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The Agricultural Management Assistance (AMA) helps agricultural producers manage financial risk through diversification, marketing or natural resource conservation practices.
NRCS administers the conservation provisions while Agricultural Marketing Service and Risk Management Agency implement the production diversification and marketing provisions.
Producers may construct or improve water management structures or irrigation structures; plant trees for windbreaks or to improve water quality; and mitigate risk through production diversification or resource conservation practices, including soil erosion control, integrated pest management, or transition to organic farming.
Who Is Eligible
Producers must:
Land Eligibility
Payment Rates and Terms
Practices that Can Receive Funding
Evaluation and Ranking Process
AMA is a competitive program and uses an evaluation and ranking process based on the pre-ranking criteria listed below and questions to assess the needs and cost effectiveness of implementing the conservation plan.
Applicants who meet five to six pre-rank criteria receive consideration as a high priority application. Applicants who meet three to four of the criteria receive consideration as a medium, and those that meet fewer than three are considered a low priority application.
The pre-rank criteria for AMA are:
The state objectives of the AMA program in New Jersey include environmental risk factors of the applicant land area, such as distance to bodies of water and pollution potential from nutrients leaching into groundwater.
There are two ranking areas in New Jersey. Applications from Sussex, Warren, Morris, Passaic, Bergen, Hunterdon, Somerset and Union counties are grouped into one area for ranking. The rest of the state is grouped into a second area. The funds awarded to each area are determined by the State Technical Committee on an annual basis.
NRCS program results data are housed on the RCA Data Viewer.
Contact your local service center to start your application.
Do you farm or ranch and want to make improvements to the land that you own or lease?
Natural Resources Conservation Service offers technical and financial assistance to help farmers, ranchers and forest landowners.
To get started with NRCS, we recommend you stop by your local NRCS field office. We’ll discuss your vision for your land.
NRCS provides landowners with free technical assistance, or advice, for their land. Common technical assistance includes: resource assessment, practice design and resource monitoring. Your conservation planner will help you determine if financial assistance is right for you.
We’ll walk you through the application process. To get started on applying for financial assistance, we’ll work with you:
Once complete, we’ll work with you on the application, or CPA 1200.
Applications for most programs are accepted on a continuous basis, but they’re considered for funding in different ranking periods. Be sure to ask your local NRCS district conservationist about the deadline for the ranking period to ensure you turn in your application in time.
As part of the application process, we’ll check to see if you are eligible. To do this, you’ll need to bring:
If you don’t have a farm tract number, you can get one from USDA’s Farm Service Agency. Typically, the local FSA office is located in the same building as the local NRCS office. You only need a farm tract number if you’re interested in financial assistance.
NRCS will take a look at the applications and rank them according to local resource concerns, the amount of conservation benefits the work will provide and the needs of applicants.
If you’re selected, you can choose whether to sign the contract for the work to be done.
Once you sign the contract, you’ll be provided standards and specifications for completing the practice or practices, and then you will have a specified amount of time to implement. Once the work is implemented and inspected, you’ll be paid the rate of compensation for the work if it meets NRCS standards and specifications.