Threats to Conservation Easement Funding Put Farmland and Wetlands at Risk

America’s wetlands, grasslands, and farmland are under increasing threat of conversion to other land uses – wetlands and grasslands are routinely targeted for conversion to crop production, while existing farmland is often threatened by conversion to commercial or residential uses. It is critical that we protect these lands and their existing uses because each serves an important function in our society and ecosystem. Without farmland, we lose our nation’s food security as well as the livelihoods of food producing and rural families. If we convert our wetlands and grasslands, we lose highly productive ecosystems that support an abundance of plants and animals, and provide a wide range of ecological benefits such as water filtration, flood mitigation, and carbon sequestration.

 

The US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agriculture Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) helps landowners, land trusts, and other entities protect these lands with long-term and permanent easements. ACEP, which was established under the 2014 Farm Bill and is administered by USDA’s National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), has two easement components – one for wetlands and one for agricultural land. The agricultural land easement component also includes a funding pool for Grasslands of Special Environmental Significance.

 

NRCS recently released state-by-state data for ACEP for fiscal year (FY) 2016, which the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) has analyzed below to determine how the program is being utilized.

 

 

In FY 2016, USDA awarded over $285 million in financial and technical assistance through ACEP for 486 wetland, grassland, and farmland conservation easements, spanning 170,567 acres nationwide. These numbers might seem large, but they are actually alarmingly low given the demand for the program and the important ecological benefits that these easements convey. As a point of contrast, one of ACEP’s predecessor programs, the Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP), provided an average of $525 million annually between 2009 and 2013 before it was rolled into ACEP in 2014.

 

Of the total financial assistance (FA) that ACEP provided in FY 2016, 41 percent ($95.4 million) was obligated to agricultural land easements, and 59 percent ($136.9 million) was obligated to wetland easements. This division of funds in FY 2016 is a significant departure from previous years, and most likely is due to wetland easement contracts not being finalized before the end of the FY 2016 application cycle. Those contracts are not reflected in the FY 2016 numbers, and instead will be carried over into FY 2017.

 

By comparison, in FY 2015, 31 percent of ACEP funding was obligated to agricultural land easements and 69 percent was obligated to wetland easements. In FY 2014, 66.5 percent of ACEP funding went to wetland easements and 33.5 percent went to agricultural land easements. Prior to 2014, ACEP existed as three separate programs – WRP, the Grassland Reserve Program (GRP), and the Farm and Ranchland Protection Program (FRPP). Between 2009 and 2013, WRP received an average of 71 percent of easement funding annually while GRP and FRPP combined received 29 percent.

 

Wetland easements made up 57 percent of ACEP projects and 23 percent of ACEP acres in FY 2016, while agricultural land easements made up 43 percent of projects and 77 percent of acres. In FY 2015, the breakdown in the number of projects was similar: 60 percent were wetland easement projects and 40 percent were agricultural land easement projects.

 

 

Between FY 2015 and FY 2016 the distribution of ACEP awards across states shifted slightly. In 2016, Colorado and Missouri joined the list of top ten states in terms of total ACEP funding awarded, replacing Texas and Ohio, which were on the top ten list in FY 2015. Florida, which was number one in the country in terms of dollars in FY 2015, dropped to number eight in FY 2016, while Montana, which was number 10 in FY 2015, jumped to number three.