Written by HLRBO Staff|
Last updated
The Senate Agriculture Committee advanced its farm bill 12 to 11 on September 16, and the conservation title inside it would more than double what one person can collect from the Conservation Reserve Program. None of it is law. The arithmetic still tells you something.
What passed, and what did not
On September 16, 2026, the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry reported the Agricultural Act of 2026, which the chairman calls Farm Bill 2.0, on a 12 to 11 party-line vote. It was the committee's second attempt. The August 6 business meeting did not close; Ranking Member Amy Klobuchar noted that day that "as noted by the Chairman, the Agriculture Committee meeting remains open for further discussions on this bill."
Chairman John Boozman, Republican of Arkansas, put out a statement the same afternoon. "Farm country is hurting and needs results now," he said. "Advancing this bill out of committee is a critical step toward getting a fully updated Farm Bill signed into law. While this is clearly welcome progress, we need more of our colleagues' votes to reflect the urgency of supporting farmers, ranchers, forest landowners and rural communities."
What a committee report is not is a law. The bill now goes to the full Senate, where the National Association of Counties reported that Boozman anticipates a floor vote after the November midterms. The House passed its own version, H.R. 7567, earlier this year, and the two texts differ on exactly the CRP provisions below. Both chambers have to act and the differences have to be settled before anything reaches the President. Worth noting too: the party-line split was not about conservation. Klobuchar's stated objection in her August 6 statement was the SNAP cost shift to states, which she called "only a one-year fix."
The clock in the background is real. CRP's current enrollment authority runs through fiscal 2026, extended by P.L. 119-37, and fiscal 2026 ends September 30.
Four changes worth your time
The cleanest side-by-side is the Congressional Research Service report R48918, "The 2026 Farm Bill: Comparison of the House and Senate Bills with Current Law," updated July 29, 2026. Four CRP items in it matter to anyone holding ground that farms poorly and hunts well.
On total acres, nothing moves. Both bills maintain enrollment at 27 million acres through FY2031, the House at section 2101(c)(1) and the Senate with what CRS calls "minor wording and grammatical differences" at the same section. On grasslands, read carefully, because this one is easy to get backward. Both bills reauthorize the existing CRP grassland enrollment minimum of 2 million acres. The Senate then "adds a maximum CRP grassland enrollment of 12 million acres" at section 2101(c)(2). That is a ceiling, not a set-aside. Grassland CRP already covered nearly 10.3 million acres as of April 30, 2026, per FSA's own enrollment announcement, which leaves under 2 million acres of headroom beneath the Senate's ceiling. FSA then accepted another 2.2 million CRP acres across the general, grassland and continuous signups on July 7, 2026, without breaking out the grassland share.
On payment limits, the Senate moves the number. Current law caps rental payments at $50,000 per person per fiscal year, written into 7 CFR 1410.42(d)(1). Senate section 2105(c) raises it to $125,000. The House has no comparable provision.
On how the rate itself is set, the Senate section 2105(b) "requires that the rental rate be based on the three predominant soils on the land" and "does not allow for inflation adjustments to payments." Today, the county schedule is built differently, and the rule is permissive about how: 7 CFR 1410.42(f) says the county schedule of maximum soil rental rates "may be calculated for cropland based on the relative productivity of soils within the county using NRCS data and local FSA average cash rental estimates." Moving the reference point from the county's soils to the tract's soils, and from something CCC may do to something the statute would require, is a real change. Whether it helps or hurts a given landowner is not something CRS characterizes, and FSA has published no rates under it, because it is not law. Anyone telling you it automatically favors marginal ground is guessing.
Running the cap arithmetic
Here is the number that does not exist pre-assembled anywhere. FSA publishes its 2026 county average soil rental rates as a spreadsheet. Pull the dryland sheet and it carries 3,180 counties with a 2026 rate. The median of those 3,180 county averages is $62 an acre. The spread is enormous, from $8 in Union County, Arkansas and Treasure County, Montana, which tie for the low, to $372 in Sangamon County, Illinois.
