Wisconsin Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP)

For Wisconsin agricultural landowners along rivers and streams who enroll filter strips, riparian buffers, or wetland restorations. Pays installation cost-share plus an upfront incentive and annual soil-rental payments; perpetual easements are also available. Co-administered by DATCP with USDA FSA and county land & water conservation offices.

Agricultural landowners with eligible acreage along rivers/streams. Filter strips can be as narrow as 30 feet, with no minimum acreage.

Combines installation cost-share, an upfront sign-up incentive, and annual soil-rental payments — roughly $2,900 lifetime value for 15-year contracts, or about $4,200/acre for perpetual easements on tilled land.

Route — your county office hands you the CREP application. DATCP does not take applications itself and publishes no form to download. Its instruction: "Landowners interested in enrolling in CREP should contact their county land and water conservation office or local Farm Service Agency office." The program brochure is more specific still, under the heading Enrollment: "Contact your county USDA Farm Service Agency, NRCS office, or your county land conservation office for a CREP application. A site visit will be completed to discuss with you the specific lands you want to enroll and what practices you would like to install." So there are three doors — county land conservation, FSA, or NRCS — and any of them can start you.

Expect a site visit, not a paper round. The visit is where you and the office settle which acres go in and which practice gets installed. Come to it having decided which enrollment option you want: "Enrollment options are either a 15-year agreement or a perpetual easement."

Find the office. County land and water conservation departments: https://wisconsinlandwater.org/members-hub/members . Wisconsin FSA offices: https://offices.sc.egov.usda.gov/locator/app?state=wi&agency=fsa .

Check eligibility before you call. DATCP states land is eligible if it "Is in one of the 52 Wisconsin CREP counties," "Has a history of crop or pasture use," and "Is within 150 feet of a ditch, stream, lake or wetland (or 1000 feet, for the Grassland Project Areas)." The brochure adds one more test for part of the state: land "Is considered highly erodible for practices in the southern grassland area." The project-area map is at https://datcp.wi.gov/Documents/CREPProjectAreaMap.pdf and the brochure at https://datcp.wi.gov/Documents/CREPBrochure.pdf — the brochure also names the practices you can choose from, by code (filter strips CP21, riparian buffers CP22, grassed waterways CP8a, wetland restoration CP23, marginal pastureland wildlife habitat buffers CP29; and in grassland project areas only, CP1, CP2 and CP25). A longer practices list is at https://datcp.wi.gov/Documents/CREPPractices.pdf . To size the money first, DATCP publishes a spreadsheet: "Use our payment calculator to estimate the payments you could receive" (https://datcp.wi.gov/Documents/CREPPaymentCalculator.xlsx).

Timing — no deadline or sign-up window is published. Neither the DATCP CREP pages nor the brochure names a due date or an enrollment period; the published route is simply to contact your county office and ask for an application. Because CREP runs through the federal Conservation Reserve Program, ask the office whether a federal sign-up period applies to the practice you want.

Who to ask at the state level. Brian Loeffelholz, brian.loeffelholz@wisconsin.gov, (608) 224-4632; Stacy Tierman, stacy.tierman@wisconsin.gov, (608) 224-4633. DATCP main line (608) 224-5012, 2811 Agriculture Dr., P.O. Box 8911, Madison, WI 53708-8911.