Page 44 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

At the same time, high commodity prices had created demand for shrinking the CRP as growers
were eager to cultivate more land.

Program enrollment slid from a peak of almost 37 million acres in 2007 to 24 million acres in
2016 (See chart below.)
Savings from cutting CRP allowed lawmakers to bolster other conservation programs that
subsidize new farming equipment and practices. (The cut came from gradually lowering the cap
on CRP enrollment from 32 million to 24 million acres by fiscal 2018.)

What the farm bill gives, congressional appropriators can take away.

Farm bills contain both mandatory and discretionary spending.

Spending that is authorized, but not mandated, by a farm bill only gets spent if it gets included in
the annual appropriations bills passed by Congress.

Appropriations committees have increasingly come to see some mandatory programs as sources
of money they can put to other purposes, so spending is capped below the mandated level. Such
cuts are known as Changes in Mandatory Program Spending, or ChIMPs.

From fiscal 2012 through 2016, Congress enacted $3.3 billion in ChIMPS on farm bill program
spending. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) has accounted for $1.25 billion
of those cuts, including a $350 million reduction in fiscal 2012.

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