Take the median county and divide. At $62 an acre, the current $50,000 limit is reached at about 806 acres. At the same $62, the Senate's $125,000 limit is reached at about 2,016 acres. That is two and a half times the ground one person can put in before the cap stops paying, against a national pool that stays fixed at 27 million acres.
That is the whole trade in one line. The Senate is not growing the program; it is changing how much of it one operation can absorb. If you hold 80 marginal acres, the cap was never your problem. If your neighbor holds 3,000, the cap is the reason enrolling all of it has not paid him. General signup offers are scored competitively on an environmental benefits index, so raising the ceiling on what large offers can earn plausibly deepens the field a small offer has to beat. That last step is inference, not a CRS finding, and no scoring data exists for a bill that has not passed.
Enroll, lease, or both
They are not mutually exclusive, and on cheap ground the lease is often the bigger number. Take Kemper County, Mississippi, where FSA's 2026 county average soil rental rate is $17 an acre, down from $20 the prior year. Forty acres of that ground enrolled at the county average would generate 40 times $17, or $680 a year.
Now the other side. Mississippi State University Extension publication P2310, written by Dr. Daryl Jones, Extension Professor in Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture, and James E. Miller, Professor Emeritus, describes the spread this way: "... high-quality waterfowl blinds leases that bring the highest annual returns per acre of access, versus leases for small-game hunting that may be as low as 50 cents per acre, to high-quality, big-game leases that may go for as much as $25 per acre or more in some areas." Take the big-game end of that at $25 and the same 40 acres leases for $1,000. Waterfowl blind access sits above that in the publication's own ordering, with no dollar figure attached to it. Stacked, and assuming FSA signs off, the tract returns $1,680, or $42 an acre, against $17 from CRP alone.
Three caveats, and they matter. A county average is not your rate; 7 CFR 1410.42(b) bases the payment on a weighted average soil rental rate for the specific soils enrolled, and offers above the county schedule get rejected outright. The $25 figure is the big-game end of a range that starts at 50 cents, not a ceiling on what access can bring, and Mississippi's Extension service is describing the South, not your county. And where the CRP rate is $372, as in Sangamon County, no hunting lease in the country competes with it. Wherever you own, the ratio between those two numbers is the whole decision, and it flips completely across the country.
The rule that decides whether "both" is legal
This is where landowners get surprised. The default in 7 CFR 1410.63(a) is restrictive: "Unless specified in this part or otherwise approved by CCC, no uses of any kind are authorized on CRP acreage during the contract period." The regulation then names what is allowed. Section 1410.63(b) permits commercial shooting preserves on CRP acreage if the preserve is state-licensed, operated consistently with that state's rules, and the CRP cover is maintained per the conservation plan. Section 1410.63(c) bars barrier fencing that blocks wildlife movement unless state law requires it.
What the regulation does not do is name an ordinary hunting lease. It names one in a different program: for the CLEAR 30 pilot, section 1410.80(d) says that land "may be used for compatible economic uses, including but not limited to hunting and fishing," provided the use is in the conservation plan. Standard CRP has no parallel sentence. The absence is not a prohibition, but it means the answer for your contract lives in your conservation plan and your county office rather than in the Code of Federal Regulations. Get it in writing before you sign a lease over enrolled ground.
One more fork worth knowing. If your state offers to pay you for access through a walk-in program funded by the Voluntary Public Access and Habitat Incentive Program, understand what that money buys. The NRCS fact sheet is explicit that states and tribes receive the grants and "then provide funding to participating private landowners through new or expanded public access programs." That is public access, which is the opposite of an exclusive lease. You can take one or the other on the same acres, not both.
None of this is settled. The Senate reported a bill, the House passed a different one, and the conservation title could change again on the floor or in conference. Check your CRP contract, check with your FSA county office, and check your state's rules before you move an acre either direction. What has already happened is that a committee voted to let one person collect two and a half times as much from a program that is not getting any bigger, and the landowners with the least ground are the ones who will feel that first. If you are pricing the other side of that decision, HLRBO's landowner leasing guide walks through what an access lease actually asks of you.