Loss of federal acres hurts hunters' public access

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By ROXANA HEGEMAN

Associated Press Writer

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) -- Some of the nation's best hunting for pheasant, quail, turkey and deer today can be found in the vast Kansas prairie.

With nearly 97 percent of the land in the state privately owned, the 271,000 hunters who come here each season have had to depend mostly on a popular state walk-in program that pays landowners to let people hunt on their land.

But hunting access in places like Kansas and other states with little public land may shrink in the coming years as millions of acres across the country come out of the federal Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers not to farm environmentally sensitive land.

About half of the 1.06 million acres enrolled in the Kansas hunter walk-in program are also in CRP. The majority of that CRP acreage now in the access program is expected to be used for crops as CRP contracts expire in the coming years, said Jake George, private lands coordinator for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks.

Kansas is not the only state facing the loss of hunting access as farmers who had enrolled their idled land in both programs start farming it again. But in Kansas, the hunter access program is "extremely important" because the state has so little public land available, he said.

"As urban populations increase, we see a disconnect between the rural and the urban," George said. "So there are not as many people giving access and not as many people acquiring access through traditional means."

The walk-in program has been crucial for hunting access since its start in 1995, he said.

For small towns scattered across the sparsely populated plains of western Kansas, hunting season brings a major economic boost. Kansas estimates that the approximately 271,000 hunters who come here each year spend an average of 11 days hunting in the state, spending an average of $827 each annually on food, gas, lodging and equipment.

For now, George is more concerned about the loss of wildlife habitat. The acreage enrolled in the Kansas walk-in program for 2009 has actually gone up between 10,000 and 15,000 from 2008 to 2009. But with the first CRP acres expiring in September and millions more due to expire in the coming years, the agency is scrambling to find ways to save as much habitat and access as possible.

By the time lawmakers scaled down the CRP program in the 2008 Farm Bill, CRP had protected 39.2 million acres nationwide. The new farm bill capped the program at 32 million acres. More than 3.4 million acres were taken out in September when the owners' contracts expired, most of them in Kansas, Texas and Colorado. The additional acreage will come in subsequent years.

"It is a little daunting," George said. "But I am pretty hopeful."

The state will be working with landowners to persuade them to leave habitat at field corners or edges even if they do break up the former CRP land for planting.

Kansas farmers get an average of $2.13 per acre for allowing hunters on their land, on top of whatever they may be getting under their CRP contracts with the Agriculture Department.

This year 2,412 Kansas landowners received payments.