Chad Wallace has long benefitted from conservation programs on his farm in central Illinois. For decades, the third-generation farmer and his family have earned passive income by taking part of their land out of crop production and into filter strips, which slow sediment and pollution from entering nearby waters.
He remembers sitting as a kid in the office of the local Soil and Water Conservation District—a subdivision of the state government—while his dad and grandfather spoke to their SWCD officer.
"It's hard for farmers to be experts in everything,” Wallace said. “Now I'm working outside of the farm, so I don't have a lot of time to research the programs. I depend on them to tell me what programs are going to work for my farm best.”
But two consecutive years of state budget cuts are leaving conservation districts in Illinois without critical funding. State lawmakers have cut almost half of the districts’ funding over the past two years—from nearly $13 million to about $7 million—as the state works to condense its overall budget. The funding changes could mean an existential shift in how the state SWCDs operate and support farmers.
Nearly every county in the U.S. has a Soil and Water Conservation District. The districts started after the Dust Bowl in the 1930s to slow down soil erosion and promote conservation.
They’re often the face of conservation in communities, said Eliot Clay, the executive director of the Association of Illinois Soil and Water Conservation Districts. The districts connect farmers to programs, grants and funding. Many also lend farming equipment and offer educational opportunities for new farming methods.
Illinois state budget cuts have only allotted about $40,000 per district – which is supposed to be able to cover salary, benefits and conservation programs, Clay said.
Now layoffs are on the horizon, Clay said. Ideally, he said each district would have enough funding for two full-time officers, plus financial resources to carry out conservation programs.
With less support for conservation practices, he said farmers’ soil could dry up and blow away in dust storms. Just this spring, dust from agricultural fields in central Illinois blew toward Chicago, creating a dust storm at a magnitude the city hadn’t experienced since the Dust Bowl.
“That is a direct result of poor soil health,” Clay said. “That soil, I mean, that is Illinois’ livelihood, literally flying in the breeze. And it wound up in Chicago, and I thought that that was going to be a big wake up call for legislators.”
Clay said federal threats to conservation are exacerbating the issue. For example, the Natural Resources Conservation Service has lost more than a fifth of its workforce and is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts under the Trump administration.
SWCDs across the country are funded through a range of sources. Some receive funding through taxes, but Illinois conservation districts do not have taxing authority. Instead, their operations mainly come from state budgets. Local counties can appropriate funds, and some money can come from private sources as well.
Clay said some local conservation districts have gotten creative—they will rent out equipment to farmers, for example. Now, he said he’s exploring other funding options beyond the state budget.
Building trust
SWCDs can be more effective than most federal conservation programs, said Matt Helmers, the director of the Iowa Nutrient Resource Center. They’re often run by people in the community who can directly build relationships with farmers.
Helmers said the districts play an important role in addressing specific conservation concerns. Iowa’s conservation districts are not facing the same financial strain as Illinois, so they can be nimbler with their resources, he said.
"In Iowa, they've been focused on nutrient reduction, and specifically nitrate reduction in certain areas,” Helmers said. “And so the state resources have been able to be devoted to a lot of those edge-of-field nitrate reduction practices, and have been able to move relatively quickly.”
The people who work in the offices often grew up in the area and are members of the community, Clay said. He said building trust can help to implement conservation methods on farms.
“If a farmer's talking to somebody that they know grew up in an adjacent town, they're a lot more willing to have conversations about new ways of doing things that maybe they wouldn't have [coming] from somebody that shows up in a suit from the USDA,” Clay said.
In Illinois, the districts could mean the difference between farmers successfully enrolling in conservation programs and falling out of compliance, Wallace said.
“Farmers, they want to do everything right,” Wallace said. “They definitely don't want to do things wrong. So having an organization or a group of people like that, that are experts that can put your mind at ease as far as legalities and best interest for your farm, it's a necessity.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
