05/29/06 USDA says erosion down 43 percent

Farm and Ranch May 29, 2006 The USDA says that according to its National Resources Inventory, total soil erosion on cultivated and non-cultivated cropland in the United States decreased 43 percent between 1982 and 2003. Sheet and rill erosion dropped 42 percent over that period and wind erosion decreased 44 percent. Bruce Knight, Chief of the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service, calls the reduction in erosion quite an achievement. Knight: "And it speaks to really 20 years of commitment to conservation improvements and efforts that have been going on around the country by tens of thousands of individual farmers and ranchers." That inventory report also shows where the erosion reductions are taking place. Knight: "The amazing thing is that those reductions come, or are as significant off of highly erodible land that is being cropped, or was being cropped, as well as significant reductions on non-highly erodible land." USDA says 72 percent of the nation's cropland was eroding below soil loss tolerance rates, compared to 60 percent in 1982. Highly erodible land being cropped has dropped to 100 million acres compared to 124 million in 1982, which was before the Conservation Reserve Program. In the Pacific Region water erosion soil loss has dropped from 4.6 tons an acre to 2.8, though soil loss from wind erosion increased from 3.2 to 3.3 tons an acre. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.