(gentle music)
- My name is Laura Schnapp.
I'm the soil conservationist in the Payne County
Stillwater Field Office,
and I do not work at the State Office.
We've put away some numbers and some graphs for now
and good job making it through so far.
This is one of my first Farm Bill meetings,
and it's a lot of information.
I couldn't imagine, I mean, I can.
I'm sitting through it, right?
Most of the information this evening
is going to be pretty general 'cause we're still waiting
to get through the regulation process
and come from the Office of Budget and Management,
the rules, and we hope to have that in January.
The 2018 Farm Bill has got three national priorities,
water quality and quantity, soil health,
and precision agriculture.
Regardless of the NRCS program,
those three priorities come to us from national,
so we'll be focusing on those.
In Oklahoma, we have four main programs.
One's the Environmental Quality Incentives Program,
which continues to offer assistance
to farmers and ranchers to install
and implement conservation practices
to protect water, air, and soil quality as well as wildlife.
Then we have the CSP,
or the Conservation Stewardship Program,
and once some of the more obvious resource concerns
have been addressed, the Conservation Stewardship Program
will continue and provide technical and financial assistance
to those that are actively managing
and maintaining an existing conservation system
and to implement additional conservation activities
to take it up to another level.
Then we have the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program,
which it's three easement programs
that has been consolidated into one,
and I'll talk about that in a little bit.
And then the regional conservation partnership program,
the partnership program, a way that
we can collaborate with different partners
and try to leverage dollars to get conservation done
at a larger scale.
With regards to Environmental Quality Incentives Program,
which we call EQIP, it's continued
from the previous Farm Bill.
I mentioned in the national priorities,
and regardless of those national priorities,
we are locally led, and we use a locally led process.
And what that means, if anyone was at the annual Ag Banquet
that is held every March, Anita Kaufmann
with the Conservation District,
puts out a survey, and we really try
to get folks to fill that out
'cause that's how we help identify our local priorities.
Water quality, air quality, soil health,
those are all important, but local priorities
were determined to be brush management, water,
whether it was livestock water or too much
or too little water on cropland,
and then soil health.
Those were where we're gonna be targeting
some of our local funding.
With regards to eligibility,
we have two types of eligibility.
One is for the land, and one is for the producer.
Rangeland, cropland, hayland, pasture,
environmental sensitive areas,
all those types of lands are eligible,
and then as far as the individuals,
farmers, ranchers, foresters,
livestock operations, conventional, organic,
specialty crops, and then there's an asterisk
with regards to the historically underserved,
there's opportunities for beginning limited farmers,
veterans, and socially disadvantaged farmers to get
an additional cost with these financial assistance programs
as well as some funds up front
versus waiting until you implement
to get that financial assistance.
Next is the Conservation Stewardship Program.
That's one where we've taken care
of a lot of the major resource concerns.
You got a good system in place,
good conservation system in place
and you want to take it up to the next level
with regards to your management.
Participants earn CSP payments for conservation performance,
the higher the performance, the higher the payment rate.
Next slide just shows some examples
of some activities or enhancements
that can be implemented to take that
to the next level.
These are examples of ones for soil health.
We got cover crops.
We got stuff like pest management,
repairing buffers, field borders,
stuff like that, and those are just some examples.
There's ones for livestock and rangelands as well,
such prescribed grazing to implementing prescribed grazing
to help with water quality
or implementing a prescribed patch burn,
prescribed patch burning to reduce pest plant pressure.
For example, you've gone through and you've done
your brush management and removed a bunch of cedars,
and you're gonna get a flush of additional cedars
from all the seeds that are out there.
Well, the fire can, one, if the trees are small enough,
they can help take care of those.
Here's an example of enhancement
or an activity you can do to help benefit wildlife.
This is just an example.
I think the photo, it's out of Custer County,
a pollinator planting.
We've done several of these in odd areas
of a field that you can't necessarily crop or yeah.
The Easement Program
helps land owners, land trusts,
and other entities protect and restore and enhance wetlands,
grasslands, and working farms and ranches.
I really like that idea, working lands, working ranches.
It's important that y'all stay in business,
and we wanna help you do that.
With the Easement Program, there's two different types.
There's the Wetland Reserve Program
and an Agricultural Land Easements.
The Wetland Reserve Easement restores,
protects, and enhances wetlands,
while the AL, or Ag Land Easements
is to protect the agricultural use,
viability, and related conservation values
by limiting non-ag uses by restoring and conserving,
restoring and conserving eligible land.
RCPP,
this one I don't hear talked about much in Payne County,
but the idea is there's some partners
that have gotten together with the agency,
and it's a way to leverage some dollars.
And they get together to focus on something,
whether it's Monarch habitat, which is one
we've done in the past.
We have one that's statewide right now
in partnership with the Oklahoma Conservation Commission,
that's focusing on soil health.
So that's another program, that if you got some cropland
or even rangelands, I see a lot of go-back fields,
fields that used to be crop that are coming back
our Broomsedge bluestem or ticklegrass or prairie grass
that maybe there's some nutrient issues going on
that we can come in and offer technical assistance
which could maybe lead to financial assistance
to help that soil health.
It all starts with the Conservation Technical Assistance.
The financial assistance, those are our programs,
and you do have to compete for them.
But the Conservation Technical Assistance
is something that we do for free.
You have an issue, you have a concern,
you have a plant, you don't know how to treat it,
or you want some ideas of how to reduce
or get rid of this weed or you got a leaky pond,
we get a lot of calls for a leaky ponds
'cause a lot of them were built 40, 50 years ago,
and they're past their practice lifespan
or how long we think that they should last,
and so just calling us up, stopping in and saying
you have a concern, you'd like some help.
We are the USDA's technical agency
to be able to offer that assistance.
If you wanted to get started with NRCS,
which FSA is one of our sister agencies,
we're in the same building, you call us up or come in.
I brought some business cards with me.
I'll feel free to stick around and pass them out.
But you come in and visit with us,
say you're interested in, you know,
this is a new piece of land, or I'm having issues
with some erosion over on next to the stream.
You come in, and we can help develop
a conservation plan with you.
It's a voluntary program.
You can then go turn around and implement it,
or you can try to get some financial assistance
through one of the programs that I visited about.
(gentle music)