The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) offers a suite of Farm Bill conservation
programs and practices that provide incentives to enhance environmental quality on privately-owned agricultural lands. In 2004, the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) initiated conservation practice Habitat Buffers for Upland Birds (CP33) under the continuous sign-up Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to target recovery of northern bobwhite (Colinus
virgianianus) and other upland bird species in rowcrop agricultural landscapes. This was the first CRP practice designed specifically to help meet recovery objectives of a large-scale wildlife conservation initiative and the first to require a wildlife monitoring component as part of its practice directive. The FSA initially allocated 250,000 CP33 acres to 35 states (increased to 350,000 acres in 2010) to be actively managed over a period of 10 years and charged the
Southeast Quail Study Group (SEQSG, now National Bobwhite Technical Committee) with development of a coordinated CP33 monitoring protocol to generate measures of population response for northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) and other priority bird species at multiple spatial scales.