Defenders of Wildlife Blog

Tim Male, VP of Conservation Science & Policy

Black-tailed deer graze on a South Dakota prairie (c) Moriah Brocar

I watched Little House on the Prairie as a boy … I might have had a crush on Laura Ingalls.  It was a story of one family on the frontier and their efforts to break the prairie and make a successful life for themselves as farmers in Minnesota.  The fictional characters succeeded … and their non-fictional counterparts in the real American Midwest did too.  Unfortunately, they succeeded a little too well from an environmental perspective.

America’s tallgrass and mixed grass prairies are mostly gone today.  States like Arkansas have less than one percent left.  States like North Dakota have lost 80 percent of their prairie.  Gone are bison and pronghorn antelope from prairies, but the loss of these landscapes has also imperiled many less obvious species that make prairies special – endangered orchids, fritillary butterflies, grasshopper sparrows.

The loss of America’s prairies continues as agricultural technology creates new techniques to plow and irrigate the hilly, rocky or poorer soils or more disaster-prone areas that until recently supported remaining grasslands.  And in the prairie pothole region of North and South Dakota, it’s not just grassland but also wetlands that are being lost.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that up to 1.4 million isolated wetlands in these prairies are at risk of being drained.  Populations of many kinds of ducks will be hit hardest by some of these losses, since this region is the ‘duck factory’ of America.

High crop prices are fueling part of this cycle of destruction, and corn ethanol subsidies help drive those prices.  Adding to the problem are the extremely generous subsidies that the federal government provides to even America’s richest corporate agribusiness to help them buy crop insurance.  Think of your car insurance and imagine that Congress paid Geico to sell you a car insurance policy. They paid 60 percent of your out-of-pocket cost to buy the insurance, and then gave more money (called a subsidy) to Geico in case you had a lot of accidents and they started losing money.  That is how our crop insurance system works, and when subsidies are that generous, economists agree that it starts producing strange outcomes.   For example, since taxpayers are covering more than half the cost of insurance, we take away the risk from plowing up those grasslands and wetlands.  Farmers have no reason not to plow up wetlands or prairie because even if a crop fails to make it to harvest, insurance and taxpayers cover the losses.  The farmer wins either way – the only loser is the prairie and the species that rely on it.

Prairie dogs are another species that make their home in these grasslands.

Last week, two Members of Congress — Reps. Tim Walz (D-Minnesota.) and Kristi Noem (R-South Dakota) — reintroduced legislation to help stop some of the pressure that taxpayer-funded insurance subsidies put on prairie and wetlands.  The Protect our Prairies Act would pull back almost $200 million in insurance subsidies by dramatically lowering the amount the government provides on any acres of native grassland that have been recently plowed. This doesn’t mean that farmers can’t keep farming, just that they won’t have as much of an incentive to plow up prairies to do it.  It’s a great idea that has Defenders’ enthusiastic support and should be passed by Congress.

We are working on additional, bold ways to rein in billions in spending on the other corporate insurance subsidies that drive environmental destruction. For example, we agree with proposals that would prevent millionaires from getting as much subsidy as other farmers.  More importantly, we are working hard to ensure that Congress passes accountability provisions that require farmers have to abide by modest conservation requirements, in exchange for a generous subsidy provided by taxpayers. This is called ‘conservation compliance’ and was successfully included in the Senate-passed Farm Bill in 2012, partly because of our efforts. There are smart ways to maintain a taxpayer-supported safety net for America’s family farmers without doing as much harm to our environment.

Tim Male, Vice President of Conservation Science and Policy 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For lesser prairie chickens and greater sage grouse, two very similar birds, things are trending toward the latter.  Greater sage grouse have disappeared from more than 50 percent of their range, and the prairie chicken from more than 86 percent of theirs.  Both are candidates for listing under the Endangered Species Act.  But the stark differences in federal goals for these two species highlight problems in how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is managing different species.

The sage grouse has lost much of its habitat to agricultural development (Credit: USFWS)

For some species that have not yet been added to the endangered species list, federal and state agencies, private landowners and businesses that might be affected by it sometimes make a last ditch effort to keep that listing from happening.  To prevent it, conservation efforts need to eliminate or reduce threats to the species, including the threat of having a population so small that it  could go extinct simply by chance. Below a certain number, the population can’t survive. The question is how biologists determine what that number is for each species.

Currently, there are up to 300,000-500,000 sage grouse on tens of millions of acres of western sage brush habitat.  The FWS determined that any population of sage grouse with fewer than 200 males, or a total of fewer than 500 birds, must be considered ‘at risk’ because the small population is inherently more vulnerable to extinction. They identified more than 40 populations that meet these conditions, and set goals for their conservation. The agency’s strategy calls for the smallest of these populations of sage grouse to be protected so that threats go down and numbers go up – a sensible approach, and one that should be applicable to most species under similar conditions.

