The Conservation Reserve Program has observers unsure about whether it’s a boon or a bust for communities. Resources for the Future scholars report their findings: the program advances land conservation without broadly harming rural economies.
The US Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is the single largest program in the nation for private-land conservation, covering over 25 million acres with an annual budget of $2.2 billion. Created in 1986, the CRP incentivizes landowners to remove environmentally sensitive cropland from agricultural production in order to generate environmental benefits. As a result, the CRP has attracted both praise and skepticism from affected agricultural communities. To understand whether the CRP helps or harms local communities, we turned to data on local home values, jobs, and population changes over the past several decades.
Competing Effects on Rural Economies
Landowners who voluntarily enroll in the CRP receive annual rental payments to remove environmentally sensitive cropland from production and replace crops with long-term vegetative cover such as grasses, trees, natural buffers, and restored wetlands. Initially designed to reduce soil erosion, the CRP’s original environmental goals have expanded over the decades to include improving water quality; protecting wildlife habitats; and, more recently, increasing land-sector carbon storage to help meet federal climate targets. As of 2025, roughly 4 percent of US cropland is enrolled in the program—an area about the size of Kentucky.
Given the size of the program, a concern long held in many agricultural regions is that the withdrawal of large areas of cropland from production could adversely impact agricultural communities who depend economically on stable agricultural outputs. For example, rural businesses that provide seed, fertilizer, machinery repair, trucking, grain handling, and other services might suffer from reduced demand, leading to reduced local employment and lost wages. Enrolling in the CRP also could provide landowners with opportunities to relocate. The possibility that the CRP may contribute to rural population decline has fueled concerns about the program, particularly in agricultural service centers and in regions with high levels of CRP enrollment.
Credit: John James Audubon, Boston Public Library / Unsplash
Conversely, the program might in some cases enhance rural economies. CRP rental payments are stable income streams that flow to landowners, even when farm profit margins are thin. To the extent that concerns over increases in absentee landownership are misplaced, the CRP could have positive effects on local demand for non-farm goods and services. The CRP also can lead to new demand for labor to convert and maintain conservation land, which may offset lost agricultural employment. Finally, improvements in natural amenities may generate benefits, including improvements to air and water quality, tourism opportunities for outdoor recreation, hunting, fishing, more wildlife, and improved landscape aesthetics.
Assessing the Impact of the Conservation Reserve Program
To investigate these trade-offs, we explored the effects of CRP enrollment on three outcomes relevant to the overall local economic impact of the program: property values, employment, and population. The findings, presented in a recent Resources for the Future report, indicate that the CRP provides amenity benefits that improve property values, moderately increases local employment and business activity, and does not contribute to long-term rural depopulation.
Property Values
The effect of the CRP on nearby residential property values is of interest because the benefits of living in a location are capitalized into property values. Changes in property values that coincide with changes in the amount of nearby conservation lands could reflect shifts in the aesthetic values or other benefits provided by those lands. However, properties differ in many ways that are difficult to measure (such as scenic views, or proximity to open space or rurality), and some of these factors may be correlated with both property values and the amount of nearby CRP land. In other words, it could be hard to separate the effects of these other factors from the effects of CRP land.
To account for potential confounding variables, we focused our analysis on properties that were sold more than once within the time span of our data and looked at how the prices of those properties changed when the amount of CRP land nearby changed. Because characteristics like rurality or scenic views are relatively constant, focusing on the changes effectively “controls” for home characteristics that do not change over time, allowing us to identify the effects of nearby CRP land.
Credit: John James Audubon, Boston Public Library / Unsplash
We find that increases in CRP enrollment near a home are associated with higher sale prices. Increasing CRP land by 10 hectares (about 24.71 acres, or roughly the size of 18 football fields) within 1 kilometer of a house is linked with a 0.5–0.7 percent increase in property value, while added tree cover on CRP land produces a roughly 2 percent valuation increase.
These findings are similar in scale to findings from previous studies on the effects of land conservation on property values. For example, a previous study of home prices in Massachusetts determined that a one-acre increase in conservation land within a quarter mile of residential property increased the valuation of the property by 0.018 percent. We also find that CRP land that is set to be converted to tree cover had a stronger effect on property values than other types of CRP land use types, consistent with findings from previous studies on the effect of tree cover on home values.
Local Employment and Business Activity
We also looked at the consequences of CRP enrollment on rural businesses and employment. CRP enrollment may impact rural economies positively through steady rental payments that boost local spending, or negatively by decreasing demand for agricultural products. Using establishment-level data to identify rural businesses in US counties between 1995 and 2022, we looked at how rural business outcomes changed in response to changes in CRP enrollment in the same county over the next five years. We found that for every 1,000 additional acres enrolled in the CRP in a given county, an average of 8 new jobs were created in that county over the next 3–5 years.
CRP enrollment fell by about 11.6 million acres between 2001 and 2022, resulting in the loss of roughly 45 jobs per county, with the impacts most visible in the high-enrollment Great Plains states. Because counties differ widely in the size of their rural labor markets, this county average should be interpreted as a modest effect in most places, and most counties saw estimated employment changes of fewer than 100 jobs. Nationwide, this figure translates to around 127,000 employment losses attributed to CRP contraction between 2001 and 2022.
Population Change
Finally, we studied how county populations have changed from 2001 to 2022 in response to shifts in county CRP enrollment. We found little evidence that the CRP contributes to sustained rural depopulation. The migration responses we estimated are small and transitory, and net effects over multiyear horizons are essentially zero, which does not support the decades-old concern that the CRP has driven outward migration from rural America.
Interpreting the Results
Past studies have found mixed evidence regarding the economic impacts of the CRP, with a 1991 paper raising concerns that high enrollment could lead to local economic decline in communities that depend heavily on farm production and agricultural services. A 2001 case study of Three Forks, Montana, similarly concluded that CRP enrollment could reduce agricultural employment and local business activity, while also helping to control urban sprawl and preserve open space. However, the last comprehensive national study, published in 2004, determined that many rural economies adjusted over time. And a 2023 paper showed that CRP enrollment can in some regions reduce agricultural employment while increasing recreation, food service, and lodging jobs, with no evidence that the program harms total local employment overall.
Credit: Grus americana / Shutterstock
Our analysis adds new evidence from recent decades by focusing on marginal enrollment changes—rather than the large changes in enrollment that occurred early in the program’s history—and by looking comprehensively across property values, rural establishments, employment, and migration. In contrast to early simulation-based studies, but like more recent empirical work, our findings suggest that the CRP can advance conservation objectives without broadly harming rural economies. Changes in enrollment can reduce some crop-related activity, but they can also support local spending through rental payments, land-management work, recreation, and improved amenities.
Future research can help identify where additional enrollment would deliver the greatest combined environmental and socioeconomic value, including whether current county acreage limits remain appropriate in places where conservation demand is high and local economic risks appear modest.
A version of this article appeared in print in the Fall 2026 issue of Resources magazine.
