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On a hot summer day, John Williams is walking through the vegetable farm he manages in central Illinois.
“All these white tubes coming up are tree tubes,” he said, “so they’re little protections for newly planted trees.”
Hazelnut, apple and pear trees run in between the fields and around the perimeter of the property at Sola Gratia Farm in Urbana, Illinois. The farm got funding to plant them through the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The trees will help protect the farm’s soil from strong winds and heavy rains, Williams said.
“That’ll help keep more of the soil on our land and less from running downhill,” he said.
NRCS staff in county offices across the nation help farmers like Williams implement practices that prevent soil erosion and improve soil health. On top of providing technical assistance, the agency also allocates grant funding that incentivizes farmers to try conservation practices.
The NRCS was founded almost a century ago in response to the Dust Bowl. But it lost nearly a quarter of its staff nationally in 2025 after President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce, leaving many farmers with less access to environmental conservation practices.
“They’ve always been a busy group of people,” Williams said of NRCS employees. “They have who knows how many hundreds or thousands of farmers that they’re working with, and they’re doing a lot with a little.”
In June, the USDA announced the NRCS will undergo "organizational improvements" along with other agencies under the department, although officials haven't indicated what the changes will be. The reorganization will sharpen the agency’s focus on conservation implementation, improve accountability and increase support for field operations, according to a press release announcing the change.
“By aligning leadership and resources closer to the communities they serve, USDA is strengthening service delivery, reducing unnecessary bureaucracy, and ensuring responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars – all while maintaining its unwavering focus on America’s farmers, ranchers and producers,” the press release states.
But conservation advocates argue the agency is already using taxpayer dollars in a sensible, efficient way.
“The NRCS is a really great example of government in action being really effective,” said Chuck Anderas, policy director of the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, a Wisconsin-based conservation nonprofit.
USDA officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Lost expertise, missed opportunities
Adam Griebie grows corn and soy on his farm in Hutchinson, Minnesota, about 60 miles west of Minneapolis. He was recently working on a project to prevent soil erosion, but then the NRCS staffer he was working with at his local office in McLeod County left the agency.
He was pushed to offices in two other counties to find help, he said, one of which isn’t even adjacent to McLeod County. That sometimes left him driving an hour away, where he felt like he was starting from square one with new NRCS staff.
“You kinda get pushed back to the bottom of the pile when you lose your technician or engineer,” Griebie said.
That’s becoming the new normal at NRCS offices across the country, according to Michael Happ with the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy. He’s the program associate for climate and rural communities at the Minnesota-based nonprofit.
“Farmers have to, instead of driving 20 minutes to their county seat, they’re driving 40 minutes or an hour to the next county over or two counties over,” Happ said, “and then when they get there, they’re running into NRCS staff that are overworked, stressed out.”
Just across the state line, Wisconsin saw some of the steepest cuts to NRCS staff in the Midwest — losing more than 30% of its workforce. That’s left some highly agricultural counties without any NRCS staff at all, said Anderas with the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute.
“A lot of beginning farmers and a lot of people that are transitioning to grazing for the first time really rely on the technical assistance that they get alongside the cost share money,” he said, referring to NRCS grants that incentivize farmers to try out conservation practices.
Nationally, 144 counties were left without any NRCS staff after the cuts, former USDA senior staffer Bernie Kluger said.
Their expertise is not cheap or easy to replace, he added.
“That individual expert was an expert on the soils in that county, and they knew the history of the soil in that county,” said Kluger, who worked on NRCS staffing issues under the Biden administration and now works at a D.C.-based consulting firm. “They knew how the local river would flood differently in this county than it does maybe 10, 15 miles down the way.”
Farmers may be able to get assistance from their local soil and water conservation district, but those are often underfunded, he said.
Federal cuts have also wiped out programs and positions that were designed to assist farmers from underrepresented groups, including women, urban growers and people of color, Anderas said. Wisconsin, for example, used to have an urban farm specialist who worked for the NRCS, he said, but that expert has left the position — and there aren't any plans to fill it.
