USDA Conservation Technical Assistance and Within-Field Resource Concerns

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Conservation Technical Assistance (CTA) program provides conservation planning and field-level assessments of conservation strategies, partnering with a network of county field offices, conservation districts, and State agencies. The CTA program supports these efforts with more than $700 million per year in Federal funding. A similar amount of technical assistance funding is provided to directly support the planning required to enroll land in the USDA’s working lands programs, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (USDA, Office of Budget and Program Analysis, 2019). The CTA program and the working lands programs help reduce soil erosion, improve water quality conditions, and address other resource conditions referred to as resource concerns. This bulletin looks at how many fields in several major commodity crops have self-reported, on-field resource concerns and whether the producers received technical assistance to address these concerns from USDA or other sources. Using field-level data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) for soybeans, wheat, oats, and cotton, the analysis focuses on within-field, predominately soil-related concerns—such as water-driven erosion, wind-driven erosion, soil compaction, poor drainage, low organic matter, within-field water quality concerns, or some other concern—that are self-reported by survey respondents. Respondents report that 49 percent of fields represented have at least one resource concern and 26 percent have multiple resource concerns. Of the fields represented with at least one concern, only 24 percent received technical assistance. Fields with three or more respondent-reported concerns are more likely to have received assistance. The largest source of assistance is the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), but other USDA agencies, cooperative extension, and non-USDA entities also provide technical assistance. Notably, 25 percent of the fields having received technical assistance for at least one resource concern obtained assistance from multiple sources