A Vision for the Future

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

National Environmental Policy Meeting
Sacramento, CA
June 15, 2005


I want to begin this morning talking about the future by looking at the past. An inscription on the National Archives reads “The past is prologue.” I take that to mean, you can’t—or you shouldn’t—decide where you’re going without looking at where you’ve been.

NRCS is evolving, and I want to talk about where we’re going—particularly in terms of protecting and encouraging wildlife—in light of where we’ve been.

70th Anniversary
In 2005, we’re all celebrating the 70th anniversary of NRCS—a partner in conservation since 1935. That’s seven decades of helping people help the land.

As you all know, NRCS began in the Dust Bowl days. Our first Chief, Hugh Hammond Bennett, spoke to Congress about the problem of soil erosion.

Folklore has it that he timed his speech perfectly in April 1935 to coincide with the arrival in Washington of a huge dust cloud swept from the Great Plains by a fierce windstorm. His tactic worked as Congress acted immediately, and the same month established the Soil Conservation Service. The agency’s charge was to help landowners reduce soil erosion.

The 1930’s and 1940’s were a period of great reduction in soil loss and an era of forging conservation partnerships. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, watershed programs were added. But the rate of improvement in soil loss leveled off in the 1950’s and 1960’s. And in the 1970’s, rising agricultural prices encouraged farmers to put more marginal land into production.

An Expanding Mission
By the mid-1980’s, the focus shifted again with passage of the 1985 farm bill. And our agency’s responsibilities changed.

Congress recognized that bringing marginal lands into production had resulted in the loss of many acres of wetlands and the valuable benefits they provide. It also meant farmers were bringing highly erodible land into production, contributing to the very problem SCS had been formed to address.

So when Congress passed the 1985 farm bill, they included disincentives for farmers to drain wetlands or bring new highly erodible land into production. At the same time, the 1985 farm bill required landowners to achieve conservation compliance to receive farm program benefits.
Our district conservationists began to help farmers and ranchers develop conservation plans to address highly erodible land as well as provide technical assistance.

Over the years, our mission has expanded to cover air, water, soil, plants and wildlife. In 1994, our name changed to reflect the broader scope of our mission and responsibilities. During this same decade, we added

• the Wetlands Reserve Program,
• the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program,
• the Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program and
• the Environmental Quality Incentives Program.

The 2002 farm bill expanded EQIP and added the Grassland Reserve Program and the Conservation Security Program to round out the conservation portfolio.

With CSP, we now recognize and reward ongoing stewardship. It’s designed to help the best conservationists do more and to encourage others to follow their example.

Today NRCS’s mission is providing leadership in a partnership effort to help people conserve, maintain, and improve our natural resources and environment. I don’t see that changing.

Knowledge-based Conservation
What I do see evolving is our approach to our mission. I think we’ll be moving more and more toward knowledge-based conservation. That’s where the greatest potential for growth exists.

We’ll do less building of structures and more enabling of conservation management or knowledge-based conservation. The next generation of conservation will be management-driven.

As you know, 70 percent of the land in the U.S. is privately owned. The long-term conservation of our resources—including fish and wildlife—depends upon what happens on private lands. We need to be sure that landowners have the information they need to make the best management decisions.

Wetlands
For example, wetlands are a vital feature of our landscape. They purify water, reduce flood flows and provide habitat for fish and wildlife. However, they were not always appreciated.
I’ll give you a personal example.

I could never see the need to pay much attention to the small potholes on my place. They were too small to really be of any interest. And are dry by mid-spring.

Then I learned about pair ponds. Ducks don’t nest in my potholes—but they do meet each other—provided they have the food, the space and the privacy they require. And tiny patches of wetland make a difference—to this pair or that pair of ducks.

Knowing the importance of pair ponds for ducks changed my perspective. And it’s given me the information I need to value those wetlands on the migratory path and preserve them for the waterfowl.

Cooperative Conservation
A second feature of our future is the importance of cooperative conservation. We need to join forces with other federal and state agencies as well as nongovernmental organizations that care about conservation—and there are many groups that focus on wildlife. We want to avoid duplication and working at cross purposes with each other.

