In United States

agricultural policy Agricultural policy describes a set of laws relating to domestic agriculture and imports of foreign agricultural products. Governments usually implement agricultural policies with the goal of achieving a specific outcome in the domestic agricultu ...

, the set-aside program (still in use in some areas today) was a program under which farmers were required to set aside a certain percentage of their total planted acreage and devote this land to approved

conservation Conservation is the preservation or efficient use of resources, or the conservation of various quantities under physical laws. Conservation may also refer to: Environment and natural resources * Nature conservation, the protection and managem ...

uses (such as grasses, legumes, and small grain which is not allowed to mature) in order to be eligible for nonrecourse loans and

deficiency payments In the United States, deficiency payments are direct government payments made to farmers who participated in annual commodity programs for wheat, feed grains, rice, or cotton, prior to 1996. *The crop-specific deficiency payment rate was based on th ...

. Set-aside acreage was based on the number of acres a farmer actually planted in the program year as opposed to being based on prior crop years. The authority for set-aside was eliminated by the

1996 farm bill The Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-127), known informally as the Freedom to Farm Act, the FAIR Act, or the 1996 U.S. Farm Bill, was the omnibus 1996 farm bill that, among other provisions, revises and simplifies ...

(P.L. 104-127).

References

*{{CRS, article = Report for Congress: Agriculture: A Glossary of Terms, Programs, and Laws, 2005 Edition, url = http://ncseonline.org/nle/crsreports/05jun/97-905.pdf, author= Jasper Womach United States Department of Agriculture