As Extreme Weather Increases Flooding on Farms, Federal Support for Climate Resilience Evaporates

At the beginning of President Donald Trump’s administration, however, much of these conservation funds were frozen. They were unfrozen in February, but Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said at the time that the administration would not fund “far-left climate programs.”

In July, the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill rescinded the IRA conservation funds. It increased funding for the programs themselves through other mechanisms, but removed support for climate resilience practices. New conservation funding can therefore go toward practices that don’t necessarily help farmers adapt to climate change, like methane gas digestors, said Chuck Anderas, policy director at the Wisconsin-based Michael Fields Agriculture Institute.

Such funding shuffles have real impacts. Last year, for example, McCormick was approved for a $400,000 grant through the IRA to restore wetlands on 50 acres of low ground that are perpetually wet, but he’s yet to see the money. For the past two years, heavy rains have flooded the fields and damaged corn stands, halving his yield on that land to an uneconomical 90 to 100 bushels per acre.

With prior funding from the USDA’s Conservation Reserve and Wetlands Restoration programs, McCormick planted trees and prairie grasses along stream beds and restored wetlands on more than 1,000 acres. These programs pay producers to take farmland out of production, solidifying their cash flow while reducing flood risk and increasing wildlife habitat.

The Conservation Reserve Program, however, was not reauthorized by the budget reconciliation bill and is set to expire at the end of the fiscal year in September unless Congress acts to extend it.

That adds up to the loss of “a very good deal for the taxpayer,” McCormick said.

Resilience vs. Recovery Funding for Small Farms

As a large landowner, McCormick has ample opportunities to stay profitable while taking marginal farmland out of production. For the majority of farmers in the country, who operate on tens to hundreds of acres, it’s a lot harder. It’s also harder for farmers who rent their land or who go into farming with more debt, Anderas said.

In Vermont, for instance, where farmers have been hammered by flooding in recent years, 40 percent operate on less than 50 acres. Such farmers can implement soil health practices and plant trees and shrubs along streams to hold the banks in place, but “every acre taken out of production is really meaningful in terms of income,” said Joshua Faulkner, research associate professor and director at the University of Vermont’s Extension Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

Farming in Vermont’s fertile floodplains is becoming far riskier for the diversified farmers who operate there and are the “linchpin of local food systems,” Faulker said. But with land being so expensive, it doesn’t make sense for many to move out of the floodplains.

The state is therefore focused on creating programs that help farmers recover rather than build climate resilience, Faulkner said. “Resilience is important, but these are really difficult places to farm, and farmers need the resources to recover,” such as loan programs to restore damaged land, rebuild structures, or remove felled trees and rocks washed up by flooding. The USDA provides disaster relief grants and loans, but the programs skew towards larger farmers, leaving the state to pick up the pieces for many of its farmers.

Faulkner acknowledged, however, that “there are some places, it probably doesn’t make sense to continue to farm, because we’ve seen repeated flooding events in those locations.”

Especially for smaller-scale farmers, steep staffing cuts and the proposed reorganization at the USDA will hamper their ability to access the necessary technical assistance for conservation practices, advocates said.

USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS) staff help farmers navigate the alphabet soup of programs and figure out which are the right practices and programs for their land. Moreover, farmers need continued support over 5 to 10 years to make conservation practices stick, Jesse Womack, policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Association said.

“The resources we just got were significant and long overdue … but it hardly matters if there’s nobody at the county office to write a contract for a producer and get those funds deployed to the field,” he said, adding that some NRCS staff are being told not to promote programs to farmers because they don’t have enough hands in the office to write contracts and conservation plans.

A USDA spokesperson responding to this claim said that Rollins is “committed to ensuring farmers have the support they need to access conservation programs. That includes supporting local USDA offices and ensuring NRCS staff are equipped to meet demand.”