Michael Fields Agriculture Institute was one of many organizations that had a partnership with NRCS to help meet the needs of specific communities, Anderas said. The nonprofit created a program called Wisconsin Women in Conservation in collaboration with the agency to address problems facing women farmers.
“It was wildly successful. It’s being replicated in other states,” he said. “Very meaningful programming for the people involved, and that was cancelled almost immediately after the Trump administration came into office, because it was said that it was discriminating against men.”
Anderas worries these cuts are undoing work the USDA has done to address racism and discrimination in its programming.
“They’re just basically getting the message that the USDA isn’t for every farmer anymore,” he said of underrepresented groups.
Why soil conservation?
The benefits of soil conservation are numerous, experts say. Conservation methods like planting cover crops or perennial trees slow water movement, helping soil stay in place.
“Basically your soil becomes spongier and spongier, and it holds more and more water in the soil,” Anderas said. “And less of that runs off and so you have fewer problems downstream with things like flooding and infrastructure being destroyed.”
A 2022 study estimates Midwestern cropland is losing nearly 2 millimeters of soil every year to erosion, totaling more than 57 billion metric tons over the past 160 years.
Conservation practices can also stop fertilizers applied to crops from dissolving into rainwater and ending up in lakes and rivers, which can contaminate water supplies. A June 2026 report written in collaboration with Michael Fields Agriculture Institute found an acre of perennial grasslands saves more than $200 per acre annually by reducing potential downstream cleanup costs, compared to row crops like corn and soy.
“It pays for itself many times over again,” Anderas said. “The investment that we put in to solve or prevent a problem from happening in the first place is always much, much cheaper than trying to solve a problem after the fact.”
As demand goes up, funding goes down
It’s been feast or famine at the NRCS in recent years. The Biden administration poured more than $19 billion in additional funding for programs at the agency that address climate change, but those funds were rescinded by the Trump administration in 2025.
“You have this demand, you have this proven benefit for farmers,” said Michael Happ with the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy, “and yet, they’re taking money away from it.”
He recently analyzed how these cuts are impacting the agency’s flagship initiative, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, which had a 38% decrease in grants awarded from 2024 to 2025.
And the cuts might not stop there. The Senate’s version of the Farm Bill proposes a nearly $2 billion cut to EQIP.
That’s left a growing number of farmers competing for dwindling funding, Happ said. EQIP alone saw an 11% increase in applicants from 2024 to 2025.
“It seems like conservation as an idea keeps getting more and more popular among farmers,” he said. “We saw an increase in folks lining up out the door to apply for these programs. At the same time, the number accepted went down.”
Staffing cuts have also made it more difficult for small farmers to win contracts, Happ said.
“There’s this incentive now to get fewer and larger contracts out the door,” he said, “because a $100,000 contract is a similar amount of work to a $10,000 contract.”
Not only does that practice make it harder for small farmers to win contracts, it also is less effective, Happ said. Paying 10 farmers $10,000 to address conservation needs can be more impactful than paying one farmer $100,000.
Happ worries this high rejection rate will discourage farmers from applying for conservation funding, he said.
“Some farmers I’ve heard they’ve gotten rejected or they’ve heard of these stories of farmers getting rejected,” he said, “and they’re like, ‘Well, why should I waste my time?’”
That trend is something Adam Griebie has begun to notice in Minnesota, he said.
“There’s a few of my neighbors that we’re all struggling to get into the programs, and then you see other farms that seemingly find it pretty simple to get in,” he said. “And it’s hard to explain why.”
Griebie’s recent experience with NRCS won’t stop him from applying for future projects. But he said he can see why other farmers would be more hesitant or “lose the passion to do the work.”
That, he worries, could damage conservation efforts for years to come.
“We don’t get paid to be good stewards out here,” he said, “and so we really need that extra funding and expertise to try to take care of the land better.”
The Midwest Newsroom’s Daniel Wheaton analyzed Office of Personnel Management data for this report.
Harvest Public Media is a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
