In March 2019, as a storm unleashed heavy snow, rain, wind and devastating flooding across Nebraska, Judith Puncochar watched as eight acres of her family’s farm were sucked into the Middle Loup River.
“When the rain came down so hard, this land just washed right into the river,” Puncochar said as she stood at the river’s edge. “It completely washed out any topsoil, and it took out four jetties.”
Puncochar’s great-grandfather purchased 213 acres of land near the quaint town of Saint Paul in 1904, and the farm has stayed in the family ever since. Some of that land has since been taken over by railroads and highways; others reclaimed by the river.
Now, Puncochar is in the process of returning the farm’s remaining acres to the wild.
In the aftermath of the flooding, she began to wonder what she could have done to protect the land from erosion. It was then that employees at her local Farm Service Agency office told her about the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP, a voluntary federal land retirement program that provides landowners with an annual rental payment in exchange for the introduction of conservation practices.
Of the 153 total farmland acres on the Puncochar Family River Farm, 117 are currently enrolled in the CRP. It isn’t a lucrative arrangement – the annual rental payment doesn’t even cover the farm’s property taxes, Puncochar said.
Still, the rental payments are helpful, and the cost-sharing program paid for about half of the nearly $35,000 cost of seeding a 60-acre field in February.
Yet the future of the CRP hangs in the balance as President Donald Trump’s administration promises to drastically shrink the size of the federal workforce and deprioritize conservation efforts. Project 2025, the oft-cited blueprint for a second Trump administration, explicitly called for the program to be eliminated.
The CRP has historically enjoyed strong bipartisan support. But Zachary Ducheneaux, the administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency under former President Joe Biden, said he isn’t persuaded that past support will have any impact on the program’s future.
“I think that the actions of the last few months have clearly illustrated that there is nothing that is not on the table,” Ducheneaux said.
How CRP works
Ducheneaux said the CRP is “arguably the largest locally led, voluntary, incentive-based conservation program on the planet.” Unlike most other federal conservation programs, which are administered by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, the CRP is administered by the Farm Service Agency.
Landowners enter contracts, typically lasting 10 to 15 years, and are paid an annual rental payment in exchange for taking former cropland out of production and introducing cover crops, native grasses, windbreaks and other environmentally beneficial practices. Participants also receive cost-share assistance to cover some costs of implementing conservation practices, which have been shown to combat soil erosion, improve water quality and attract wildlife.
Jesse Womack, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition who grew up pheasant hunting on CRP lands in Minnesota, said the program has become a “mainstay of the landscape” in many states.
“It just does so much for quality of life in rural communities,” Womack said. “It offers farmers an alternative means of cash flow if they have acreage that, you know, needs rest, or isn’t the most productive. It has benefits for water quality, direct benefits for sportsmen.”
For Puncochar, who returned to the family farm full time in 2020, the CRP was an opportunity to honor her father, who prioritized making the land suitable for wildlife when it was a working farm. It was also an opportunity to prevent catastrophic damage when the next flood comes by planting native trees and bushes along the riverbank.
“If the river were to take out more land … it would head right for the highway, and then there’d be a lot of expense for the federal government,” Puncochar said. “So the little tiny bit of money that’s put into the CRP program relative to the amount of money that is going to require to rebuild the roads and infrastructure and bridges is, I think, an investment.”
Like all federal conservation programs, funding for CRP comes from the farm bill. But unlike conservation programs run by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the CRP did not receive a funding authority extension through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Many working lands programs, like the Conservation Stewardship Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, had mandatory funding authority extended through 2031 through the IRA.
Not receiving that extension spared CRP from the impacts of IRA-related federal funding freezes earlier this year. But it also means that funding authority will run out again in September without a new farm bill or another extension.
A USDA spokesperson said the agency will continue to service and make payments on existing contracts if CRP is not included in the next farm bill or if an extension does not pass.
Proposed elimination of CRP
Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second term in office penned by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, explicitly called for the elimination of the CRP.
“Farmers should not be paid in such a sweeping way not to farm their land,” the Project 2025 document said. “If there is a desire to ensure that extremely sensitive land is not farmed, this should be addressed through targeted efforts that are clearly connected to addressing a specific and concrete environmental harm.”
“The Conservation Reserve Program should be eliminated.”
Though Trump sought during the campaign to distance himself from Project 2025, his actions in the first 100 days of his presidency have drawn heavily from the project’s guidelines, and many of the project’s authors have high-ranking roles in his administration.
The Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives, also called for halting all new CRP enrollments. In a budget proposal released last year, the committee said eliminating new enrollments is in line with Trump’s stated goal of reforming and streamlining conservation programs.
