The latest farm bill was generous to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. And new programs have a higher cap limit. Familiarize yourself with the program to see if there is a cost-share approach that might fit your farm.

The 2002 farm bill (Farm Security and Rural Investment Act) brings back the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and sweetens the pot with funding of $6.1 billion--up from $1.3 billion funded for the 1996 law.

"There's a bigger dollar limit on cost-share and incentive payments, too," said Terry Cosby, assistant state conservationist, with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in Columbia, Mo. "The limit on total payments has been increased to $450,000 per individual or entity over the life of the farm bill. That's up from a $50,000 limit under the previous law."

An additional $50 million has been targeted for the Klamath River Basin in Oregon and California, to fund water conservation.

There are other adjustments in EQIP, including:

• The government's share of practice costs remains at 75 percent. However, cost-share can be increased up to 90 percent for limited-resource producers or beginning farmers and ranchers.
• Nationally, at least 60 percent of EQIP funds are to be targeted to livestock producers, including grazing practices. EQIP contracts for confined animal feeding operations must include a comprehensive nutrient management plan (CNMP). Incentive payments are available to help with CNMPs.
• The minimum length of an EQIP contract has been reduced to 1 year after the completion of all practices, and producers can receive payments in the same year the contract is approved. The maximum contract length stays at 10 years.
• Conservation priority areas have been discontinued. The "bidding down" provision (where EQIP participants could improve their chance of approval by doing some work on their own) has been eliminated. "We don't discourage producers from doing work without EQIP cost-share," said Cosby. "But all applications with comparable environmental benefits are on equal footing; we cannot select one over another because of lower cost."
• Beginning in fiscal year 2003, producers are ineligible for EQIP payments in any crop year that adjusted gross income exceeds $2.5 million, unless 75 percent of that income is derived from farming, ranching or forestry.

State conservationists are given considerable discretion as to how EQIP is implemented. For example, to accommodate the state's diversity, Missouri is divided into four resource areas, or EQIP regions, each with its own scoring sheet:

1. The glacial till region takes in all of the state north of the Missouri River, plus the river basin on the south side of the Missouri.
2. Cherokee prairie is comprised of the prairie region of west-central Missouri.
3. The Mississippi Delta includes the Bootheel and other areas in the lower Mississippi flood plain.
4. Ozark Highlands stretch across the southern half of the state, from roughly U.S. Highway 50 to the Arkansas line.

"We have developed scoring sheets for each EQIP area, plus a scoring sheet for streambank stabilization and riparian corridors statewide," said Cosby. "Landowners will be competing for EQIP benefits with other landowners in their region, not with landowners across the entire state."

In other words, a farmer in northwest Missouri will not be competing directly with a Bootheel producer for the same EQIP dollars.

"EQIP is not for every producer, probably," he added. "It's primarily for people with big environmental projects to be completed over a period of time. We aren't competing with or overlapping the state conservation programs. In fact, year-by-year cost-share is more appropriate for state programs."

"Right now, we are re-evaluating applications that had been submitted but had not been approved when the new farm bill took effect," said Marilyn Gann, NRCS resource conservationist (programs). "We have more than 2,000 applications that were in the pipeline. We want to get those resolved by Feb. 1.

"Of course, EQIP is an on-going, year-round program," she added. "We also are getting new applications all the time."

That puts a lot on the plates of NRCS technicians and supervisors. The agency now is certifying private, third-party vendors who will pick up part of the workload.

"We've begun the certification process for third-party vendors," said Terry Cosby. "We're screening them pretty closely, because all work must be done to NRCS technical standards. All vendors who are certified will be required to do a certain amount of educational and professional training to remain certified."

All EQIP projects are carried out according to an EQIP plan of operations, which includes only those practices to be implemented. Plans are site-specific for each farm or ranch.

"Producers who are interested should start at their county USDA Service Center office," said Cosby. "People at the local Soil and Water Conservation District [SWCD] and NRCS personnel can answer questions and provide details on a project; they'll help identify resources and practices that need to be done to correct natural resource concerns."

They'll also help walk you through the application process.

EQIP applications, which can be submitted throughout the year, are screened initially by a local work group, convened by the SWCD. This work group may include representatives from the SWCD, NRCS, Farm Service Agency, extension and other state and federal agencies. The local work group does the initial scoring on applications.

From there, applications--and their scoring sheets--make their way up the NRCS reviewing chain.

"Applications are ranked according to which have the higher scores," said Cosby. "In each EQIP region, those applications with highest scores will be approved and funded first."

Final approval of EQIP requests is made by Roger Hansen, Missouri State Conservationist.