Washington, D.C. — Today, Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, Chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry’s Subcommittee on Conservation, Climate, Forestry, and Natural Resources, released his opening statement ahead of the subcommittee’s hearing, “Conservation In The Farm Bill: Making Conservation Programs Work For Farmers and Ranchers.”
Bennet’s opening statement as prepared is available below. A livestream of the hearing starting at 8:00 a.m. MT/10:00 a.m. ET is available HERE.
Good morning. I am pleased to call this Subcommittee Meeting on Conservation, Climate, Forestry, and Natural Resources to order.
I want to thank Ranking Member Marshall for partnering with us on this hearing, along with all of our colleagues who join us today.
Our goal is to have an honest conversation about the state of USDA’s conservation programs — for better and for worse.
To help us, we have several excellent witnesses to share their firsthand experience with these programs and help us identify specific ways to make them work better for America through the upcoming Farm Bill.
First, I think it would be helpful to briefly review why USDA’s conservation programs exist in the first place.
We have to go back almost a hundred years — to the early 1930s. The economy was mired in a depression, and a combination of weak crop prices, high temperatures, and relentless drought created what we now call the Dust Bowl.
It was a terrible time for American agriculture. Out of desperation, farmers and ranchers put subpar land into production. Many abandoned responsible practices for land management.
All of it made America’s working lands vulnerable to dust storms that ravaged the heartland and stripped over a million tons of precious topsoil.
The conditions forced nearly 750,000 family farms and ranches to shutter.
In 1935, Congress recognized the danger and created the Soil Conservation Service, which has since become the Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS.
For almost 90 years, NRCS has partnered with farmers, ranchers, and private landowners to strengthen competitiveness, protect the environment, and safeguard our natural resources.
Since then, Congress has expanded USDA’s conservation mission with new programs, including:
The Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP;
The Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP;
The Conservation Stewardship Program, or CSP;
The Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, or ACEP;
And the Regional Conservation Partnership Program, or RCPP.
Although the specifics of each program vary, they all advance a larger mission: to empower America’s farmers and ranchers as stewards of our lands and environment.
Today, that mission has never been more important as we confront a changing climate and a hotter, drier future.
But even as the importance of USDA’s conservation programs has grown, they continue to operate below their potential.
They haven’t kept pace with a world that looks a lot different than the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.
And I say that not as a critic of these programs, but as someone who believes in their promise and fought to give them another $20 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act. That historic investment only raises the stakes for making sure these programs work as well as they can.
But in the 26 listening sessions I’ve held in Colorado over the last year – and frankly for the last decade – I’ve heard five consistent complaints:
First, NRCS programs are too rigid, bureaucratic, and burdened with red tape.
The applications take too long for people to fill out and too long for USDA to process. In some cases, people have to literally fill out their application by hand and send it in the mail — in the year 2023.
In my state, the Colorado Cattlemen’s Land Trust received a conservation easement from RCPP two years ago, but USDA still hasn’t sent them the paperwork to start the easement process.
They also face delays with another easement, and they just found out it’s because there is only one person at NRCS who reviews easement modifications for the entire country.
Second, while this bureaucracy is a pain point for everyone, it’s especially hard on young farmers, small-scale producers, and first-generation farmers.
They don’t have the time or experience to navigate the red tape, and they often can’t afford to hire someone to do it for them.
A young farmer from Boulder, Colorado told me she spent over 80 hours applying for EQIP, only to receive $1,700 for her 10-acre farm.
If it takes 80 hours for the possibility of receiving $1,700, I can see why someone would think twice before applying.
The future of rural America depends on whether the next generation decides to continue their family farms and ranches. And instead of making assistance more accessible, we’re making it more painful.
Third, a lot of that pain comes from a crippling shortage of staff and expertise.
Staff levels at NRCS have been going down for years, and they took a massive hit in the last administration. And while I applaud Secretary Vilsack for his heroic effort to staff up, we still have a lot of work ahead to get the right people in place.
Until we achieve that, it will continue to delay projects and discourage participation at the very moment we need them to scale up.
And one way USDA can fix this is by offering salaries that are actually competitive.
NRCS posted an engineering job in Durango, Colorado for $35,000 a year. You can’t hire an engineer in Durango for that — not when a typical home there costs $600,000.
Fourth, USDA’s conservation programs should do more to help producers in the West grappling with a 1,200 year drought — for example, by offering real incentives to conserve land in the heart of the Dust Bowl and equipping farmers and ranchers with tools to use water more efficiently.
Finally, NRCS programs need to reflect actual costs in the economy. In Colorado, people tell me they’ve given up on EQIP projects because, as they waited two years for USDA to process their application, the project’s costs doubled and the math no longer penciled out.
When you put it all together, these five issues are a massive headwind to USDA’s conservation mission.
And it has real costs to America.
It’s the rancher who wants to do the right thing by his land but lacks the expertise or funds to make the transition.
It’s the rural economies deprived of opportunity; the topsoil degraded; the water polluted; the family farmers and ranchers forced to sell their land instead of passing it on to the next generation.
They are doing everything they can to pass on that legacy to their kids and grandkids.
They deserve conservation programs at USDA as imaginative as they are; as ambitious as the problems they are meant to solve; and that reflect the indispensable role of America’s farmers and ranchers as stewards of our working lands and environment.
Today, our farmers and ranchers may not face a Dust Bowl, but they face a 1,200 year drought. They face a changing climate and a future that’s going to be a lot hotter and a lot drier.
They don’t have any time to waste. They need us to make USDA’s conservation programs work and live up to their potential.
And my hope is that today’s hearing can help us identify specific ways to make progress, and I’m prepared to work with every member of this committee in a bipartisan way to do so.
Now let me stop there and turn it over to Ranking Member Marshall.