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CONSERVATION RESERVE PROGRAM
USDA cuts rental rates for Grassland CRP across most of the West.
The Grassland Conservation Reserve Program pays ranchers to conserve sensitive grasslands while still allowing grazing and haying—a win-win for both agriculture and conservation. However, this year’s rate cuts may discourage participation by landowners who steward working lands across the West that provide critical habitat for endangered species and migrating big game. Without meaningful rental rates, these grasslands are at greater risk of being converted to cropland or development. Western landowners deserve fair compensation for stewarding wildlife habitat.
DETAILS
What Landowners Need to Know
📉 Minimum Rental Rate Removed: USDA has eliminated the $13/acre minimum rental rate that applied from 2021 to 2024. As a result, offered rental rates in most counties in the West have dropped substantially, as low as $1/acre in some counties.
✅ Check your county's rate in the table from USDA, or in this interactive map from WLA.
🔝 Priority Zone Area Bonus: Counties located with National Priority Areas receive an additional $5/acre.
Limited Enrollment: This is a highly competitive signup. Only 1.8 million acres will be enrolled across all CRP programs. Applicants in national and state priority areas and lands within areas of high conversion are more likely to be accepted. Small scale livestock operations also receive bonus ranking.
Ways to Improve your Ranking
- Choose a 15-year contract instead of 10-year
- Accept a reduced rental rate
- See the complete ranking factors
Who Can Enroll: Both landowners and those who lease land are eligible to apply. To apply, visit your local FSA office.
Consider these things before enrolling:
- Land with greater than 5% tree canopy is not eligible.
- There is no limit to acreage that can be offered, but participants cannot receive more than $50,000 annually.
- Enrolled acres must be maintained according to an NRCS conservation plan and protected from crop conversion and development.
- Participants must control noxious weeds
- View current rental rates by county on the map above, or in a table, downloadable from USDA here.
- Grassland priority zones are the same as in 2023-24. Being located in one conveys an additional $5 per acre payment and increases ranking priority.
HOW TO APPLY
Interested and willing landowners are encouraged to contact their County FSA office to begin an application to the program. It is a good idea to talk to your local FSA office about your desires and plans early, as staff are stretched thin as deadlines near.
FSA and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) staff will assist in developing the application and ranking factors. The application will then be evaluated against other applications. If selected, the landowner will work with NRCS and FSA staff to develop and implement a conservation plan and a 10-year or 15-year agreement with the FSA and NRCS.
Contact your County FSA office
Find your County Office contact info on this map by clicking on your state: https://offices.sc.egov.usda.gov/locator/app
July 23, 2025
Informational Webinar
How are the payments determined for Grassland CRP?
The program provides ranchers with yearly acre-rental payments, capped at $50,000 per entity, for sustaining wildlife habitat on grasslands while allowing livestock production activities to continue. In return, landowners must follow a Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) management plan. The management plan may stipulate forage requirements, grazing regimes, and times for haying. Rental rates are based upon 75 percent of the cash rent data provided by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) plus a climate-smart practice incentive. The FSA has rental rates posted on its website.
How is Grassland CRP different from General CRP?
General CRP is a land retirement program that pays landowners to take land out of crop production and to re-establish valuable land cover that helps improve water quality, prevent soil erosion, and reduce loss of wildlife habitat. Grassland CRP is not a land retirement or fallowing program. Ranchers can continue to graze, seed, and hay land enrolled in the program according to an NRCS-approved management plan. To understand the difference between various USDA programs, check out our USDA comparable programs factsheet here.
How is Grassland CRP a habitat lease?
The leasing of land for a variety of purposes is long familiar to the agricultural community. Farmers and ranchers lease pasture for grazing, hay production, conservation, energy development, hunting and other public access. Similarly, habitat leasing is a negotiated agreement between a landowner and a lessee in which the landowner receives compensation for providing products or services that benefit public wildlife for a specific amount of time. Lessees can include individuals, businesses, non-profit organizations, charitable funders, government agencies, or a combination of interested parties.
A habitat lease recognizes and compensates landowners and producers for providing public values at a cost. These costs can include such things as competition for forage and disease transmission between ungulates and livestock, damages to hay and fencing, livestock depredation, water-conserving measures, management changes to accommodate wildlife needs, and opportunity cost (e.g. foregoing more lucrative land uses such as development). Grassland CRP is a lease with the USDA.
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