A Bright Future for Conservation on America’s Working Lands

Good afternoon. Thank you, Tom (Christensen). I am happy to be here with you today for this national training session for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP).

Thank you and congratulations for a successful year of implementing EQIP. You have managed this important program through a dramatic period of change. And you have managed it through a major shift in emphasis to better meet the needs of livestock producers.

This training session is particularly exciting because EQIP is on the rise. From its modest beginnings under the 1996 farm bill, it has grown to be our flagship conservation program. And there is every reason to hope its growth will continue over the long term.

Some of you have attended a number of EQIP training sessions over the years. There are periodic changes, and it is important that everyone have the latest information. The last couple of years, these changes have gotten much more complex.


Increased Funding

Two years ago, you had to implement some major changes to EQIP as part of the 2002 farm bill. One of the biggest changes was the dramatic increase in the program budget for EQIP under the farm bill. And the funding for EQIP has continued to grow each year.

National Priorities

Another change was the shift from Conservation Priority Areas to national and State program priorities. One important aspect of that change was to make the process of developing priorities more open to producers and to allow them to tailor their applications to match the priorities -- preventing them and us from wasting time on applications with little chance of acceptance.

And we continue to work on the process of developing our priorities. The USDA Strategic Plan for FY 2002 – FY 2007 calls for working collaboratively with our partners to sustain past environmental gains, while increasing efforts to address new and emerging environmental concerns. We are also directed to undertake periodic reviews of national priorities and the effects of program delivery at the State and local level. We will use input from the public and affected stakeholders to ensure that EQIP continues to address national resource needs.

The recent Customer Satisfaction Index Report on EQIP identified the need for NRCS to evaluate the application and ranking process and develop appropriate program policies and tools that will improve the consistency, efficiency, and customer understanding of the application and ranking processes. We have also received many comments from outside organizations relative to changes needed in the program application and ranking processes.

Our National Ranking Evaluation Team has come up with a number of recommendations concerning the EQIP ranking process. The team developed a national prototype template based on a number of States that have been using automated ranking processes.

State allocation of EQIP funds is guided by national priorities. EQIP national priorities should be used by States as guidance when setting their ranking systems and scoring their applications. National policy and guidance is being developed to provide States with the information they need to develop their ranking processes and comply with national priorities and program rules.

We continue to support locally-led conservation by using State Technical Committees at the State level and local work groups at the county level to advise NRCS on technical issues relating to the implementation of EQIP. I want to thank the States who are sharing their web-based ranking strategies with us this week.


Emphasis on Livestock

The farm bill also increased the emphasis within EQIP on the environmental and regulatory challenges faced by livestock operations. The growing funding for EQIP, coupled with the requirement that 60 percent of this funding go to livestock operations and the increase in the maximum contract size, allowed us to help more livestock producers do more for conservation.

Congress told us that EQIP is a valuable tool to help producers avoid the need for future regulation, and directed the Secretary to manage the program to maximize this purpose. To respond to the regulatory challenges, there are two EQIP objectives: 1. to help producers comply with local, State, and Federal regulatory requirements, and 2. to help producers address natural resource concerns in a manner that makes regulatory actions unnecessary.


Single-Agency Program Administration

A fourth aspect of change was the elimination of dual concurrence on EQIP and CRP contracts. Secretary Veneman was a strong advocate of this change, because it helped streamline both programs by eliminating duplication of effort. This year, as you are learning, we have taken this change a step forward by placing all aspects of EQIP within NRCS.


The idea behind having FSA and NRCS work together in administering programs came from a desire to avoid duplication between the two agencies and allow each agency to do what it knew how to do best. That wasn’t a bad idea, and it did prevent certain kinds of duplication. But dual concurrence involved two agencies, and coordinating the activities of the two agencies often resulted in delays for the customer.

Secretary Veneman felt things should be more streamlined, and she asked Administrator Little and me to work together to simplify and streamline the administration of these programs. I am proud of the way FSA and NRCS employees worked together to simplify EQIP processes. Working together all across the nation, we came to have a better appreciation for each other and we made great progress in coordinating our activities.

The time has come to take things a step farther -- to move EQIP entirely into NRCS. This transition is not a matter of winning or losing for NRCS or FSA. It is a great accomplishment for USDA and America’s farmers and ranchers.

