What is the Conservation Reserve Program? Comment on the program's effectiveness.

The aim of the program was to reduce the supply of farm products by converting farmland into forests. To date, over 22 million acres of farmland have been converted to forests. When the program started in 1986, it paid farmers $30 to $50 per acre for up to 15 years for farmland that was converted into forests by planting seedlings. This subsidy prompted farmers across the country to get into commercial forestry. They planted seedlings that when full-grown would be felled for lumber, electrical poles, and paper pulp. The result has been a huge decline in the price of wood as a mountain of mature trees began to come onto the market in the mid-2010s. By 2018, the price of saw timber (the quality of wood that can be used for making lumber) had fallen to a 50-year low. The demand for wood was up, but the supply increased more than demand. The result was falling prices for nearly every type of wood. The prices of lumber, telephone poles, and pulp have fallen so low that, in retrospect, the farmers who converted farmland into woodland would probably have made more money continuing to farm agricultural crops than they are going to make harvesting the trees that they were subsidized into producing.