https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191219142844.htm

"Those sweeping conservation efforts in returning cropland to vegetated land might have done so with an until-now hidden consequence: it increased the wildlife damage to remaining cropland and thus caused unintended cost that whittled away at the program's compensation for farmers," said Hongbo Yang, lead author in a recent paper in the Ecological Economics journal.

Yang, who recently earned a PhD at from Michigan State University (MSU) and is currently a research associate at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and his colleagues analyzed the reforestation achieved via programs that encourage, and compensate, farmers to convert their cropland to forests via China's enormous Grain-to-Green Program (GTGP).