USDA Staffing and Funding Cuts Would Threaten Virginia’s Ability to Reach Chesapeake Bay Cleanup Goals

Lee Good grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania and raises cows, calfs, crops and hay on about 200 acres in the foothills of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. 

Good, 55, previously farmed as a hobby but now makes his living in Rockingham County, the top contributor to the state’s top private industry—agriculture. 

He cares about clean water and air while still being profitable, and he wants to protect the environment in both his local community and the Chesapeake Bay at the other end of the state, which recreators, crabbers and fishermen all rely on. 

“We don’t inherit the land from our parents, we borrow it from our children,” said Good. “We’re stewards until it’s their turn. The goal is for each generation to care for it so that it is in as good or better shape for their children as it was when they were the stewards of it.”

But being a good steward of the environment may soon become harder for Good and other farmers if a Trump administration proposal advances to reduce the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, which helps local farmers enact pollution reduction measures on their land. 

Already, the NRCS staff in Virginia has dropped from 178 over the past several months to 137 as of May 1, through layoffs and buyouts. The new budget proposal would slash $754 million in conservation technical assistance from the NRCS nationwide. As the Trump administration enacts deep cuts across the federal government, questions are mounting about the state’s ability to fill in gaps and maintain cleanup goals for the Chesapeake Bay. Within the 64,000 square miles of waters along the U.S. East Coast that feed into the bay, the nation’s largest estuary, Virginia is one of the final contributors. 

The goals, first established in 1983 and then in a 2010 court order, specify targets and completion dates. Initiatives like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program allow agricultural producers to voluntarily participate in exchange for funding to offset some of the costs of pollution reduction practices. At the state level, Virginia also offers an Agricultural Best Management Practices Cost-Share Program.

The incentivized practices, including streambank fencing and forested buffers, help reduce the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen nutrients from animal waste and fertilizer entering waters flowing into the Bay. 

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins “understands the array of mission critical positions and programs at the Department, and she will ensure that those areas have the resources and personnel they need to continue serving the American people,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement. 

The NRCS staffing reductions come at a time when farmers are dealing with high costs leading to thin profit margins, which are getting further stressed by tariffs from President Donald Trump and the worsening disasters and other climate conditions farmers must work with.

Meanwhile, Virginia’s efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay are likely to miss this year’s targets. In its latest report card in 2022, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation graded the bay’s health as a D+.

Kate Wofford, executive director of the Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley, a group that has worked with Good and helps implement conservation practices, said long-term funding and staffing reductions would have severe “consequences for conservation progress in our region.”

NRCS Cuts Ripple Through the State

Administering the NRCS and state programs can be a delicate dance. Farmers tend to be wary of the government. It takes time to establish trusted relationships with producers to ensure the practices are carried out correctly so they can be counted in the bay progress models.

When Good installed a streambank fencing and watering system through a well for his cattle so they wouldn’t need to access the stream, staff in the local field office helped him figure out how to do it. 

“Their own personal economy is not based on whether or not they sell you a certain product. It builds a relationship of trust that’s different,” Good said. “If they’re talking about closing the local office, and having one office in Richmond, that’s just a terrible idea. People who work in our local office, by and large, are people who grew up locally in the agricultural community.” 

A funded practice of planting cover crops with no tillage can help land retain nutrients during downpours, Wofford said. That both reduces runoff and the amount of nutrients farmers need to reapply. Investments in those practices, or others like a waste storage facility, can have some upfront costs, but they can be offset with NRCS help and pay off in the long run, Wofford said, adding, “We know they do.”

“These practices that farmers voluntarily implement result in cleaner water, groundwater and surface water, they result in cleaner air, more trees, more wildlife habitat. Many of them enable farmers to be profitable in the long-term—that helps family farms stay in farming. That is good for our rural culture, rural communities,” Wofford said. “The NRCS staff, and their expertise and knowledge, technical abilities and these cost-share programs that they help get in the ground, are critical to enabling a new generation of farmers to succeed.”

A 2022 report by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation found that with every dollar spent toward achieving agricultural pollution reductions, “the Chesapeake Bay region can expect $1.75 in economic returns to local businesses and workers through additional sales of goods and services and greater earnings.”

All of the workmen Good contracted with to drill the well, install the water-handling system and put in the streambank fence “earned a fair wage,” he said. “None of them were going to Hawaii on that money, but they were able to feed their kids and put clothes on their back and pay their taxes and buy a house locally.” 

