Georgia cash offer

NWU Radio Script

3-26-01

In an effort to conserve tight water supplies after three years of drought, the state of Georgia is offering to pay farmers NOT to irrigate this year.

With Georgia looking at its fourth straight dry summer, the state has set aside $110 million from their national tobacco settlement allotment to pay farmers in 42 counties to forgo irrigation. The region includes cotton farms and some of the nation's most fertile peanut fields.

Farmers who accept the money can still try to grow crops, but if they do not have good, timely rains this summer their field may wither.

If the summer is wet, the farmers can keep the money and still have a healthy crop.

Many farmers signed up for the recent irrigation auction. Most, as can be expected, were not particularly excited about the idea, but were resigned to the need to conserve water.

"I don't know of a single farmer who has admitted he likes it," Harold Wilson, Terrell County Extension educator told the Associated Press.

According to Tommy Irvin, Georgia's agriculture commissioner, he knows of no other state that has held an auction to pay farmers not to irrigate.

Tim Senn of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, said in his 23 years with the USDA, this is the first time he's seen such an incentive.

"In this time of depressed agricultural commodity prices, there needs to be some compensation for reducing yields," Senn said in the AP article.

The auctions were held earlier this month in eight towns. Farmers had to submit written bids offering not to irrigate acreage for a certain amount of money.

Bids were to be analyzed by computer and the analysis would be used to determine which ones would be accepted. Farmers were to know by that evening whether their bids were accepted.

Concerns lingered as some had heard the state was considering payments of $100 an acre - an amount farmers noted would be insufficient in light of rising input costs. Georgia officials had no comment.

The auctions are a novel idea and depending on what happens in Georgia, might well become a tool utilized by other drought-prone states.

This month the government began making $1.1 billion in payments to 160,000 farmers who lost crops to drought and other weather-related disasters last year. Texas, North Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas were among the states with the greatest demand for the money, money that Congressional representatives from urban areas are having an increasingly difficult time justifying to their taxpayers.

Avenues such as the one taken by Georgia, right or wrong, might well find appeal as discussions begin over how to write the next Farm Bill.

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