| Summary: | Three different, but related studies on conservation in North Dakota were completed. Expansion of Devil’s Lake over the past 20 years has flooded farmland, towns, and roads, causing economic damage and distress. Retirement of private land into conservation could play a role in ameliorating damages to citizens, while simultaneously improving and protecting wildlife habitat. The objective of the first study is to investigate the supply of agricultural land that might be available for conservation use at various purchase prices. It was expected that increasingly frequent flooding over the past decades would have increased the supply of land available for conservation. This was verified to be the case for the most vulnerable lands in Devil’s Lake Basin—areas below 1,460 ft. elevation and within 300 ft. of surface waters.
The Conservation Reserve Program is comprised of lands that were previously farmed and have been converted into grassland. The landowners are compensated by the US government for retiring this farmland because it provides environmental benefits. Current commodity prices are giving farmers less incentive to renew their CRP contracts and many are deciding to instead farm those lands. The second study aims to identify and quantify the factors that affect a landowner’s decision to renew an expiring CRP contract or not in the Sheyenne River basin. The economic factors examined were crop prices and CRP payments. The ecological factors were slope of the land, distance to the nearest stream, and soil texture.
The purpose of the final study is to estimate the increase in sediment loading due to changes in CRP enrollment, and then value the cost to society of the increased sedimentation. This will be accomplished by creating a SWAT model of the Sheyenne River. Future and hypothetical land use datasets will be substituted into the model. Every ton of sediment entering the river costs society an estimated $2.40. The model estimated 1,218.36 tons of sediment entered the river from the study area in 2005. Using the landcover conditions present in 2014, an estimated 1,661.4 tons of sediment would have entered the river across the study area, an increase of 36%.
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