Our technology makes this transition possible – and desirable – for us to assume this responsibility. Specifically, our Protracts system is the tool we need to administer contracts. I am proud of the work of the West Texas Pilot to make Protracts what it is today.

Among other things Protracts has the capacity to dovetail with our reporting system, giving us one single system that takes us from contract to completion to reporting. The linkage of Protracts to databases such as PRS and TCAS, for example, will provide a data to support managing and decision making. We will also be able to provide our customers with quicker and more efficient payments resulting in greater customer satisfaction.

When the electronic signature capability becomes available in Protracts, our customers will be able sign contracts when it is convenient for them, at their homes, businesses, or any other place -- wherever a computer is handy.

Accountability and benefits are key issues for government funded programs today. Managing EQIP by ourselves will allow us as an agency to better respond to questions and inquiries from the Department, OMB, Congress, and the customers EQIP is intended to serve. We will be in a position to better demonstrate how EQIP achieves the greatest benefit for the least cost. And our partners will receive the same or similar benefits as our clients, the administration, and Congress.

I know that taking over total administration of EQIP is a major step, and I appreciate the time and effort you are all making to learn what needs to be learned to make this happen.

Single-agency administration is good for our customers, and it is good for our agency. It will reduce both the hassles and the cost of administering this important program. I especially want to thank the three States that are sharing their migration strategies with us this week – North Dakota, Mississippi, and Indiana.

Improvements under the Farm Bill

We can’t afford to look at EQIP in isolation of the NRCS mission. Dramatic improvement has continued in the years since President Bush signed the 2002 farm bill.

2003 was a year both of continued expansion of the EQIP program and a year of rulemaking. We published both the proposed rule and the final rule for EQIP in 2003. In addition, we started to put in place some important new mechanisms for getting the most conservation out of our efforts with livestock producers.

During the year, working with our partners, we developed State Animal Conservation Frameworks, and by the end of the year, we released the National Animal Conservation Framework. The Framework presents a vision for voluntary, proactive efforts to foster environmentally sound and economically viable livestock and poultry production. It helps us focus our conservation dollars.

2004 was another year of expansion for EQIP, and a year for implementing the Animal Conservation Framework. We also developed the Livestock Emphasis Action Plan. And we have completed our reorganization of National Headquarters, which resulted in the new leadership team for EQIP -- many of the people who are involved in this week’s training session.

LEAP identifies 24 action items. We have completed some of these actions:

• We allow the use of EQIP funds for portable equipment in selected situations,
• We have issued a clarification on cooperative contracts,
• We collected ideas for innovative approaches from State offices, and
• We put together a national team that evaluated the ranking process and is now making recommendations on that process.


Conservation Innovation Grants

Last Month, Secretary Veneman made an exciting announcement under the new Conservation Innovation Grants provision of EQIP. She announced more than $14 million in grants to 41 projects in 29 States. These grants will fund development and adoption of innovative conservation technologies and approaches through pilot projects and field trials. When you add in the contributions of nonfederal partners, the total investment in these projects is more than $63 million. These grants will result in approaches that will help farmers and ranchers protect the environment and comply with federal, state and local regulations.
CIG has turned out to be a popular provision. Nearly 150 organizations submitted proposals. The proposals we accepted address issues such as agricultural air emissions, water quality improvement, water management, livestock nutrient management, and market-based approaches to conservation.

New Leadership
So here we are, at the beginning of the 2005 fiscal year, getting ready to implement EQIP in new and better ways. You have your new national leadership team in place:

• Tom Christensen as Director of the Financial Assistance Programs Division
• Harry Slawter as Branch Chief
• Ed Brzostek and David Webster (reporting in a couple weeks from Utah) as EQIP specialists.

On the financial side, we have Joe Oleska as the new Chief Financial Officer, ably assisted by Debbi Curtis, who you have worked with over the years as Supervisory Budget Analyst, and now Vicki Sult as Acting Accounting Officer.

And of course, administering EQIP is a very technology intensive process -- supported by a group of long-term and highly effective people, from Jack Carlson as Director of the Information Technology Center, to Terry Schmid as Lead Application Analyst and Wendall Oaks as Project Manager.


Learning from CSP

As we have been telling producers, partners, and employees over the past few years, the 2002 farm bill places a new emphasis on programs that promote conservation on working lands, rather on programs that take land out of production. This new emphasis is what has turned EQIP into a billion-dollar program.

