One of USDA’s largest land stewardship programs “allocates too little funding to environmentally sensitive lands in one of the most important agricultural areas in the country,” said the Environmental Working Group on Wednesday. In a report, the EWG said the cost-sharing Environmental Quality Incentives Program should be reformed to make climate change its primary purpose.
In a report, the EWG said only 36 percent of $519.6 million in EQIP spending in 13 states went to practices that would mitigate climate change or reduce nutrient pollution on environmentally sensitive lands. The EWG focused on so-called potential wetland soil landscapes, which have soils that are sometimes or frequently saturated with water. There are 33 million acres of such soils. “Many were once likely wetlands and converted to cropland years ago,” said the report, which covered the Mississippi River Critical Conservation Area of 1,047 counties in the years 2017-2020.
The PWSL land offers “some of the most promising opportunities to reduce nutrient runoff and climate emissions, if the right agricultural conservation practices are funded and adopted,” said the EWG. But most of the EQIP money went to structural, equipment or facility practices “that neither benefit the climate nor reduce nutrient pollution.”
The EWG report is available here.