Thune Unveils New Conservation Program

South Dakota Republican Senator John Thune is introducing a measure designed to give producers another conservation option in the upcoming 2018 Farm Bill. He’s calling it the Soil Health and Income Protection Program, or SHIPP. An Ag Web Dot Com article says this is a voluntary program to address soil health and less-productive farming land. The SHIPP proposal is a shorter conservation program than the normal Conservation Reserve Program. To participate, farmers would have to commit a maximum of 15 percent of their least productive acreage for three-to-five years. It’s a shorter time commitment than the 10-to-15 years required for CRP. “Having a program like this that’s three-to-five years in duration satisfies a lot of the requirements that farmers are frustrated with regarding the CRP program,” Thune says. He says this will be a good opportunity for farmers to get income off their least productive lands and give them a chance to plant crops on it again if commodity prices improve. Producers can plant the acreage with hay or alfalfa outside of the nesting and brood-rearing period in their county. The annual SHIPP payment rate is half of the CRP general sign-up rental-per-acre rate for the county.