As you know, the emphasis on working lands also created the nation’s second billion-dollar conservation program in the form of the Conservation Security Program. In 2005, we will have somewhere around $200 million for new CSP contracts. That number includes the first year of long-term contracts, so $200 million in new contracts will mean well over a billion dollars in total financial support over the life of those contracts.

These major investments make EQIP and CSP by far the nation’s two largest conservation programs on working lands. I believe that those of you who are running these two programs have the opportunity to a lot from each other over the coming years.

Management Intensity

One concept we can adopt from CSP is Management Intensity. We must incorporate intensive management measures if we want to provide the most effective and efficient program possible and one that maximizes benefits and environmental performance for our customers. These measures can improve resources and provide for more efficient resource utilization and energy conservation.

In CSP, we are operating under the principle of rewarding the best and motivating the rest. We are rewarding those people who go beyond the conservation practice standard to achieve higher levels of management. New and emerging technologies are being used to achieve this high level of performance. We should encourage management intensity and incorporate measures in all our programs to achieve this. Ultimately, our goal is to have all USDA program participants rewarded for their intensive efforts of achieving great environmental performance and benefits for society.

Self Assessment Process

Another concept we can borrow from CSP is the self-assessment process, which allows producers to work on their applications on-line from their homes or offices 24 hours a day seven days a week, whenever and wherever it is convenient for them.

Self-assessment also dramatically cuts down on the time it takes NRCS to process applications for CSP. It reduces the Federal dollars required to administer the program and makes more dollars available for the producers. That is good government.

The farm bill put a 15 percent cap on our overhead for CSP. We could never meet that cap without this self-assessment process.

The self-assessment process is here to stay. It can serve as an example for other programs, including EQIP. By the time of the next farm bill, we should be well along the road toward learning how to apply the self-assessment process and other money-saving measures in appropriate ways in our other programs. I know this issue is not on your agenda for this week’s training session, but it is something to be thinking about as the year progresses.


Conclusion

As I said at the beginning of my remarks, EQIP is on the rise. The future of conservation lies in activities that conserve, maintain and improve our working farm and ranch lands. And that is what EQIP is all about.

The issues you are working on this week will contribute to the continued success of EQIP. The tremendous demand for conservation, both in the agricultural community and within society as a whole, will do the rest. The challenge is to improve our program administration skills rapidly enough to keep up with the anticipated growth of EQIP and other conservation programs.

In addition to the challenges of managing EQIP in the coming years, we also need to be looking ahead at what we need to do to be ready for the 2007 farm bill.

NRCS is near the end of the rule writing process for farm bill programs. We only have a handful of rules remaining to be completed. Thanks to the hard work of many NRCS employees, we got through the rulemaking process in record time.

We are in full implementation of the programs contained in the farm bill. Our successes during 2004 and 2005 are going to be very important when Congress begins to draft the next farm bill.

The 2002 farm bill was a tremendous vote of confidence in our ability to get conservation done on the ground. But Congress and others are already starting to look at how we are living up to that vote of confidence, and we need to produce demonstrable results. I believe we can rise to that challenge.

The data from 2004 and 2005 for each of our programs will be the best indicator of what has worked versus what hasn’t worked in the 2002 farm bill. We need to look closely at how well we are doing in each program -- what we are saying “yes” to and what we are saying “no” to -- and compare our estimate against how others are seeing things.

We need to make sure our decisions are transparent, logical, and self evident to others, and not just to ourselves. For example, we need to do everything we can to demonstrate the logic behind the watershed approach we are using in CSP, so that even producers who are having to wait for their watershed to be selected see the logic in the approach and are willing to wait their turn.

Our decisions have to be seen as fair -- both to small operators and to large operators; to specialty producers, such as the organic industry, as well as to production agriculture; to livestock producers, as well as to producers of row crops or those who operate orchards. We cannot please everyone, but we need to do everything we can to be sure everyone understands why we do what we do.

We need to know our own strengths and weaknesses before others do. Or we will not be seen as the people who know the most about how to go about the business of conservation.

If we were to sit down with the Agricultural Research Service, the Economic Research Service, and the Cooperative States Research, Education, and Extension Service right now, what questions would we ask to give us the data we need to demonstrate our accomplishments?

You work to improve EQIP and to demonstrate our progress will contribute to making this truly the next Golden Age of Conservation. You are all playing an important role in making this golden age a way of life.

Thank you.