Friday, September 9th 2016
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced the investment of $26.6 million by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) into 45 projects that will spur innovative conservation initiatives on both rural and urban farms across the country. Public and private grantees will provide matching investments, bringing the total value of support to $59 million. The investment is made through USDA's Conservation Innovation Grants (CIG) program, which fosters innovation in conservation tools and strategies to improve things like on-farm energy and fertilizer use as well as market-based strategies to improve water quality or mitigate climate change. The 2016 projects focus on water quality, conservation finance and assistance to historically underserved USDA customers. Approximately 25 percent of the funding announced today will go to projects that benefit historically underserved producers, military veterans, and new and beginning farmers. With funding from this announcement, USDA has invested nearly $173 million to fund 414 national CIG projects since 2009. For this round of funding, USDA received 170 applications requesting more than $100 million, which far exceeded the initial funding target of approximately $20 million. USDA is making an investment of $26.6 million today, which will leverage an additional $32.5 million in matching investments from the grantees, more than doubling the federal investment. In 2015, CIG began supporting the burgeoning field of conservation finance and impact investing to attract more private dollars to science-based conservation solutions. Of the 45 projects receiving funding today, 13 are conservation finance awards. These new projects support the design and implementation of approaches to attract private capital to working lands conservation. The selected projects address diverse natural resource issues such as pollinators; sage-grouse conservation; forest, carbon and corporate chain sustainability; and organic farming. CIG is funded through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). The maximum grant is $2 million per project and the length of time for project completion is three years. The CIG projects are designed to engage EQIP-eligible producers in on-the-ground conservation activities that accelerate transfer and adoption of innovative conservation technology and approaches. CIG awards competitive grants to local and state units of governments, American Indian tribes and individuals. Through CIG, USDA works with other public and private entities to accelerate transfer and adoption of promising technologies and approaches to address some of the nation's most pressing natural resource concerns. Since 2009, USDA has invested more than $29 billion to help producers make conservation improvements, working with a record 500,000 farmers, ranchers and landowners to protect land and water on more than 400 million acres nationwide.