CRP white paper published Policy concerns and advocacy priorities from the Washington Association of Wheat Growers

Editor’s note: This article is excerpted from a Washington Association of Wheat Growers white paper published in June 2026. The full white paper is available at wawg.org/wp-content/uploads/CRP-WA-Policy-Paper-05.26.26.pdf.

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is one of the most important conservation tools available to Washington state farmers, not just for agriculture, but for public health, air quality, and environmental protection across the state’s dryland farming regions. CRP is far from a program of niche interest. It is a critical economic and environmental pillar for the dryland farming communities of Central and Eastern Washington.

Washington State’s CRP story spans diverse geography, from the high-rainfall Palouse hills to the bone-dry Columbia Basin. The program’s most urgent environmental and public health role is in Washington’s arid interior: the Columbia Basin, the Horse Heaven Hills, Douglas County, and the Tri-Cities region. Here, fragile soils, low rainfall (as little as 6-8 inches annually), and relentless southwest winds create one of the most severe windblown dust environments in the American West.

The Benton Clean Air Agency, in coordination with the Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has documented that the Columbia Plateau’s silty, fine-grained soils, once broken down by tillage, traffic, or drought, will not reform clods and are extremely susceptible to wind erosion. This is not an agricultural nuisance; it is a classified air quality emergency.

The Horse Heaven Hills: Ground zero for wind erosion

The Horse Heaven Hills, the rugged, semi-arid uplands of Benton and Yakima counties south of the Yakima River, are among the most wind-exposed dryland farming areas in the Pacific Northwest. Southwest winds regularly exceed 40 miles per hour, picking up soil from exposed fields and driving it into the Tri-Cities metro area and the Wallula area downriver.

For farmers in this region, CRP is not a choice between farming and conservation. It is a choice between farming the fragile margins and facing regulatory enforcement action from Ecology for air quality violations. CRP enrollment of the most erodible parcels in the Horse Heaven Hills serves a dual purpose: it protects the farmer’s economic interest by removing unproductive ground from farming costs, and it serves the broader public interest by reducing PM10 emissions that directly harm human health.

Farmers in this region have already implemented many best management practices — conservation tillage, cover crops, residue management — but some fields are simply too fragile, too steep, and too exposed to manage within conventional crop production. These are precisely the lands CRP was designed to protect.

The Columbia Basin and Douglas County: High enrollment, hard limits

Douglas County provides perhaps the clearest example of a region where the CRP program is both urgently needed and structurally limited. The county has historically had some of the highest CRP participation rates in Washington state, reflecting the large proportion of land that is conservation-priority by nature, including critical wildlife habitat as well as erodible dryland soils. Importantly, much of Douglas County is not mapped as Highly Erodible Land (HEL). It is the county’s critical wildlife habitat — sagebrush steppe, native shrublands, and raptor habitat — that has made this ground eligible for CRP enrollment and makes protecting it so important.  

However, Douglas County has repeatedly bumped against the county-level acreage enrollment cap, a statutory limit set at 25% of a county’s cropland. When CRP contracts expire and the county approaches or exceeds the cap, farmers with expiring land cannot re-enroll, even when their land is clearly eligible, whether for critical wildlife habitat values or for highly erodible soil conditions. This forces productive conservation land back into crop production, often on ground that serves irreplaceable ecological and air quality functions.

In 2020, when Douglas County producers were locked out of the CRP general sign-up, a temporary workaround was found using the Environmental Quality Incentives Program Sage Grouse Initiative, a program with very different objectives than soil conservation. This is not a solution. It is a symptom of a program that needs structural reform.

The Pearl Hill Fire of September 2020, which burned over 223,000 acres in Douglas County and destroyed significant CRP acreage, further highlighted the county’s vulnerability and the importance of re-establishing conservation cover as quickly as possible. Fire-damaged CRP land must have a clear re-enrollment pathway.

The Palouse and transition counties: Where dry meets productive

The Palouse region, covering primarily Whitman and parts of Garfield, Asotin, and Columbia counties, is Washington’s highest-productivity dryland wheat country. It is also where the most documented model correction work has occurred. For eight years, Palouse producers and the Washington Association of Wheat Growers fought to correct discrepancies in the National Commodity Crop Productivity Index (NCCPI) soil productivity model that were causing CRP Environmental Benefits Index (EBI) scores to dramatically undervalue steep-slope Palouse soils. That work, completed through a Farm Service Agency (FSA)/Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) collaboration, ultimately produced model corrections that benefited the entire state.

The Palouse matters in the CRP story not as the dominant narrative, but as the proof of concept: local producers with documented, on-the-ground knowledge, working with state agency partners, can correct national model errors. That precedent now belongs to every wheat-growing region in Washington.

