Given its long history of championing farmers’ rights, the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation can hardly be faulted for trying to make it easier for young people to enter farming and ranching, an enormously difficult struggle for all but the fortunate few who have inherited family-owned land.

Stripping the federal Farm Bill of the Conservation Reserve Program, as recommended last week by delegates to the Farm Bureau’s Summer Policy Conference, isn’t the answer to this problem, and it’s questionable whether it would help more than a handful of young farmers in a specific geographic area. The crux of the issue before the delegates was the fact that so much land in Southern Iowa is tied up in CRP that young farmers can’t acquire it for grazing, a purpose for which that region’s rolling hills are ideally suited. Advocating action with national implications to affect a regional problem is a reactionary and imprudent course that could actually end up contributing to rather than stemming large-scale corporate agriculture. That trend is perhaps a greater barrier to young people taking up farming than CRP’s popularity in Southern Iowa. Arguably, a set of strict environmental policies is a good defense against the abuses of corporate agriculture.

Paradoxically, the Farm Bureau’s resolution came on the heels of Iowa’s No. 1 ranking in quality of life by Forbes magazine. Quality of life is a sometimes nebulous concept determined by many factors, but environmental policies are without question among them. CRP is one of the crown jewels in environmental policy in Iowa, which has led the nation in the establishment of riparian buffer strips to filter agricultural chemical and sediment runoff into waterways.

The Farm Bureau enthusiastically encourages farmers to adopt such practices, making all the more puzzling the resolution to remove a tool that makes it economically feasible for them to do so. Providing financial incentives to farmers to adopt more environmentally sound practices is a decades-old tradition in the nation’s farm policy. We sympathize with the young farmers in Southern Iowa who are having difficulty acquiring land for grazing and ranching, but eliminating CRP altogether seems to invite environmental abuse.