Check your NRCS agreements

Your payment may be in jeopardy, and you might not find out until it's too late

Author’s note: Although many of you know me through my work with American Farmland Trust, the information and opinions I share on this Substack newsletter are mine and mine alone. I’m writing from the perspective of someone who works with NH farmers every day to improve soil health, increase farm viability, and improve the environment through careful management of livestock. I hope you find some parts of it helpful.

It is starting to become clear that when the White House Press Secretary — New Hampshire’s own Karoline Leavitt — said the incoming administration’s decision to freeze certain federal payments wouldn’t include payments to hardworking American individuals, she might have been confused.

It’s easy to understand how that could have happened. She’s new on the job. Things are happening fast — in the course of just a few days, the administration ordered a freeze on all federal payments, then got slapped with a court order to lift the freeze, then rescinded the memo, but Leavitt insisted the freeze wasn’t rescinded.

But when she said the freeze wouldn’t effect payments to individuals, she was either confused, misled, or lying. Which one? Hard tellin’ not knowin’. I certainly don’t want to ascribe malice to a fellow Granite Stater where the inexperience, ineptitude, or just being played could provide an adequate explanation.

Over the last week, a more focused freeze has emerged, as the administration attempts to overturn the Inflation Reduction Act without bothering to ask Congress to repeal it.

All this crazy DC drama, huh?

Well, if you’re a farmer or forest steward, the drama may soon play out in your checkbook. Over the last couple of years, NH NRCS has obligated millions of dollars of contracts for conservation projects across the state using funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA.

If you signed one of these contracts, it appears that payments are currently suspended. Farmers and forest stewards across the US are being told, one contract at a time, that, yes, they have completed the work items in the contract according to NRCS standards and specifications, but no, they will not be receiving the promised cost share payment because the funds (or payment process, same outcome) have been frozen.

How would you know if your contract is funded by the IRA?

Your NRCS paperwork indicates what program was used to fund the contract. Most conservation contracts are funded by the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), but there’s also now a separate program called EQIP-IRA, which uses funds from the IRA. If your contract mentions EQIP-IRA, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise. There’s also an IRA-funded version of the Conservation Stewardship Program, also known as CSP-IRA. I presume the same freeze would apply, but I have no information one way or the other.

Your planner probably discussed IRA funding with you during the planning process, but it’s been my experience that most clients are more focused on their natural resources, improving soil health, and how the economics of a project are going to work than which particular NRCS program is funding the project.

Plus, at the time these projects were being planned, EQIP-IRA seemed like a great program. It was awash in money, which made it less competitive than its vanilla cousin, farm bill EQIP. If you can’t find your paperwork or figure out how to read it, contact your NRCS planner and ask if your contract is IRA-funded, and if so, whether they know anything about a freeze.

Crickets from NRCS and USDA

As I write this on Sunday, Feb. 10, neither the NRCS or its parent agency, the US Department of Agriculture, has made any public statement about whether the freeze is in fact, in place, how long it’s supposed to last, or whether it’s permanent. In my job I work pretty closely with NRCS field and state office staff and I receive all emails that are circulated to NH NRCS staff. I haven’t gotten any information from NRCS to say this is true, but I also haven’t heard that it isn’t. I’m aware of one NH farmer who says his planner told him that EQIP-IRA payments are frozen, and I’ve read reports of it happening elsewhere across the US.

If you do talk to NRCS staff, be sure to ask them what they know and how they know it. There’s a good chance that they don’t know anything more than you or me. But, if you’re not getting good information from your local field office or the NH state office, I’d suggest writing to your Congress person (Maggie Goodlander in the parts of the state that I cover) and Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassen, who both represent the entire state.

A group of Congress people has sent a letter to the acting secretary of agriculture asking for information, and characterizing the freeze as “illegal” and “unconstitutional” — our Senators and Congresspeople should join the effort to find out what’s happening, and why this administration thinks it can tear up perfectly valid contracts that were entered into in good faith by hardworking stewards of our country’s natural resources.

Are AFT’s RCPP projects and other NRCS contracts safe?

Who knows? All I can say at the moment is that if you worked with me to develop a conservation plan and NRCS funded it, we didn’t use IRA funds. The NRCS money for our contracts comes from the now-expired Farm Bill of 2018. The impacts of shifting priorities, and the demonstrated willingness of the new administration to simply tear up contracts it doesn’t like, make me think that no federal agreement is truly “safe.” But there is such a thing as security through obscurity. The $15 million, 5 year budget of the project I’m working on isn’t likely to draw attention away from the $19.5 billion that’s flowing into NRCS over 10 years.

The other area that has apparently been hit by the freeze is the “Climate Smart Commodities” program. There hasn’t been much uptake of this very complicated program in NH, but I know a couple of my clients have been exploring it. If you have a contract, likely developed with the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA), I’d contact them before starting any work. And if you have an EQIP IRA contract, I’d try to pump the brakes on any spending that you can, unless you can afford to absorb it, or at least carry it for the foreseeable future.

While some other programs with IRA funding also seem to be impacted, they are not ones with active contracts with individual farmers.

The final takeaway is that we don’t actually know whether payments of individual EQIP IRA conservation contracts are intentionally frozen, and if they are, we don’t know if it’s temporary or permanent. We also don’t know what legal authority — if any — USDA is claiming to implement the freeze. It’s likely that NRCS employees don’t have answers either. Like us, they’re being intentionally kept in the dark.

If you have more up to date information, please let me know.