I've heard that in some places (eg, Kansas) where public hunting is allowed as 'walk in' on privately held CRP, the landowners get a break on property taxes. Is there any truth to this?
Buzz, the states with "walk-in" (or "PLOTS", or whatever they choose to call them) programs offer different incentives to landowners. In all cases, one way or another, if the ground is already in CRP and they're getting a check from Uncle Sam, they get a little "sweetener" on top of that from the state. Re tax breaks, the state of Michigan runs a very large program (unrelated to CRP)--used to be a couple million acres, almost all in the UP I believe--called Commercial Forest. In return for allowing public access for hunting, landowners do get a tax break. Those CF areas are not signed or anything like that. But unless you've got houses, fences, or active agriculture going on, if it's forest land in the UP and there aren't any no hunting/no trespassing signs, you can hunt it.
People who didn't live in serious farm country when CRP got started probably don't remember that more than anything, to start with, the program had a goal of taking marginal land out of crop production in order to reduce an oversupply of commodities which had resulted in very low prices. Farmers going broke, banks foreclosing on them etc. Yes, it was also of significant benefit to wildlife, but it also kept a lot of farmers from going under. Brought the price of corn and other grains back up by reducing supply. And in 3 years, Iowa's pheasant harvest doubled: from what was then an all time low of a little over 700,000 in 1984 to almost 1.5 million in 1987. Now? We'd be real happy to hit that 700,000 mark again.
