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In July, the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill rescinded the IRA conservation funds.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

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.”

For Climate Resilience, Technical Help Is Critical

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.”

Reduced staffing in Wisconsin will likely shift NRCS offices toward writing larger contracts, such as for methane digestors on dairy farms, with a smaller number of farmers, Anderas said.

The vilification of federal workers has meanwhile created a “toxic environment” at NRCS offices in Wisconsin, he added. “People are scared. They don’t know whether their careers are safe anymore. They don’t know what’s coming.”

The president’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 completely zeroes out USDA’s conservation technical assistance. While it’s not the final budget, “it can give you insights into what this administration is prioritizing or not prioritizing,” said Aviva Glaser, senior director of agriculture policy at the National Wildlife Federation.

The Path Forward

Advocates are also pressing for the next farm bill to include such reforms as factoring recent weather data into crop insurance and making the Whole Farm Revenue Protection program, which allows farmers to enroll in crop insurance based on their overall revenue rather than on a crop-by-crop basis, more accessible to the small, diversified farms that benefit the most from it.

Crop insurance isn’t working well even for large, commodity growers, McCormick said.  It “doesn’t really pay unless you lose everything, but the cost of production is so high you can’t afford to lose these crops,” he said. “You’re paying a massive premium and not getting [much, or] any claim.”

Conservation funding must also be increased to reach more farmers, and programs should be restructured to offer 10 years of support, Womack said. Future agriculture systems should incorporate annual crops like corn and soybeans with perennial grain crops and shrubs and woody species bearing nuts and fruits, he added. “It’s not just row crops. It is a hybrid way of thinking about agriculture, where you’re meshing a lot of stuff together.”

Schechinger concurs. “With climate change, we’re going to get to a point where you can’t make money unless you’re doing some kind of diversification and some kind of conservation practices.”

“We are also going to have to have a pretty frank conversation about longevity of practices on acres that are truly in a 100-year floodplain,” she added.

For McCormick, the adoption of soil health practices by farmers throughout the watershed will be crucial for sustaining farming in floodplains, where he sees growing attrition. “Farmers are selling the river bottoms, or the tenants are leaving them.” Also, he added, they don’t have the funding to restore unproductive fields by turning them into wetlands.

“We got four inches [of rain] last night,” he continued, “and we all went to the NOAA site and looked at the flood predictions. That’s what we deal with as farmers now. We get these big, big rains, so we all rush to our computers to see if we’re going to lose our crops. It’s a lot of stress.”