Pete HahnloserThe United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is announcing new funding for the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) for fiscal year 2025. Through the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), this program supports landowners and other entities in conserving, restoring and protecting wetlands, productive agricultural lands and grasslands at risk of being converted to other uses.
NRCS accepts applications for ACEP Agricultural Land Easements (ACEP-ALE) and Wetland Reserve Easements (ACEP-WRE) on a rolling basis. Interested parties should apply by either Oct. 4 or Dec. 20 at their local NRCS office to be considered for the two state-led funding cycles. Any application submitted to NRCS that wasn’t funded in fiscal 2024 will be automatically reconsidered during the October funding cycle.
For fiscal year 2025, states will get funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and all eligible applications in a state will compete for this pool. These funds are in addition to what’s available under the Farm Bill. Funding priorities remain the same as last year and are available in all states, with some states having additional priorities identified by NRCS.
ACEP-ALE priorities are:
- Protecting grasslands in areas most at risk of being converted to other uses to avoid losing soil carbon.
- Safeguarding agricultural lands at risk of being converted to non-agricultural uses.
- Addressing state-specific priorities, like rice cultivation on subsiding, highly organic soils.
For ACEP-WRE, NRCS is concentrating on:
- Lands with high levels of organic carbon in the soil.
- Lands that will be restored and managed as forests, such as bottomland hardwood forests.
- Lands currently covered by forests that will continue to be managed as forests.
- Specific geographic priorities, including former cranberry bogs, wet meadows and ephemeral wetlands within grassland ecosystems.
The IRA allocated an additional $1.4 billion for ACEP over a five-year period and updated ACEP guidelines to fund easements that focus on reducing, capturing, avoiding or sequestering greenhouse gas emissions. For fiscal 2025, $500 million has been authorized..
In March, NRCS announced a fiscal 2024 investment of roughly $138 million from the IRA for 138 new climate-smart conservation easements, helping farmers and ranchers conserve wetlands, grasslands and prime farmlands. NRCS will soon provide more details about funding and sign-up opportunities for IRA funds available through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, Conservation Stewardship Program, and Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) for fiscal 2025.
NRCS is simplifying ACEP to make the program more user-friendly and to improve IRA implementation, including appraisals and land surveys for ACEP, and certifying entities to assist NRCS and producers in placing land into agricultural land easements. For further details, refer to ACEP and the Inflation Reduction Act.
For more information about NRCS programs, producers can reach out to their local USDA Service Center. They can also apply for NRCS programs, manage conservation plans and contracts, and access and print conservation maps by logging into farmers.gov.
Sixflashphoto, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
