The USDA will end income-replacement payments to some Whatcom County, Wash., farmers who voluntarily took land out of production to provide habitat for wildlife and fish.

Over the past two decades, the USDA’s Farm Services Agency has erroneously enrolled ineligible land in the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, FSA State Director Jon Wyss said Thursday.

More than 200 CREP contracts in Whatcom County could be terminated or modified because of FSA errors dating back to 2003, he said.

Farmers may be able to enroll in other conservation programs, but they won’t be paid as much. There is no offer from the government to pay for removing riparian buffers and returning land to agriculture.

“This is a very difficult situation. It’s a very challenging conversation to have,” Wyss said in an interview after an online meeting with landowners.

CREP encourages the conservation of soil, water, fish and wildlife by replacing farm income. Contracts last 10 to 15 years. There are about 880 CREP contracts statewide covering more than 13,300 acres.

Most CREP contracts are in Whatcom County. The northwest Washington county has streams, farms, tribes and environmental activists.

“It’s the perfect county to have CREP,” Wyss said.

Whatcom Family Farmers executive director Fred Likkel said CREP payments are an incentive for farmers to provide salmon habitat.

“Now we’ve just been disincentived to do that,” he said. “Farmers have bills to pay. In reality, other programs don’t even come close to matching CREP.

“We’re going to see land revert back to agriculture and that’s not what the environmental community, the tribal community and others have been happy with,” Likkel said.

Wyss said he agreed CREP projects — even the ones erroneously funded — have provided “fantastic environmental benefit.”

The state FSA, however, has no choice but to terminate or reduce some CREP contracts after a decision by Frank Wood, the director of the USDA’s National Appeals Division, Wyss said.

The case arose when a Whatcom County landowner applied to re-enroll 9 acres in CREP. The land was in the program between 2007 and 2022. The landowner received $5,083 a year, according to Wood’s decision.

A Washington Fish and Wildlife biologist said fish-bearing streams ran through the land, but the streams are not on a map of streams eligible for CREP contracts, according to the decision.

Wood stated that he understood why the landowner was frustrated — he did everything right. But the land simply wasn’t eligible for CREP, Wood wrote.

The decision led to further reviews and finding CREP contracts that don’t meet eligibility rules for a “multitude of reasons,” Wyss said. “It was one after the other,” he said. “Every contract has a different challenge.”

The state CREP handbook went out of step with national polices “somewhere between 2003 and 2008,” Wyss said. “Staff followed those procedures, but those procedures were outside national policy.”

The FSA has so far identified nine contracts outside Whatcom County that may have been erroneously enrolled, he said.

The FSA will make payments in October, the month CREP checks are sent to landowners. FSA also won’t seek refunds for past payments, Wyss said.

One farmer told Wyss he would gladly refund CREP payments if FSA paid to restore his land to agriculture.