Local soil and water conservation districts, which administer the state cost-share programs and are funded through Virginia’s budget, also rely on the NRCS. 

Kendall Tyree, executive director of the Virginia Association of Soil & Water Conservation Districts, said her 47 district offices typically have one or two workers providing technical assistance. 

“Certainly understandable that when your federal NRCS office loses 10 of its staff, and others across the state, it’s going to unfortunately bring us low productivity,” Tyree said. “But districts are willing to stand up where we can to support.”

Out in the eastern part of the state, alongside the Chesapeake Bay, the Northern Neck Soil and Water Conservation District recently lost its NRCS administrative worker, who completed paperwork to process payments to farmers. NRCS staff members in Virginia who had been fired under the Trump administration have since been brought back after a judge ordered USDA employees be allowed to return to work. 

But the initial loss prompted the Northern Neck Soil and Water Conservation District operations manager, Kathy Clarke, to send a letter to U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Yorktown), explaining how the district is “dependent” on the NRCS relationship.

A member of Wittman’s staff said the office had not received the letter but is in communication with the district.

“This year, I am proud to be supporting six different appropriations requests for the Natural Resources Conservation Service to support Chesapeake Bay programs, including robust funding for conservation technical assistance that will help address common natural resource goals while improving agricultural activity across the watershed,” Wittman said in a statement. “I will continue to advocate for federal funding to support the Bay’s cleanup goals.”

Then there’s the fate of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program that doled out billions of dollars to farmers across the country for conservation practices and reductions in greenhouse gases, including $25 million to the Maryland & Virginia Milk Producers Cooperative Association and two other groups.

At a recent state-convened meeting in Virginia to evaluate progress toward reaching Chesapeake Bay cleanup goals, Martha Moore, Virginia Farm Bureau vice president of governmental relations, asked if practices enacted as a result of the dairy group’s climate-smart program could be counted in the bay cleanup model. 

That prompted Lindsay Reames, the dairy co-op’s executive vice president for sustainability and external relations, to acknowledge that Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities and several other funding sources were “all on pause.” 

On April 14, following Virginia’s meeting, the USDA said it was canceling that program—calling it a “Biden Era Climate Slush Fund”—and rolling it into a new Advancing Markets Program. The announcement offered few details about what that change would entail.

Now What?

Good, the Shenandoah Valley farmer, didn’t vote for Trump. He said that the reduction of NRCS local offices “is a terrible idea,” and that the loss of potential federal funding streams “would be a tragedy.” He said he worries about what could happen with USDA’s Farm Service Agency, which administers drought assistance and other programs.

“I’m OK with being asked to try to do something in a new way, but it’s short-sighted when hard-earned local knowledge is being scrapped in favor of ‘we know best from a distance.’ That is just a recipe for disaster,” Good said. “I think what it’s doing is tearing at the fabric of what a local economy looks like.”

All of this change comes as the Chesapeake Bay’s cleanup goals are getting re-evaluated by officials from Virginia and other states within the watershed, who are grappling with missed goals in recent years. 

Jay Ford, Virginia policy manager for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, is concerned about the impact of the NRCS reductions on bay cleanup progress.

“Agriculture is not only the largest single source of water pollution here in Virginia, but it’s also the sector that has the furthest to go in terms of meeting its bay restoration target,” Ford said. “We’d hate to see cold water get thrown on that effort right as we’re starting to pick up some momentum over the last couple of years.”

Dana Fisher, coordinator of the Virginia Farm Bureau’s young farmer and growing leaders program, said it’s hard to take land out of agricultural production for the conservation practices amid tough times, but he’s heard from farmers who say they’ve noticed less nutrients in the water they’re pulling from their land to irrigate crops.

“There’s still room to improve,” Fisher said. “But I think farmers are willing to work on it. It’s just a matter of how do we get the dollars to where they need to be, and how do we get the projects to work, and how do we make adjustments when it just isn’t feasible.”

A central debate around achieving the bay goals is whether adoption of the conservation programs should be voluntary, which they currently are, or mandatory. A Virginia mandatory if the targets aren’t met by 2028.

Either way, the issue of agricultural pollution has wide-ranging impacts to farmers and the bay, Good said. That was the logic of federal help.

“The fella who’s working the crab boat in Tangier Island deserves to make a living wage,” Good said. “What we do on the land here impacts what happens in his neck of the woods.”