6. Technical Assistance

While the CES offers a number of educational services to farmers and other rural residents, NRCS’ advising focuses exclusively on natural resource issues.¹⁰⁸ The agency has roughly 4,400 conservationists in field offices throughout the country who supply farmers with information about conservation practices and programs, conduct on-farm resource assessments and inventories, and provide assistance to farmers implementing conservation practices.¹⁰⁹ NRCS receives funding to provide technical assistance through a variety of programs.

The single largest source is the Conservation Technical Assistance program (CTA), which received $726 million in FY 2018 to provide conservation planning and implementation assistance for any group or individual engaged in agriculture throughout the United States.¹¹⁰ USDA’s conservation programs, discussed below, also generally include funding for technical assistance to help farmers fulfill their program agreement or contract with the agency.¹¹¹ The three largest conservation programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), and the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), provided $768 million for technical assistance in FY 2019.¹¹² EQIP contributed the majority of these funds, devoting $428 million or 25% of its total funding to technical assistance.¹¹³ CSP also included $267 million, representing 19% of CSP’s budget, while only 4% of CRP funding ($73 million) was devoted to technical assistance.¹¹⁴

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Technical assistance provided through Farm Bill conservation programs has increased steadily since FY 2009, when EQIP, CSP, and CRP collectively included only $364 million for technical assistance.¹¹⁵ As conservation program funding for technical assistance has increased, however, CTA’s budget has fallen substantially in real terms.

CTA is funded through the Conservation Operations (which the Trump Administration proposed renaming “Private Lands Conservation Operations”), almost 90% of which goes to CTA. The 2018 Farm Bill appropriated $819 million annually to Conservation Operations in discretionary funding, making it USDA’s largest discretionary conservation program.¹¹⁶ Congressional appropriations for Conservation Operations has hovered around $800 million in nominal terms since 2002, which represents a substantial decline in real terms.¹¹⁷ Inflation-adjusted funding for Conservation Operations reached more than $1.1 billion early in the George W. Bush Administration before reaching a low of $830 million in FY 2020.¹¹⁸ As a result, the number of full-time staff positions funded by Conservation Operations has steadily declined from more than 8,000 in FY 2000 to a little under 5,000 in FY 2020.¹¹⁹ Nonetheless, it remains a critically important program. Approximately one million farmers, ranchers, and foresters received technical assistance through CTA in FY 2019, affecting 111 million acres of agricultural land and forestland.¹²⁰

While NRCS’ national reach and focus on conservation practices make it an ideal agency to provide technical assistance to farmers using carbon-farming practices, it currently lacks the capacity to do so effectively. Its field staff generally focus on conventional conservation practices that have moderate climate effects, at best. Even more disconcerting, many of its conservationists are skeptical of anthropogenic climate change¹²¹ and do not see increasing climate change mitigation or resilience as part of their job.¹²² A 2017 nationwide survey of almost 2,000 NRCS field staff found that only 45% agreed that there will be an increased need for agency programs in their service area due to changing weather patterns and only 52% agreed that assisting farmers

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with increased weather variability is part of their job.¹²³ Neither additional funding nor reframing climate change resilience as “soil health” will fully address these problems. Congress should dramatically increase funding for conservation technical assistance, but it will need to tie any new funds to the most environmentally beneficial conservation practices in order to ensure that the desired results are achieved.

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Source: Lehner Peter. Farming for Our Future: The Science, Law and Policy of Climate-Neutral Agriculture. Environmental Law Institute,2021. — 255 p.. 2021

6. Technical Assistance

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