Taking Conservation Assistance to a New Level

Remarks by Bruce I. Knight, Chief
Natural Resources Conservation Service

at the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture
Lexington, KY
October 8, 2002

Thank you, Commissioner Smith, and good morning. It is a pleasure to be here today and to be a part of the farm bill implementation panel. Good morning also to my fellow panelists, USDA Under Secretary Bill Hawks and John Johnson of USDA’s Farm Service Agency.

Today, I will try to do three things: First, give you an overview of the conservation provisions of the farm bill. Second, go over what we are doing to implement those provisions. And third, talk a bit about opportunities the conservation title presents for the State Departments of Agriculture.

But first I would like to take a minute to recognize the close tie that exists between NASDA and NRCS and to thank you for your work on the farm bill. Your 2002 Farm Policy Initiative did a good job of presenting the issues facing American agriculture. It played an important role in framing the debate over the 2002 farm bill.

NASDA is also doing some fine work in the environmental area. I want to recognize Frank DuBois, director of the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, and the NASDA Natural Resources and Environment Committee for their fine work.

The NASDA Research Foundation is also doing good things, including publication of the environmental guides for each state. The guides are a valuable tool for farmers and ranchers, and we look forward to having the complete set available.

Thanks again for your hard work on behalf of America’s farmers and ranchers.

Now, I’ll give you a quick run down on the provisions of the farm bill and the resources it makes available to farmers and ranchers.


Farm Bill Program Run Down

The new farm bill represents the largest investment in conservation on America’s working lands in farm bill history – $13 billion over six years. The farm bill provides a great deal of flexibility for America’s farmers and ranchers. Funding increases in all programs offer more farmers and ranchers more options for addressing their natural resource challenges.

The biggest single program in the farm bill is the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). The farm bill provides an extra $5.5 billion for EQIP. For Fiscal year 2002, that amounted to an additional $227 million to provide financial and technical assistance to farmers, ranchers, and tribes. Two hundred million dollars went for general enrollment for EQIP and $25 million to provide technical and financial assistance for ground and surface water conservation. For fiscal year 2003, EQIP will have $700 million, plus $45 million for ground and surface water conservation.

Other programs show similar increases.

The farm bill provides $360 million for the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP) over six years. WHIP had $15 million for last fiscal year and will have $30 million for FY 2003.

The new farm bill provides for several programs to protect working farmland and ranchland, including the Farmland Protection Program (FPP) and the Grassland Reserve Program (GRP). FPP will have nearly $600 million over six years. For fiscal year 2002, FPP had $50 million. The Secretary released most of that money early last month. For fiscal year 2003, FPP funding doubles to $100 million. GRP will have a quarter of a billion dollars in mandatory spending to enroll up to two million acres of grazing land. It remains to be seen how much of that money will be available each year.

In addition, the Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP) has significant increases in its acreage cap. The Secretary released $275 million in WRP funds last month. We were able to enroll more than 200,000 acres.

The Conservation Security Program (CSP) will provide payments for producers who have historically practiced good stewardship on their agricultural lands and incentives for those who want to do more. The U. S. Department of Agriculture is working hard on the rule for the CSP program. We are determined to create a program that works, so it may take some time to work out the details.


Farm Bill Implementation

That is what the farm bill contains. But, passing the farm bill was only the first step. Even before the bill became law, USDA was preparing for the massive task of implementing the bill.
That effort is well underway, but we still have much to do.

We are only five months into a six-year effort. We still need to write rules for several programs. And we need to be able to make wise use of increasing amounts of money each year. Under this farm bill, the investment in conservation started big, and it just keeps getting bigger. For example, by 2005, the amount of money in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program each year will equal the total amount spent over the six-year life of the last farm bill.

Secretary Veneman recently testified before a Senate committee on what USDA has done to implement the farm bill over the last five months. Before the Federal fiscal year ended, we released additional funding for EQIP, WRP, WHIP, and FPP. We also released $25 million for Ground and Surface Water Conservation, a new activity authorized in the farm bill as part of EQIP. The total funding released for 2002 was nearly $750 million.