Lincoln County occupies a particularly important transitional position. Situated between the arid Columbia Basin and the higher-rainfall Palouse, Lincoln County farmers often straddle multiple CRP program dynamics simultaneously: they face the Basin’s wind erosion challenges in their western portions while managing Palouse-type soils in the east. The county’s five-year average published rate of $54.59 and the 2025 proposed rate of $69 reflect some improvement, but after the statutory 85% proration, the actual CRP payment is $58.65/acre, and Lincoln County has historically been one of the counties most affected by National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) survey distortions. Crop-share arrangements are the norm, cash rent data is unreliable, and the actual payment of $58.65 likely significantly understates what comparable crop-share ground is worth in Lincoln County’s more productive eastern sections.

The broader Columbia Basin: Dry, fragile, and underserved

Counties like Adams, Grant, Franklin, Lincoln, and Benton share many of the same characteristics: low annual rainfall, highly erodible soils, significant proportions of land that barely pencil as cropland in average years, and communities that bear the public health costs of windblown dust. These are not areas well served by programs calibrated primarily for high-productivity agricultural land.

Only 2.1% of Washington state CRP acres are classified as prime farmland. This is the clearest possible evidence that CRP in Washington is doing exactly what it should, protecting fragile, nonprime land from erosion. Every barrier to enrollment in these regions undermines the program’s core mission.

Key issues remain unresolved

• Rental rates that do not reflect the economic reality of dryland farming regions.
• NASS surveys that fail to capture crop-share rental agreements, skewing the rate baseline.
• Payment limitations frozen at $50,000 since the 1980s, capping how much land can be enrolled.
• EBI scoring disruptions caused by the transition to RUSLE2/WEPS that have not been fully corrected for all affected regions.
• County acreage caps that have locked farmers out of enrollment in high-participation counties like Douglas — one of only about 13 such counties nationally — compounded by a waiver process that requires county commissioners to initiate, not the FSA county committee.
• Inadequate cost-share for mid-contract management, particularly during drought.
• No mechanism for local soil, climate, or land data to formally correct national model errors.  

WAWG priority advocacy positions

The 2026 House Farm Bill (the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026) largely extends the existing CRP program through fiscal year 2031 with a flat acreage cap and no major structural reforms. Congressional staff have confirmed that “scoring challenges” prevented the CRP modernization provisions proposed in the 2026 Farm Bill from advancing. This makes the conference process a critical opportunity to push for meaningful reform.

Based on the analysis in this paper (see wawg.org/wp-content/uploads/CRP-WA-Policy-Paper-05.26.26.pdf for the full paper), WAWG identifies the following as its priority CRP advocacy positions for the 2026 Farm Bill conference and ongoing administrative engagement:

Legislative priorities (farm bill conference) are: 

• Increase the individual CRP payment limitation from $50,000 to a level reflecting 40+ years of inflation and the economics of large-scale dryland farming operations.
• Restore the State Acres For Wildlife Enhancement program exemption from county CRP acreage caps or establish a formal statutory waiver process for counties near the 25% threshold.
• Require NASS to redesign cash rent surveys to capture and convert crop-share arrangements to cash-equivalent values for use in CRP rental rate calculations.
• Establish a formal, documented process for state FSA and NRCS offices to submit local soil, climate, and land data to correct national model errors in RUSLE2/WEPS/NCCPI.
• Require EBI baseline recalibration whenever a significant methodology change (such as the RUSLE2/WEPS transition) is implemented, to maintain comparable competitive access.
• Create a fire/disaster recovery re-enrollment pathway that does not count against county acreage caps during a defined post-disaster recovery period.

Administrative priorities (FSA/NRCS national) are: 

• Complete the NCCPI model refinement for Asotin County as noted by NRCS scientist Robert Dobos and establish a regular review cycle for all Washington state soil map units.
• Implement drought-adjusted NRCS stand status review protocols that formally incorporate drought designation data and year-to-date precipitation when evaluating stand compliance, with FSA compliance determinations required to reflect those findings.
• Increase mid-contract management cost-share to levels that reflect actual costs for stand maintenance in arid climates, with automatic cost-share floor adjustments in D2/D3 drought-designated areas.
• Shift the NRCS stand status review schedule to include mid-contract evaluations at years three to four and six to seven, coordinating with FSA compliance determinations, so producers have time to remediate, not only in the final two years of the contract.
• Provide clear, advance communication to producers when EBI model changes will affect scoring, with sufficient lead time for enrollment strategy adjustment.
• Develop an expedited re-enrollment pathway for fire-damaged CRP land, with streamlined conservation plan updates that do not require full re-establishment documentation for stands that were compliant prior to the fire.

State-level administrative priorities are:

• Washington state FSA and NRCS should maintain the collaborative model established between the state offices and national technical staff for soil data validation, ensuring that future model discrepancies are identified and escalated quickly.
• FSA should work with the Washington Department of Ecology and the Benton Clean Air Agency to formally document the air quality benefits of CRP enrollment in the Horse Heaven Hills and Tri-Cities region, creating a record that supports both federal conservation investment and state clean air compliance planning.
• FSA Washington should prioritize education and outreach for producers in the Columbia Basin, Horse Heaven Hills, and Douglas County on Highly Erodible Land eligibility changes under RUSLE2/WEPS, with county-specific guidance on Environmental Index impacts.