The FWS’s conservation goals for the lesser prairie chicken, however, offer a stark contrast. There are currently an estimated 37,000 prairie chickens remaining – a far lower number than the sage grouse, and this out of a historic population of two to three million.  For this bird, the agency has hinted that the species is not “at risk” so long as it maintains a minimum of four “strongholds,” each consisting of 25,000-50,000 acres of habitat and just 6 male and 6 female birds.  Add that up and what do you get?  200,000 acres of habitat and only 500 birds in total. Although the documents also obliquely reference ‘additional strongholds,” it looks like they are setting this low threshold up as being enough conservation to avoid listing.  And even if additional strongholds are established, there would likely remain large, unaccounted gaps between the goals for the prairie chicken and those for the sage grouse.  Dan Ashe, Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, stated that he sees this plan as having all the ‘right ingredients’ for conservation to make an endangered species listing unnecessary.

A lesser prairie chicken in New Mexico (Credit: Larry Lamsa)

As a scientist, it’s extremely difficult for me to understand any scientific rationale for the differences in conservation goals between these two very similar bird species.  Both species have generally similar diets, longevity, reproductive potential and breeding system.  How can one say that the sage grouse’s future depends upon having 20,000 birds in dozens of populations across 165 million acres of habitat, but at the same time state that prairie chickens only require 200,000 acres of habitat and 500 breeding birds in total? And, if the Service’s goals for the prairie chicken are scientifically valid, and a population of 500 means a species is neither threatened nor endangered, how can FWS even have considered listing the 500,000-strong greater sage grouse?  Those differences certainly look like the agency is setting expedient goals rather than scientific ones.

The Endangered Species Act is capable of achieving great things for species on the brink, but with taxpayer dollars funding their recovery it is important that the Act’s protections be applied to the species that need it most. It’s unfortunate that FWS has never set measurable standards that define what makes a threatened or endangered species, even though the IUCN, the State of Florida, New Zealand and other countries have already done so.  Those standards would be one step toward a more scientific basis for one of the most important wildlife questions the U.S. government faces: whether a species is or isn’t endangered.

Tim Male, Vice President, Conservation Science and Policy

Whooping crane and chick (Credit: Flickr/GillianChicago)

Since the mid-1980s, there has been a deal between taxpayers and farmers: in exchange for generous subsidies to help maintain farms, farmers with fragile soils and wetlands would agree to protect those areas. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) credits the program with preventing billions of tons of topsoil erosion every year, and saving hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands. Hundreds of rare wildlife species, from endangered whooping cranes to Florida panthers, have benefited from the program. In many places in the Midwest, areas protected voluntarily by farmers in exchange for these subsidies are the only remaining habitat for wildlife amidst an otherwise endless sea of corn and wheat crops.

Now, this important program is at risk because some members of Congress believe these modest environmental commitments are too much to ask of farmers — even though they receive approximately $10 billion in exchange. The loss could happen through a political sleight of hand. Here’s how. Congress is poised to ditch a subsidy program called Direct Payments, which provides the lion’s share of farmer assistance. Conservation requirements are a part of that program’s language — part of the DNA of that program. In place of Direct Payments, Congress plans to increase funding for crop insurance — another subsidy program. Taxpayers already pay for 65 percent of insurance costs for farmers, and pay the companies to sell insurance to farmers as well. The new assistance will make insurance coverage even more comprehensive, but without any conservation language. The result is that farmers would keep getting generous assistance under a different name, but conservation measures would go away in the process.

However, there is still a chance to fix the situation. Congress has time to pass a multi-year Farm Bill before the holidays. The Senate has already passed their version of the bill, which thankfully includes language to protect conservation measures. The leaders of some of America’s biggest conservation groups — ranging from Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever to Defenders of Wildlife and the League of Conservation Voters — are calling on the President, the House of Representatives and all of Congress to take action to save wildlife habitat by making conservation a requirement for all farm and insurance subsidies.

With the right version of the Farm Bill, we can accomplish some great things. With the wrong version, there is a lot that we stand to lose:

Funding
Both the Senate and the House have moved forward with 20 percent cuts in funding for wetland protection, habitat restoration and water quality projects in drafts of the Farm Bill so far. We cannot accept even greater cuts that would compromise our ability to save wildlife in some of America’s most important and vulnerable ecosystems.

Environmental Commitments
About 140 million acres of farmland — and 2 million acres of wetlands — currently have a voluntary plan in place that prevents soil erosion and protects wetlands. In exchange for the plan, the farmers get billions in subsidies. But under the proposal of the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee, by switching out one crop subsidy program for another, taxpayer subsidies would continue to flow, but the conservation plans fo away — and so will all that habitat.

The sage grouse has lost much of its habitat to agricultural development (Credit: USFWS)

Protect Environmental Laws
Some Members of the House of Representatives want to strip away state laws that prevent invasive species from spreading, and laws that require humane standards for livestock, eliminate procedures meant to keep pesticides out of rivers and streams and open more national forests to bigger clear cuts. A good Farm Bill would leave out these harmful riders, as the Senate has done.

Grasslands
Less than one percent of America’s tallgrass prairies remain, and other kinds of prairie are falling fast to agricultural and other forms of development. Congress can slow down the loss of our remaining grasslands by denying federal subsidies to corporations and other farmers who would plow up virgin grasslands to grow a crop.

These changes have broad support among millions of conservations and are the right thing to do for the environment. Moreover, our demands for the Farm Bill would also result in legislation that is less expensive for taxpayers. A win-win if ever there was one.