This report estimates the impact that high levels of enrollment in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) have had on economic trends in rural counties since the program's inception in 1985 until today. The results of a growth model and quasi-experimental control group analysis indicate no...

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) pays farmers about $2 billion per year to retire cropland under ten- to fifteen-year contracts. Recent research by Wu (2000) found that slippage - an unintended stimulus of new plantings - offsets some of CRP's environmental benefits. In a comment on Wu, we...