Over the last two years, the EEN community has rallied behind our nation’s farmers and ranchers, advocating for increased support to chronically oversubscribed and underfunded voluntary conservation agriculture programs administered by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). EEN’s efforts, which included the collection of over 100,000 signatures from pro-life Christians in support of our farmers, nearly 1,500 letters to Congress, and farmer fly-ins to Washington DC, resulted in a historic success with the inclusion of a permanent funding increase to conservation agriculture programs in the final budget reconciliation bill passed by Congress and signed into law in July, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA).
Iowa farmer Ray Gaesser, who participated in EEN’s Washington DC farmer fly-ins, says, “Conservation agriculture is a long-term investment. The permanent baseline for OBBB conservation programs provides farmers with the funding certainty to make long-term decisions to protect agricultural soils for next generations.”
The NRCS is a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) agency that provides voluntary technical and financial assistance to farmers, ranchers, and private landowners to conserve and improve natural resources like soil, water, air, plants, and wildlife on private lands. For decades, farmer demand for NRCS’s highly popular conservation programs, including the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP), and Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), far outpaced available funding levels, meaning that thousands of eligible farmers were denied support due to lack of funds. The OBBB permanent conservation funding increases not only reverse decades of underinvestment but also avert a “conservation funding cliff” in 2026, when short-term funding increases to the conservation programs passed in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act were set to expire. With the OBBB, conservation programs will receive the following long overdue funding boosts (calculated as ten-year totals):
- CSP – $13.6 billion, a 36% increase
- EQIP – $31.55 billion, a 55% increase
- ACEP – $6.85 billion, a 26% increase
- RCPP – $4.475 billion, a 49% increase
The permanent baseline funding commitment offers farmers of faith the certainty and resources needed to fulfill the mandate of Genesis 2:15 to tend and keep the garden. The robust OBBB conservation agriculture budget will encourage and empower farmers to be faithful stewards of God’s creation for years to come. We thank House and Senate Agriculture Committee Chairs Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA-15) and Sen. John Boozman (R-AR) for their leadership ensuring our farmers have the support they need for years to come to steward the land, water, and soil well.
