Last month, USDA released the final rules and regulations for the Conservation Stewardship Program. The rule will guide the program roll out from this point forward. There are some clear victories and some disappointments too.

The Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) is a voluntary program that rewards farmers and ranchers for managing their land in a way that produces real and measurable conservation outcomes – healthy soil, clean water and air and wildlife habitats. The program is administered by USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS). Congress provided $12 billion over the next 10 years to enroll nearly 13 million acres a year in CSP.

The rule will guide the program roll out from this point forward. Two important victories revive some good definitions from the old CSP. These include Pastured Cropland and Resource Conserving Crop Rotations.

For Pastured Cropland, now farmers who converted cropland to grassland for livestock production will be justly rewarded for such optimal conservation. The NRCS will establish a “pastured cropland” category that will pay a higher rate per acre than is paid for regular pastureland.

We learned through our Farm Bill Helpline that farmers who had converted cropland back to grassland were actually being penalized because they were being paid at the CSP pastureland rate, which is half the payment rate of cropland.

Resource Conserving Crop Rotations now must improve soil fertility and tilth, interrupt pest cycles, and reduce erosion, so they must include forages and perennials. This will improve the environmental performance of CSP.

We are concerned that USDA has created another familiar loophole thanks to their failure to include “actively engaged” requirements for participating in CSP. This means that farms seeking to evade the payment limitations could bring in additional investors to increase their payments.

The rule does create a per person limit and a contract limit. However, the absence of the actively engaged rule opens the door for abuse and could potentially serve some mega farms – many of which have already restructured their operations into multiple entities to evade commodity program payment limitations – very well.

There is more to discover with CSP under the new rule, including needed improvements to better reflect conservation cropping systems in the more arid regions of the country. Those specifics, and many others, will not be uncovered until farmers complete this year’s application process and explore changes in the Conservation Measurement Tool.

We need to keep learning from farmers and ranchers, so please share your CSP experience with us by contacting our Farm Bill Helpline at 402.687.2100.