Washington, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to pay for more than 100 conservation projects nationwide is an important step toward restoring water quality and protecting wildlife habitat, EWG said in a statement today.
The projects will be funded through the Regional Conservation Partnership Program, a new USDA program set up in the 2014 farm bill. Half the conservation funding under the program will go for water quality projects.
Craig Cox, EWG’s senior vice president of agriculture and natural resources, said:
The RCPP is an important first step to modernize the way USDA deploys its conservation programs. Focusing program dollars on individual projects designed to get landowners working together is a much better way to make progress on the serious environmental problems confronting agriculture. This is a much wiser use of taxpayer dollars to promote conservation and a break from the government’s failure to effective target conservation funding. We hope this smarter and collaborative approach serves as a model for all government conservation programs.
