Nebraska NRCS Training Boosts Farmer Enrollees in EQIP Organic Initiative

Project title: Increasing the adoption of organic farming practices through NRCS training

Coordinator: Kathie Starkweather, Center for Rural Affairs, Lyons, Nebraska
Project location: Nebraska and North Dakota

Project links: Complete project report submitted by Kathie Starkweather (7 pp). The Basics of Organic Transition - NRCS training PowerPoint. Expanding or Transitioning to Organic Agriculture with EQIP, an Organic Initiative Factsheet by Nebraska NRCS, May 2011.

Summary
This project was designed to address an unmet need: to provide training in organic practices to USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) staff to help implement new provisions contained in the 2008 Farm Bill. These new provisions offer organic growers access to cost share programs through the EQIP Organic Initiative.

Four organic farm tours supplemented the web-based training curriculum to help NRCS staff better understand organic farming systems.

NRCS staff, responsible for administering the program, while dedicated to natural resource conservation and knowledgeable of conservation programs, were not familiar with the Organic Initiative program. That lack of understanding created barriers for development of successful cost share contracts with organic producers. As a result, organic producers were not participating in NRCS cost share programs. 

We approached this need by designing a web-based training in organic practices for Nebraska NRCS to build fluency in organic systems, in turn allowing them to successfully write and administer contracts with organic growers. The training was held in May 2009. We included organic farm tours to help ensure full understanding was achieved.

Thirty-five NRCS field staff participated in the web-based training, representing 17 out of Nebraska's 23 districts (or 74% of districts).

Agency staff became more proficient in explaining program rules related to organic farming, organic transition, and certification processes.  An interview with the NRCS Program Leader (with whom we worked to arrange the training) indicated that one year later he was still seeing the results of the training in relation to field staffs’ understanding.

In terms of success, Nebraska was one of the top ten in the EQIP Organic Initiative in the country with signups when it was rolled out in 2009.  Nebraska was also number 3 in terms of contract dollars and number 5 in terms of number of contracts, landing in the top 5 in the country. 

Though this training cannot claim all of the success in the number of Nebraska’s organic EQIP signups, contract dollars, and numbers of contracts, it is fair to say that this training, the field tours, and the attention that the training brought to organic practices and policies had an impact.

A final report describing the results of this project was submitted in July 2010.