President Bush is committed to integrating our conservation efforts across agencies at all levels of government. August 29-31, in St. Louis, the White House is convening a Conference on Cooperative Conservation to facilitate the exchange of information and advice related to cooperative conservation.

The conference will involve the Departments of Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency. Even more importantly, our customers will be invited. We’re looking forward to hearing about their vision for improving our cooperative efforts to achieve significant conservation goals.

Endangered Species
One way we can increase our cooperative conservation efforts is by working together closely to achieve the objectives of the Endangered Species Act. As we move forward, we conservationists must provide the tools and the knowledge that landowners need to make it easy for them to protect habitat for threatened and endangered species.

Assisting critical species can sometimes be a challenge—for the landowners and for us! But it also provides us with great opportunities.

There is enough flexibility in the Act to allow NRCS to take programmatic or broad approaches to consultation instead of the more labor-intensive, site-specific or case-by-case approach.
You heard about this approach throughout this meeting. And you heard how this can save us time when it comes to getting conservation on the ground.

The Act also gives us the opportunity to work closely with our partners in fish and wildlife conservation. One of our jobs is to make sure that the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA fisheries understand how our programs and technical assistance can contribute to the recovery of listed species.

There are also tools, such as Safe Harbor Agreements and Candidate Conservation Agreements with Assurances, which can help ease farmer and rancher concerns about additional land use restrictions if they help protect declining species. You’ll hear more about this later this afternoon.

Keeping Species off the ESA List
More importantly, we want to do our best to ensure the viability of species so there’s no need to list them under the ESA in the first place. After all, it is what happens on the ground that makes the difference—not the length of the list. A good example is efforts to support sage grouse habitat protection.

We need to be bold—in implementing our programs and authorities and working with other agencies in a spirit of cooperative conservation. Private lands are critical in the battle to save species. More than half the listed species have 80 percent of their habitat on private lands.

You heard this morning about a Memorandum of Understanding with the FWS and the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. This is a formal agreement to guide our cooperative efforts to recover species and keep them off the ESA list.

We need to share information. And we need to find ways to coordinate our efforts so we can leverage our resources and really make a difference to fish and wildlife through landscape approaches. Our cooperation with FWS and IAFWA will smooth the way for voluntary efforts by landowners to conserve ESA-listed and at risk species.

State Comprehensive Wildlife Strategies
In the MOU, one of the things we ask you to look at is how our efforts can be aligned with the State Comprehensive Wildlife Strategies. I understand these are due to FWS in October.
Tomorrow morning you will hear more about these strategies.

Every State is developing a comprehensive wildlife strategy—based on the priority species and habitats for that State. We need to coordinate our work with State agencies so we can cover a roader part of the landscape or bring additional cost share to projects with landowners.

We need to tailor our programs to address the fish and wildlife conservation needs within States.
Declining species are a priority for many of our programs. The State Wildlife Strategies will help us focus our resources.

Wildlife Action Plan
The current farm programs, along with our technical assistance, offer us both the opportunity and responsibility to assist landowners with fish and wildlife conservation on working agricultural lands.

In January, we issued our Fish, Wildlife and Wetlands Action Plan to move NRCS further in its commitment to conserving these resources. The plan was developed by some of you along with program managers and our partners to help us maximize our effectiveness in meeting fish, wildlife and wetlands objectives.

You’ll be hearing about the plan in detail tomorrow. But I want to mention a few highlights.

The team identified 178 specific needs and issues, and the plan focuses on 31 high priority needs. About two-thirds of the needs relate to agency policy and program management, while one-third concern technology development and transfer.

The bottom line is that conserving wildlife is a vital aspect of the NRCS mission, and we need to make sure all of our priorities and programs reflect this. We want to increase program emphasis on species of conservation concern or declining species.

It is good public policy to work with those species in decline to recover their populations and prevent them from being placed on the endangered list. Additionally, our recent emphasis on the sage grouse, bog turtle, bobwhite quail and the Ivory-billed woodpecker are examples of targeting program dollars to emphasize conservation of a species.

