Agricultural Conservation Easement Program

Agricultural Conservation Easement Program

Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. I'm Greg Martin with Colorado Ag Today.

Protecting farmland is important today. The Agricultural Conservation Easement Program provides financial and technical assistance to help conserve agricultural lands and wetlands and their related benefits including. Jessica Groves of the Natural Resources Conservation Program talks about the new Agricultural Conservation Easement Program - a merger of several easement programs.

GROVES: It's a new easement program that was developed in the 2014 agricultural act and consolidates three of our previous easement programs. It consolidates the Wetlands Reserve Program, the Farm and Ranch Land Protection Program and the Grassland Reserve Program. The new ACEP program has two components then, it has the Wetland Reserve easement component which takes in the purposes and functions of the former Wetland Reserve Program and it has an agricultural land component.

You have until April 28 to comment on the program and Groves explains new provisions.

GROVES: There's a new provision for example on grasslands of special environmental significance that those lands that have grasslands of special environmental significance can receive a higher cost share rate and in the regulation we've provided a definition for what constitutes a grasslands of special environmental significance and those are the completely new features that were introduced with the 2014 act that we would like to have comments back in on in the regulation.

And that's Colorado Ag Today. I'm Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.

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