The Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) and the next Farm Bill
By Kari Cohen, Federal Agriculture Consultant, Nine Steps Consulting
While we await the transition to the new Trump Administration and word on the next RCPP funding announcement, let’s turn our attention to the next Farm Bill and the future of RCPP. The 2018 Farm Bill officially expired at the end of September 2024. As of the time of writing, it appears as though Republicans will retain a narrow majority in the House, leaving limited prospects for passage of a new Farm Bill in Congress’ lame duck session.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) extended the authorizations of the Farm Bill conservation programs, which means that NRCS can spend fiscal year 2025 conservation funding even with an expired Farm Bill. We’ll have to wait to see whether Congress passes another Farm Bill extension and if so, how long the extension would last to enable the next Congress to develop and pass a new Farm Bill.
The Republican-led House Committee on Agriculture released Farm Bill draft text on May 10, 2024. While we have no idea what would be in a final bill, there are clues in the existing House draft that point to what RCPP v3.0 could look like.
The Senate Ag Committee released a summary of its draft bill earlier this year but now that the Senate will be changing hands with a new Republican majority, that summary is not worthy of analysis at this point.
Below is an analysis of the House draft bill and how its provisions would modify RCPP moving forward.
Back to the Future: Perhaps the most impactful provision in the House draft Farm Bill includes language that would revert the mechanics and administration of RCPP back to the way the program operated under the 2014 Farm Bill. Projects awarded under the 2014 Farm Bill were administered using the rules and contracts used by the “covered programs”—Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP), Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP), etc. For example, if a partner was awarded a project focused on soil health, the contracts entered into under that project would be EQIP (or potentially, Conservation Stewardship Program, or CSP) contracts. The same is true of easements, which would be either ACEP-ALE, ACEP-WRE or HFRP easements.
The 2018 Farm Bill radically changed the program, creating standalone RCPP producer contracts for land management (EQIP- and CSP-like) activities, and standalone RCPP easements with their own unique features (such as the ability to put a RCPP easement, either entity- or U.S.-held, on any land use type). It took NRCS approximately three years following passage of the 2018 Farm Bill to develop all the new program policy and documents associated with the move to RCPP as a standalone program.
Shifting back to using covered program instruments would have several effects. First, it would require the agency to once again overhaul the program, and it would take some time to develop a new regulation and undo all that was created under the 2018 Farm Bill. Second, it would perpetuate the circumstance that the agency faced following the 2018 Farm Bill, in which State RCPP staff had to manage and administer RCPP projects under two vastly different regimes. Third, it would eliminate many of the flexibilities that many RCPP projects awarded since passage of the 2018 Farm Bill have taken advantage of, such as the easement land use flexibility mentioned above. Fourth, it would put back into place the Adjustment of Terms process that was in use under the 2014 Farm Bill, through which partners could request waivers for covered program policies and regulations they hoped wouldn’t apply to their project. An obvious example would be the irrigation history requirement that is part of EQIP. Interestingly, however, the House draft bill pre-empts any concerns about it by waiving the irrigation history requirement. The same is not true of countless covered program policies and regs that partners would like to waive but are not relevant under the 2018 Farm Bill RCPP.
However one feels about the balance of advantages and disadvantages of returning to RCPP v1.0, it would certainly be the biggest potential change to RCPP included in the House draft Farm Bill.
An Opening on Administrative Expenses: The second substantive provision in the House draft bill allows for up to 10% of the funds obligated into a RCPP agreement to be used for administrative expenses related to the project. Both the 2014 and 2018 Farm Bills prohibit the use of any RCPP funds for partner administrative expenses, more commonly known as overhead or indirect costs. This prohibition has long been a significant hurdle for RCPP partners, particularly small and under-resourced organizations that have found the prohibition on admin expenses too large a pill to swallow. Compare RCPP to USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-smart Commodities initiative, which had no limits on administrative expenses. Allowing organizations to recover as small a percentage as 10% would be a positive development and help eliminate some of the administrative burden NRCS has created to ensure it is not paying any partner administrative expenses.
Ramping up Partner Contributions: The third substantive provision relates to partner contributions associated with RCPP projects. Partner contributions, in-kind and cash offered by partners to complement NRCS’s RCPP investment in the project area, is a bespoke concept for RCPP and is distinct from partner “match” commonly associated with Federal grant programs. A lot could be written about partner contributions and why it exists as a bespoke concept and how it differs from matching funds. In the interest of brevity, the House draft Farm Bill would, for the first time, explicitly require that partners provide at least 50% of the costs of a RCPP project. The 2018 Farm Bill did not include an explicit amount of required partner contributions, instead stating that partners should provide “a significant portion of the overall costs of the scope of a project...” The House draft language runs counter to the recent past, in which NRCS has relaxed expectations around partner contributions. For the 2024 RCPP competition, there was no published level of required contributions and NRCS offered awards to proposals with low contribution levels. The House draft language would put an end to that and would make it much more challenging for partners to develop and submit proposals that have contributions at least equal to the amount of RCPP funds requested.
A Slap on the Wrist: The House Farm Bill draft includes several provisions that serve to micromanage USDA’s administration of RCPP, largely due to partner dissatisfaction with the administrative complexity of participating in the program. There is new language stipulating timelines for signing project agreements and for making reimbursements to partners.
Technical Assistance Changes: The 2018 Farm Bill for the first time authorized technical assistance (TA) funding to RCPP partners for producer education and outreach, and to develop baseline metrics to support reporting of project outcomes. The language authorizing this TA funding was included in a provision about advance payments to partners (see next paragraph below). The House draft Farm Bill goes further and breaks out the authorization of TA funding to partners separately from the advance authorization. In the draft bill, the language about baseline metrics and producer education and outreach are echoed, but new language authorizing funding for “the costs of TA needed to facilitate the maximum conservation benefit of the applicable project” provides broad latitude to USDA when considering what TA activities are reimbursable for RCPP projects.
The draft bill also includes amplified language authorizing advance payments to partners. As noted above, the 2018 Farm Bill included language authorizing advance payments for limited purposes but NRCS has been unable to operationalize advances. As RCPP project sizes have ballooned through Inflation Reduction Act funding, partners not being able to tap into advance funding has been a real challenge for project implementation.
Certified Entities to Streamline Easement Processing: the House draft bill for the first time includes a provision pulling over the “certified entity” concept from USDA’s Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) to RCPP. This would allow easement holding entities that have gone through the process to be classified as a certified entity to take advantage of streamlined easement processing and closure procedures.
More Funding: The 2018 Farm Bill authorized RCPP’s funding level at $300 million annually. The draft House bill increases RCPP to $400 million in the first year and tops out at $450 million. While these figures may leave stakeholders wanting after recent billion-plus funding announcements supercharged by the Inflation Reduction Act, the authorized amounts represent a significant increase from the 2018 Farm Bill authorized level.
In summary, the House draft bill contains a mix of substantive and smaller changes that would result in a RCPP v3.0 that looks more like RCPP v1.0. We’ll be back with further analysis as circumstances warrant. We’ll be watching Farm Bill action as well as the fate of USDA’s IRA funding, which will help determine fiscal year 2025 RCPP funding levels.
Support for this analysis was provided by the Doris Duke Foundation. Views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the policy or positions of DDF.