Impacting Wildlife
I want to talk a little about what we’re accomplishing. A number of our programs directly or indirectly impact wildlife.

In 2004 alone, under WHIP, we provided more than $27 million through more than 3,000 contracts on 430,000 acres. This year, we have $47 million allocated for WHIP contracts, and the President’s proposed budget for FY 2006 calls for $60 million. That’s nearly triple the $21 million available in 2003.

Just over a year ago, President Bush made an historic commitment to move beyond no net loss of wetlands to true gains of three million acres over five years. The Wetlands Reserve Program is the cornerstone for the President’s wetlands initiative.

We have placed more than 1.6 million acres into the program. Those lands that have been restored provide habitat to millions of waterfowl, shorebirds, songbirds, frogs, reptiles and other fish and wildlife. We are changing the landscape, and you are part of that.

This year, on Earth Day, the President reported that in just the past 12 months, more than 832,000 acres of wetlands have been restored, created, protected and improved. We project that more than 1.6 million additional acres will be restored, improved or protected from now through 2006. That equals 80 percent of the President’s goal.

Other NRCS programs also provide habitat for wildlife—GRP, EQIP, CSP and Conservation Technical Assistance. Even other programs that don’t have a specific wildlife component add value for wildlife. For example, our watershed programs provide lakes that increase fish habitat and add trees and grasses friendly to wildlife.

Conservation Benefits
Though we often talk about dollars and acres, we want to focus more specifically on outcomes. We’re tracking the benefits that such practices as establishing wetlands and fish passages produce.

As most of you know, one step toward tracking environmental benefits is a five-year study NRCS, the Agricultural Research Service and many other partners are conducting. The goal is to determine the specific conservation benefits of government conservation programs on agricultural lands.

The Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) involves a nationwide assessment of conservation benefits plus in-depth studies in 20 selected watersheds around the nation.
CEAP is going to give us information on the effects of many conservation practices, including wildlife habitat and riparian restoration.

Yes, the data will help us justify our budget requests—demonstrating measurable results. But more importantly, the data will show us how effective various conservation practices prove in achieving our objectives. It will improve our program management.

Preparation for Next Farm Bill
As we look ahead, it’s clear we have a lot of conservation to implement this year, and in the future. Between today and the expiration of the farm bill, we have about $9 billion to invest in conservation.

That represents a tremendous amount of work for us, for our partners, and especially for farmers and ranchers. I can’t emphasize strongly enough the importance of getting that work done.

Implementation of the 2002 farm bill programs is job one.

We need to maximize our performance. We need to complete unfinished work from 2003 and 2004: look at older contracts, and get them done.

We need to:

• maximize our effectiveness,
• sign the largest number of contracts,
• benefit as many producers as possible,
• buy as much conservation as we can, and
• bring on as much technology and advanced information as we can.

The 2007 Farm Bill
Even as we seek to complete our work under the 2002 farm bill, discussions are beginning on the 2007 bill. Secretary Johanns has said that he will begin holding listening sessions on the next farm bill shortly. And he plans to reach out to as many states as possible.

I believe the next farm bill will produce shifts in several areas—even more emphasis on:

• Working lands – economic sustainability
• Incentives
• Voluntary efforts to avoid additional regulation
• Efficient program administration
• Measurable results, and
• Meeting wetlands and forest health objectives

Providing habitat for wildlife—and measuring our success—will continue to be an important objective. Economic growth and conservation are compatible goals. Integrating our work with other agencies charged with protecting wildlife to get the greatest synergy is a challenge we will need to meet.

Vision for the Future
Environmental stewardship is a critical responsibility for farmers and ranchers and for us all as a nation. That includes preserving wildlife habitat and encouraging wildlife conservation.

At NRCS, our responsibilities for helping landowners protect wildlife and improve habitat have greatly increased—and I view that as a very good thing. We are fortunate to have a leading role in encouraging a voluntary approach to conserving species’ habitat.

As experts in this area, I am counting on you. Counting on you to work with farmers and ranchers—and our partners in State agencies and private organizations. We need to maximize the benefits our programs and assistance produce and make sure that we give priority to those species that most need protection.

Thank you.
 

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