Last December, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched a new initiative that will set aside $700 million for regenerative agriculture techniques like cover crops and no-till farming.
The program, called the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative, is an effort to connect the dots between human health and farming under the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again campaign. Many farmers have voiced excitement about the program, but major staff cuts at USDA could undermine the Administration’s goals to improve soil health, warn policy experts.
“I’m very concerned about the capacity of the department to effectively roll out the product,” said Bernie Kluger, a former USDA senior advisor who was brought into the agency in 2022 to help increase staff retention at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). NRCS is the office administering the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative.
Much of Kluger’s work was reversed in early 2025 when President Trump initiated thousands of layoffs at nearly every federal agency. The USDA, of which NRCS is part, was hit the hardest: more than 24,000 employees have left the agency since last January, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. The NRCS lost 2,438 employees, second only to the Forest Service, which lost a whopping 12,663 employees, according to data analysis from NPR.
Many of the people who lost their jobs were still in a one- to two-year probationary period. At NRCS, these early-career employees were the ones who worked directly with farmers to help them apply for grants and identify conservation projects to implement on their farms. These are the employees who would have likely helped with the rollout of the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative, which will allocate $400 million to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and $300 million to the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) over fiscal year 2026.
Without the necessary staffing, the initiative could falter — even though it’s likely to be very popular among farmers. “I think this [initiative] is a really positive movement in the right direction,” said Wendy Johnson, an Iowa soybean and grain farmer.
Other farmers agree that this program is an opportunity to popularize conservation practices on farmland. “It used to be that we were the really weird ones, but I think over time it’s going to be a more standard type of practice,” said Jon Hemme, a Missouri dairy farmer.
The data support this theory: in 2022, just one-quarter of applicants to EQIP and CSP were awarded contracts, according to data analysis from the Center for Rural Affairs. These programs are regularly oversubscribed because without federal support, most farmers cannot afford the initial costs of implementing a conservation project on their farm. For many, it can take three to five years for that new project to even become profitable, making programs like EQIP and CSP essential to keep farmers afloat during that startup phase. Earmarking $700 million through the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative to these programs could help get contracts into more farmers’ hands.
But without the proper staffing, experts warn it could have the opposite effect.
“The [initiative] cannot work as intended without full staffing at NRCS,” wrote Michael Happ, program associate at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, in a report on the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative. “This program does not create a new pot of funds and does not include the additional technical assistance needed, meaning local staff support will be strained, making it harder for interested farmers to successfully navigate the application process.”
Happ also warned that small producers could be left out of the process altogether, citing research from the University of Madison-Wisconsin that showed that fewer NRCS staff at the county level means fewer contracts are issued, and when they are, they’re issued to larger-scale producers.
It could also be difficult to get the initiative off the ground because of a loss of expertise at NRCS. In addition to early-career employees, many specialized positions like soil scientists, were eliminated, even though improving soil health is one of the main priorities of the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative.
“Protecting and improving the health of our soil is critical not only for the future viability of farmland, but to the future success of American farmers,” said USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins in a press release about the initiative.
“If we intend to Make America Healthy Again, we must begin by restoring the health of our soil,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy in the same press release.
Jon Hemme, the Missouri dairy farmer, said he believes the Administration truly wants to improve soil quality for the sake of public health. He was flown out to Washington D.C. for the rollout of the initiative in December and had a meeting with Secretary Kennedy and Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The leaders spoke to Hemme about his use of cover crops, which has helped decrease soil erosion on his farm and improve the health of the surrounding waterways and air quality.
“That [meeting] really opened my eyes to how broad this whole deal is,” Hemme said. “These two agencies (USDA and HHS) have different goals… but they’re really trying to tear those silos [between the two agencies] down.”
Hemme said he likely won’t apply for funds through the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative because he’s already implemented the projects it would fund on his farm, in part thanks to support from USDA staff over the past decade.
But for other farmers planning to apply for funds through the initiative, it’s quite possible their questions to the agency go unanswered with fewer people on the job to assist.
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