Dustin and Brent, I certainly agree that prairie grass in general is superior to brome. But here's the point, weather aside: CRP gave us in Iowa, virtually overnight, 2 million acres of grass habitat, most of which was brome. That grass replaced 2 million acres of corn and soybeans. And while I also agree that brome is poor winter cover . . . well, take a year like last year, when much of Iowa hardly had winter. I ran my snowblower once, and probably didn't need to that time. And it is decent nesting cover until it becomes matted down, which takes a few years. Because of the 1988 drought, our brome CRP acres didn't really have much of a chance to reach the point that it wasn't good nesting cover until well into the 90's.
As far as how much time I spent hunting, from 1987-96, I averaged 69 pheasants bagged per year without ever leaving Iowa. That included only one year (1988, when I started teaching at Iowa State) when "work" interfered significantly with pheasant hunting. After that, once I adjusted my teaching schedule to compensate for the fact that my colleagues didn't like early morning classes, even though I was working "full time" during pheasant season for the next 4 years, I hunted most afternoons. And while I didn't hunt every day during Iowa's average season of 75 days or so, I almost always hunted more days than I didn't.
I don't doubt that we would have had far greater bird numbers if all those big CRP fields--so many of which we lost after the 96 Farm Bill--had been prairie grass rather than brome. But "pre-winter" conditions often exist in Iowa for the majority of the season. Significant snow seldom comes before December. And when it does, it usually melts--and even the brome fields would recover to the point where they were once again holding good numbers of birds.
Much of my advantage as a pheasant hunter came from the fact that I lived in Poweshiek County from 1985-88 and made a lot of good contacts with farmers. Poweshiek during the early CRP years had an almost perfect mix of CRP and crop fields. 50,000 acres of CRP in a single county. But I hunted other parts of the state as well. And wherever I hunted those big brome fields, I did quite well.
I agree that for various reasons--unless maybe we lose the Renewable Fuels Mandate--it's highly doubtful Iowa will ever see those boom years again. While those big CRP fields were being established, as I drove around the state, I observed a whole lot of "micro-habitat"--fencerows, sloughs, small wetlands--being removed. Bigger and cleaner crop fields. Significantly reduced trapping pressure on nest predators like raccoons. And I thought to myself, God help us if we ever lose CRP. And while we haven't lost it, what we have now = both reduced acres and less valuable in terms of nesting cover, if not winter cover, than what we had in the program's first decade.
All of those factors make it pretty clear that we won't ever see Iowa again as it was when CRP was initially established.
I'd also add that the string of snowier than normal winters and cooler/wetter than normal springs--the very unfortunate "perfect storm" for Iowa pheasants that gave us numbers lower than I thought we'd ever see--occurred in the 21st century, long after the 1996 Farm Bill and the subsequent loss of much of Iowa's "full field" CRP acres.
Last edited by L. Brown; 10/25/17 06:23 AM.