But, another important part of our work is getting the rules in place for programs that have changed as a result of the new farm bill and for programs created in the farm bill. Secretary Veneman also stressed that we are on schedule as far as writing the rules needed to implement the conservation provisions of the farm bill. So far, we have issued final rules for the Wetlands Reserve Program and Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program and a proposed rule for Agricultural Management Assistance and the Farmland Protection Program. We are renaming this program the Farm and Ranch Land Protection Program to better describe its scope.

Looking ahead, this fall we will publish the proposed rule for EQIP and the interim final rule for Technical Service Provider certification. We also are making steady progress toward the proposed rule for the Conservation Security Program. Finally, USDA is finishing up the delegation of authority for the Grassland Reserve Program. We will post the latest information on the USDA Web site as we move these rules through the process.

In formulating these rules, we want to keep as much decision making as possible at the local level, so that local people have as much control of the programs as possible. Deputy Secretary Moseley refers to this approach as keeping things “lean and local.” Some programs have no changes or only prescriptive changes. We have expedited the regulatory process for these programs. Other programs – the new Conservation Security Program, for example – will go through the formal rulemaking process, including a period for public comment.


Looking Beyond Programs to Conservation Goals

We are encouraging farmers and ranchers, NRCS employees, and our partners, such as the State Departments of Agriculture, to look beyond the individual programs contained in the farm bill and focus on overall conservation goals. Farm bill programs offer voluntary solutions for complying with the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and other regulations. But, the farm bill also greatly enhances the ability of operators to protect wetlands, water quality, and wildlife habitat in ways that go beyond regulatory requirements.

Participation in farm bill programs is uniquely landowner driven: Each producer determines his or her level of participation. What the farm bill as a whole will do is help operators maintain profitability, while meeting their conservation objectives.

It is important that we keep conservation objectives at the center of our decision making and not give in to what I call the “program mentality.” I hope the States will help foster the general principles of conservation and not get too bogged down in the effort to implement individual programs.


Technical Service Providers

One feature of the conservation title of the farm bill that offers a major opportunity for State conservation agencies is the requirement that USDA implement a process for using outside services to assist in the delivery of conservation. States have been providing technical services as a part of conservation programs for many years, and this provision offers the opportunity to expand that effort tremendously. The emphasis is to make it possible for State agencies and other partners to provide additional services, not to replace existing state-funded activities with Federal dollars.

We hope to have the technical service provider process in place by the middle of the month (October) with publication of an interim final rule in the Federal Register. The rule will call for a 90-day comment period, during which we will find out what further improvement can be made in the process.

Here are some of the features you can expect in the technical service provider process: The farm bill provides for USDA to offer technical assistance both directly by government employees or through payment to producers to acquire outside assistance from qualified sources – including State agencies.

In creating the technical service provider process, we are actually creating a whole new industry of conservation service providers out there, who will be doing much of the conservation planning and implementation work for producers. The farm bill simply provides too much opportunity for NRCS to do all the work.

NRCS employees will still be around, helping landowners, working with technical service providers, and making sure the resources get where they need to be. We are continuing to use current procedures to work with our partners. In addition, the farm bill authorizes USDA to use program resources to enter into stewardship agreements with State and local agencies, tribes, and nongovernmental organizations. I want to alert you to an event next month related to technical service providers. USDA will be hosting a technical service provider input session to include participants in Washington, DC, with satellite downlinks nationwide and a Web broadcast. I hope you will all be able to attend, either in person or electronically. The session will be part of the public input process for the new rule.

Conclusion

As I mentioned earlier, the new farm bill represents the single greatest commitment of resources to conservation on private lands that this nation has ever seen. Thirteen billion dollars in six years for conservation is a huge investment.

The big job now for NRCS, and for all our partners, including the States, is to put these resources to work on the land. Now we all need to get together and do what it takes to conserve, maintain, and improve our natural resources and environment – and, at the same time, maintain and improve the profitability of our agricultural operations.

One way States can help make the farm bill work is to continue making producers aware of all the assistance that is available to them. I hope you will use all the methods at your disposal to keep producers informed of how they can benefit from the new farm bill.

The new farm bill gives us the opportunity to take conservation assistance to a whole new level.
The cornerstone of our work is local leadership. That is certainly true as far as NRCS is concerned. We think locally led conservation is the only conservation that works. That is why we will continue to work with the States and with local people to help every private landowner in America achieve his or her conservation goals.