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Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announces up to $720 million available towards conservation projects that will help communities with various water and ag projects

[/title][fusion_text]Friday, February 12th 2016

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and partners across the nation together will direct up to $720 million towards 84 conservation projects that will help communities improve water quality, combat drought, enhance soil health, support wildlife habitat and protect agricultural viability. These projects make up the second round of the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) created by the 2014 Farm Bill. Through the 2015 and 2016 rounds, USDA and partners are investing up to $1.5 billion in 199 strategic conservation projects. Projects are selected on a competitive basis, and local private partners must be able to at least match the USDA commitment. For this round, USDA received 265 applications requesting nearly $900 million, or four times the amount of available federal funding. The 84 projects selected for 2016 include proposed partner matches totaling over $500 million, more than tripling the federal investment alone. RCPP draws on local knowledge and networks to fuel conservation projects. Bringing together a wide variety of new partners including businesses, universities, non-profits and local and Tribal governments makes it possible to deliver innovative, landscape- and watershed-scale projects that improve water quality and quantity, wildlife habitat, soil health and other natural resource concerns on working farms, ranches and forests. Vilsack announced the launch of the 2016 projects at Fort Stewart in Georgia, where he also highlighted a RCPP partnership led by the U. S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities to accelerate and expand forest health conservation practices in longleaf pine forests around six Department of Defense facilities in the Southeast. Through the Southern Sentinel Landscapes Conservation project USDA will invest $7.5 million, matched by $10 million from 20 partners, including the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps. This project will protect and restore working forest habitats while helping ensure military preparedness by protecting open space for training and reducing regulatory pressure on the bases by improving habitat for at-risk species on private lands. USDA is committed to invest $1.2 billion in RCPP partnerships over the life of the 2014 Farm Bill. Today’s announcement brings the current USDA commitment to almost $600 million invested in 199 partner-led projects, leveraging an additional $900 million for conservation activities in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. USDA invested $370 million in 115 high impact RCPP projects during 2015. In New Mexico, a RCPP project with the Interstate Stream Commission and an acequia—a local communal irrigation system—has addressed long-standing infrastructure failures to significantly reduce water needs by improving irrigation efficiency. In Oregon, removal of encroaching juniper was part of the West-wide private lands conservation effort that helped obviate the need to list the Greater sage-grouse on the endangered species list.

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