Conservation Measures and the Farm Bill

The document details how the 2014 Farm Bill allocates funding for conservation programs to mitigate agricultural pollution and enhance soil productivity. It describes specific practices such as cover cropping, no-till operations, and intercropping, while outlining the four primary USDA conservation programs: EQIP, ACEP, CRP, and CSP.

• The 2014 Farm Bill authorized $489 billion in spending through 2018, with 6 percent of those outlays dedicated to conservation.
• Agriculture is identified as the primary source of water contamination in surveyed rivers and streams, largely due to nutrient runoff of nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers.
• Cover crops improve water quality by filtering pollutants and increase soil water-holding capacity, though adoption was limited to 1.7 percent of U.S. cropland in 2011.
• No-till operations in the United States have contributed to the avoidance of 241 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions since the 1970s, and can sequester between 0.05 to 1.3 tons of carbon per hectare per year in North America.
• Edge-of-field practices like subsurface drainage bioreactors can remove 15 to 60 percent of the annual nitrate load without taking land out of production, while buffer strips can remove 50 percent or more of nutrients and pesticides.
• The 2014 Farm Bill provides $57.6 billion for conservation programs, including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP), Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), and Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP).
• The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) has become highly competitive; in the 2016 general enrollment period, only 411,000 of the 1.8 million offered acres were accepted.

APA

Zayas, G., & Chillrud, R. (2017). Conservation Measures and the Farm Bill. Environmental and Energy Study Institute. https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-conservation-measures-and-the-farm-bill

Chicago

Zayas, Gabriela, and Rebecca Chillrud. Conservation Measures and the Farm Bill. Environmental and Energy Study Institute, 2017. https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-conservation-measures-and-the-farm-bill.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Zayas |first1=Gabriela |last2=Chillrud |first2=Rebecca |title=Conservation Measures and the Farm Bill |publisher=Environmental and Energy Study Institute |date=3 March 2017 |url=https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-conservation-measures-and-the-farm-bill |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{zayas2017conservation, author = {Zayas, Gabriela and Chillrud, Rebecca}, title = {{Conservation Measures and the Farm Bill}}, institution = {Environmental and Energy Study Institute}, year = {2017}, month = mar, url = {https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-conservation-measures-and-the-farm-bill}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }