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Groton Daily Independent
Thursday, Oct. 19, 2017 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 102 ~ 19 of 63
There were old oil lters, fan belts and all manner of broken tractor parts sprinkled liberally across the landscape. Crumbling barns and other buildings lled what had been a farmyard and there was very little water anywhere on the farm. There wasn’t much in the way of wildlife, either.
“It was a hell of a mess,” Moisan said.
He and his partner hadn’t had nearly enough money to buy the place outright. There was a mortgage to pay and a hefty property tax bill to consider as well, Moisan said. So he needed a renter to produce a crop to help pay the mortgage and taxes. The guy he found wasn’t that great a farmer and largely kept doing what the previous owners had done.
“I lost $30,000 one year,” Moisan said.
In 2004, Moisan turned to the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays landowners to take land out of production and turn it into wildlife habitat, especially when the land’s soil is highly erodible. He learned about a program contained in the program called CP38, which is better known as State Acres for Wildlife Enhancement or SAFE. The idea is to put the least-productive portions of farm elds to better use as wildlife habitat.
Moisan heard about the program at a Pheasants Forever banquet in Pierre. The Farm Service Agency of ce in Tripp County, though, wasn’t familiar with it. Still they worked with Moisan to enroll 130 acres into the program.
He planted 42 acres of trees, totaling about 66,000 individual plants. The rest of that rst 130 acres was planted to grass. Moisan’s renter was not happy about the change. Farming around the trees was going to make things a bit more dif cult and the renter didn’t much care if the newly planted CRP acres hadn’t actually been producing a pro table crop.
Moisan was forced to part ways with that rst renter after just a few years.
Moisan’s goal for Eagle View Ranch was to create a haven for wildlife, while at the same time making enough money to break even on the property nancially. The plan revolved planting 30 percent of the property to native grasses and enrolling it into CRP, keeping 30 percent of the property as farm ground and another 30 percent would be pasture land. The remaining acres would be used for stock dams, drain- age basins and a few more manicured acres around the small mobile home and few remaining barns that made up the farmyard.
Moisan said he based his plan on a master’s degree thesis written by Emmett Keyser. The thesis focused on pheasant habitat requirements. Keyser’s thesis found that a mix of about one-third crop, one-third undisturbed grass and one-third disturbed grass was ideal for pheasant production.
Making his plan a reality was a tall order. One that would require an experienced, forward-thinking farmer and a thorough understanding of federal, state and privately funded conservation programs.
Understanding the conservation programs came only after countless hours of study and practice. What Moisan discovered was that the people who manage federal conservation programs at the country level often interpret the programs differently from each other. The end result is that the USDA of cers in Tripp County will enforce different rules than their counterparts in Hughes County even if they’re working with the same program.
A big part of navigating federal conservation programs, Moisan discovered, was knowing more about what was available than those at his local FSA and Natural Resources Conservation Service of ces.
“One thing about NRCS of ces in the area is that they don’t actively tell people about the programs available to them,” Moisan said.
Still, he was able to get 30 percent of his land enrolled into CRP. Moisan also was able to get a new dam built with the help of a cost share between the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and himself.
The work isn’t over once the land is enrolled either, Moison said. He spends a lot of time working with the FSA and NRCS of ces in Tripp County to gure out what he can and can’t do to improve wildlife habitat on his property.
“The biggest hurdle I’ve seen was what the NRCS and what the FSA told me I could plant was really far apart,” Moisan said.