to collect on.

On whatever remaining natural or ecologically sensitive zones a landowner may have, preserving land for wildlife or for water quality protection represents a significant financial sacrifice.

So it's good to see the County of Red Deer become Alberta's third to partner with Delta Waterfowl, a conservation and research group, in a program that will take up some of the burden of good land stewardship. That includes both the financial and practical tools needed to help landowners preserve the natural heritage we all started with when this part of the world was settled.

Delta Waterfowl promotes the Alternative Land Use Services program, which Red Deer County joined in April. ALUS promotes itself as incentive-based. Their start point is that creating and enforcing environmental regulations is expensive, and in the final analysis, doesn't work.

That's because of the law that says if you don't plant, you don't get paid.

ALUS connects farmers to the tools needed to make conservation less costly. It makes use of the leadership of farmers and ranchers as conservationists.

The program also acts as a link to both government and the public, because without their support, all the regulations in the world cannot overcome the financial law of farming.

Ultimately, that means some of our tax money must go to farmers to have them refrain from putting sensitive zones to the plough.

In the partnership Red Deer County just joined, we're not talking about a whole lot of cash, though. The County of Vermillion River is the lead applicant in the partnership, and they are only asking for $250,000 to cover the three counties involved. And that's over two years.

Viewed in the light of the costs of farming, a quarter million over two years ain't much. But with the other tools and assistance ALUS brings to the table, important bits of land here and there that are not currently under crop can be preserved as wetlands and habitat for wildlife.

In Canada and in the U.S., there are a lot of different programs that pay farmers to keep land out of production. But not all of them work.

In the U.S., the federal Conservation Reserve Program pays farmers directly not to plant on land that could easily erode, or is ideal habitat for wildlife. But the area under that program is dropping.

A farmer can simply make more money renting the land to another farmer who would plough it over. And the more direct payments you make to farmers to compete with land rentals, the higher the rents offered will grow — when grain prices are high as they are now.

When prices are low, taxpayers rightly complain about farmers cashing in on conservation programs for land that would not have been planted anyway, because it's not economical to farm marginal land.

But once land is disturbed, it takes many years for it to return to something like it was before, and if the wildlife that used to live there or migrate through there is gone, it's simply gone.

Some other means needs to be used to help landowners use their land in a way that both allows them to plant, and keeps the costs of not planting certain areas within reasonable limits.

That's what Delta Waterfowl and the ALUS program appear to be trying to do.

Instead of voters pressuring government to push down on farmers to preserve natural areas, ALUS supports farmers who want to lead in being conservationists — apparently using a lot less money.

Hopeful news, as we watch this year's crop go in the ground.