The CRP was one of the more than 2,600 programs targeted by the administration’s Jan. 28 Office of Budget and Management memo ordering agencies to temporarily pause the disbursement of federal funds as programs are evaluated for compliance with the administration’s priorities. Enforcement of that order has been paused by a federal judge.
Despite the proposals, Womack said he’d be shocked if the CRP was scrapped entirely.
“I think it’d be a pretty unpopular thing across a lot of different constituencies if they tried to entirely eliminate CRP,” he said. “I would find it shocking if there was not some bipartisan collaboration to protect CRP if a material threat emerged.”
Ducheneaux isn’t so sure, especially after watching his former Farm Service Agency colleagues be fired or accept early retirement to escape what he calls the “psychological warfare” of working in today’s federal government. Even if the CRP is not dismantled, he said, the staffing challenges will make it difficult for the agency to effectively administer the 50-plus programs on its roster.
“The basic administrative functions of delivering farm programs to producers were already stretched to the breaking point,” he said. “There is no way the [USDA] is going to be able to tighten its belt or streamline or find efficiencies just because someone says so. At some point it becomes a function of the resources you have available to deploy to the g–damn job.”
On May 2, the Trump administration released its discretionary funding proposal for the coming fiscal year, to include $358 million in funding cuts for the Farm Service Agency. The reduction was proposed “in order to reflect the Agency’s plans for efficiencies,” according to the proposal.
An annual signup period has not been announced for CRP for the 2025 fiscal year. Asked if there would be an annual signup this year, a USDA spokesperson said the agency is “evaluating conservation goals and priorities” and will announce additional details as they are available.
No new CRP enrollments have been accepted since the expiration of a prior farm bill extension on Sept. 30, 2024. While last year's farm bill extension reauthorized CRP funding through this September, a notice issued by the Farm Service Agency on Jan. 15 specified that offices could not accept or approve new CRP offers under any signup type.
That notice expired on May 1. As of May 2, no new guidance has been issued.
“The American Relief Act of 2025 extended authority for CRP through FY2025 and the 2025 crop year,” the USDA spokesperson said in an email. “FSA hasn’t opened CRP signups yet, including the continuous CRP signup, as FY 2025 CRP options are actively being reviewed by USDA leadership.”
Grasslands program drives enrollment
In the midst of uncertainty about CRP’s future, the program has seen high enrollment in recent years. Nationwide, as of November, there were 26 million acres enrolled in the CRP. The current acreage cap under the 2018 Farm Bill is 27 million acres.
That’s far from the peak enrollment of nearly 37 million acres in 2007, but it’s also a significant increase from recent years. In 2020, CRP saw its lowest enrollment since the program’s inception with just over 20 million acres.
The increases, particularly in and around the Midwest, are due in large part to the grassland CRP, a working land program that allows farmers and ranchers to continue grazing and haying while conserving existing grasslands. The program was introduced under the 2014 Farm Bill and, as of last November, comprised about 38% of total acres enrolled in the CRP.
“The value proposition of grassland CRP is you’re meeting two distinct deliverables that are typically at odds with each other: One is ag land in production, and one is land in conservation,” Ducheneaux said. “We really use that as an opportunity to illustrate that those two aspects can be correlated, linked together and mutually beneficial.”
In Nebraska, CRP enrollment has more than quadrupled since 2016. As of November, Nebraska is home to the third-most enrolled acres in the country at more than 2.4 million. Only Colorado and South Dakota have more land enrolled in the program.
Other states across the Midwest and Great Plains have seen the same boom in enrolled acres: South Dakota went from fewer than 250,000 enrolled acres in 2020 to more than 2.6 million in 2024. Iowa’s enrollment nearly quadrupled over the same time period. Kansas and Missouri saw more modest increases, at 31% and 21%, respectively.
Texas and Oklahoma, which both saw a drop in CRP enrollment over the past decade, are not experiencing the same enrollment renaissance, though numbers are slowly rising in both states.
More than 75% of Nebraska land enrolled in the CRP is under the grassland program; Nebraska has both the most farms enrolled and the highest number of grassland contracts of any state.
Puncochar, too, has a 12-acre plot across the highway enrolled in the grasslands program.
With all the talk of potential cuts, she’s started to worry about what she will do if she can’t re-enroll her land in the CRP at the end of her 15-year contract. There are a few alternate sources of funding – she was recently awarded a $15,000 grant to plant elderberry and chokeberry bushes from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine – but opportunities like that are few and far between.
“I would probably have to go back to raising hay, and I don’t want to,” she said. “I’d rather have it be wild for the wildlife.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
