Iowa landowners are used to hearing “no” when they apply for federal conservation funding.

Fewer than one-quarter of Iowa applications for cost sharing through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) were funded in fiscal 2022.

Iowans received more than $48 million in fiscal 2022 between the two programs and ranked in the top 10 states for EQIP funding and top 20 for CSP. But Iowa’s share of applications funded was below the median for U.S. states and territories, according to a Gazette analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture data provided as part of a Freedom of Information request.

The Biden administration has called such USDA conservation programs a linchpin in the nation’s climate strategy, yet they remain vastly underfunded. Nationwide, just three out of 10 applications for EQIP and CSP were approved between fiscal 2018 and 2022. The majority of landowners are told to try again without advice for improving their odds.

“These are farmers and landowners who want to do conservation on their farm. They want to do something we all seem to support — which is conserving natural resources,” said Jonathan Coppess, an associate professor and director of the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at the University of Illinois.

Hundreds of thousands of farmers are applying out of the desire to improve the environment. “And then you don’t get funding for no other reason than that funding is not sufficient in the program. The level of frustration and anger is pretty real,” he said.

Although the Inflation Reduction Act provided $18 billion more for in-demand conservation programs, mostly for EQIP and CSP, some members of Congress want to claw back that money to pay for the 2023 Farm Bill, which remains under negotiation.

High demand, not enough money

The flagship program of the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, EQIP reimburses agricultural and forestry producers 50 to 90 percent of the cost for fixing specific conservation problems and delivering environmental benefits, such as improving water or air quality, enriching soil or protecting against drought.

Between fiscal 2018 and 2022, the NRCS allocated $6.2 billion for EQIP, but that covered only 31 percent of the nearly 600,000 applications submitted during that five-year period, according to Investigate Midwest’s analysis of application and funding data the USDA provided The Gazette.

CSP, created in the 2008 Farm Bill, provides annual payments to producers willing to improve conservation over a five-year period. The NRCS awarded $2.1 billion from fiscal 2018 through 2022, which covered just 28 percent of applications nationwide.

“EQIP and CSP are working lands programs so they are doing conservation on land that is continuing to produce crops,” Coppess said.

‘History repeating itself’ in Mississippi

When the USDA denied Albert Johnson Sr.’s application for a farm loan in the mid-1980s, he went to a lender who made him list as collateral all 20 of his cattle and his one bull.

“I stood a chance of losing my livestock,” Johnson wrote in a 1999 affidavit to receive part of a $2.3 billion federal settlement between Black farmers and the USDA. But Johnson, 81, who lives near Lexington, Miss., was among thousands deemed to not qualify for settlement money, his family said.

Against all odds, their family farm has persisted, part of the just 1 percent of remaining Black-owned farms in the United States. In an age of mechanized and industrialized agriculture, they face many challenges in operating a sustainable cattle farm — and there’s federal assistance to help with that.

But last month, Johnson’s children learned their application for federal conservation funding was turned down. They had sought up to $30,000 to dig a well and add cross fencing that would have allowed them to do rotational cattle grazing — which protects the soil from erosion.

“It was like ‘here again, another generation’,” said Charlene Gatson, 50, Johnson’s daughter. ”It was like history repeating itself.”

The Mississippi NRCS suggested in an Oct. 6 denial letter that the Johnsons “defer” their EQIP application, which puts it back in the pile for the next funding cycle.

But Gatson wanted to know why their project didn’t rank higher so she can improve the application for next time. “Could you tell us why some were funded and some were not?” she told a reporter. “I would like to see the persons that were funded and why they were funded.”

Programs face criticism

Modern agriculture takes a toll on soil and water. Programs like EQIP and CSP are intended to mitigate the damage. A 2020 NRCS report showed EQIP conservation from 2014-2018 increased soil and carbon retained in farm fields as well as provided wildlife habitat. “Practices funded through EQIP to address forest health and watershed protection on non-industrial private forest land also sequester carbon,” the report found.

Some environmental groups have criticized EQIP for earmarking 50 percent of all funding for livestock practices. They fear it will encourage large-scale animal production, which can produce large amounts of waste that threaten water sources. But managing manure is important to maintaining or improving water quality, Coppess said.

The NRCS allocates money to each state for EQIP and CSP contracts. States then distribute the cash to counties or manage the funds at the state level.

To decide how to spend the limited pot of money for conservation programming, local NRCS officials rank applications on a handful of factors, including how much the practice or activity costs, the magnitude of environmental benefits that could be achieved and how well the practice or activity proposed fits with “national priority resource concerns,” the NRCS reported.

“The ranking process was developed to try to be fair to everyone,” Scott Cagle, assistant state conservationist for partnerships with the Iowa NRCS, said during the The Gazette’s 2023 Iowa Ideas conference. But there are winners and losers and some producers drop out if they don’t get funded right away, Cagle said.

“We run into instances where producers signed up, the process takes too long sometimes and they give up,” he said.

Cash infusion in jeopardy

Conservation advocates hope a federal cash infusion will reduce the backlog of unfunded projects.

The Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Joe Biden in August 2022, provides $8.45 billion more for EQIP and $3.25 billion more for CSP starting this year and building through fiscal 2026. This could potentially fund hundreds of thousands more applications. There’s another $300 million to quantify greenhouse gas sequestration.

“We know nationwide that (Inflation Reduction Act) funds will increase” in 2024, said Jamie Alderks, assistant state conservationist for financial assistance programs with the Illinois NRCS. “IRA funds will assist in meeting some of the unmet demand.”

But Republicans in the U.S. House want to repurpose that conservation money to help pay for the Farm Bill, which expired in October without being renewed. House Agriculture Chair Glenn Thompson suggested cutting $50 billion, mostly to climate change and public nutrition programs, to pay for other agriculture programs, such as crop insurance, The Hill reported.

In an Oct. 23 letter published by Politico, 24 Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee pushed back against the idea: “Moving the IRA funds from conservation would be denying farmers the support they need and want.”

Brittney J. Miller of The Gazette contributed to this article, which is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The Gazette is part of the network.