Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a series, “Getting Grounded,” that examines the nation's conservation delivery system and the mounting challenges facing farmers in getting the help and advice they need to select, plan and implement practices that can improve water and air quality, reduce water usage, increase wildlife habitat, make farms more climate-resilient, and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
His eyes trained forward and shoulders squared, Natural Resources Conservation Service Chief Terry Cosby sat in a wood-paneled recording studio in the basement of the Agriculture Department’s South Building and pitched his agency as a great place to work.
He reeled off a list of job titles: Engineers. Foresters. Hydrologists. Rangeland management specialists. Soil conservationists. Soil scientists. He expressed pride over his 40-plus-year career with the agency. Then he delivered a final plea to the audience.
“If you want to live our motto and ‘help people help the land,’ I encourage you to consider us the employer of choice.”
The video, which has gotten a few more than 500 views, is among a slew of recent efforts by NRCS to expand its workforce. Finding and retaining employees has long been a challenge for the agency, but boosting staffing levels became an absolute necessity after USDA got $19.5 billion in conservation program funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to implement.
NRCS’s sprawling network of nearly 3,000 offices gives it a unique footprint in rural America. The agency helps to advise, equip and bankroll farmers looking to tackle soil erosion, water pollution and other environmental challenges. As concerns about climate change mount, the agency’s services have been viewed as key to helping the nation adapt.
But it’s one thing to have offices and another to fill them. Hiring freezes, competition with the private sector, retirements and limited candidate pools have at different times in the last eight years complicated agency leaders’ efforts to ensure producers nationwide have a friendly, local face to go to for assistance.
“Their core responsibility is delivering services out there on the ground and they have had a very difficult time maintaining a workload out there,” said Chuck Conner, who served as both USDA deputy secretary and acting secretary during the George W. Bush administration. “This was a problem when I served at USDA and I would say it’s on steroids now.”
Recent hiring efforts, however, have shown results. An ambitious push to counter an 8.4% average annual rate of attrition since 2019 while expanding the agency’s workforce enough to manage billions in Inflation Reduction Act funding has borne fruit. NRCS now employs 11,709 full-time staff, a high it hasn't seen in over a decade, and is aiming to bring on even more with freshly authorized direct hiring authority.
The uptick in staff comes as NRCS works to roll out $19.5 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act for four of its major programs — the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, the Conservation Stewardship Program, the Regional Conservation Partnership Program and the Agricultural Conservation Easements Program — through 2031. NRCS continues to have access to the $3.77 billion in annual farm bill budget authority for these programs.
The influx of new resources brought “exponential growth” in the amount of financial and technical assistance the agency would be able to provide, Deputy NRCS Chief for Management and Strategy Angela Biggs wrote in a memorandum to state conservationists last May. But the new dollars also added to the agency’s workload, since producers rely on NRCS specialists for on-the-ground assistance when crafting conservation plans, designing projects like irrigation delivery systems or buffer strips, and ensuring they are compensated for their efforts to improve lands and waterways.
“NRCS has an urgent need of literally thousands of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics positions, across multiple years, in a very competitive marketplace,” Biggs wrote in the memorandum, which was obtained by Agri-Pulse through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The agency hit its 623-person hiring goal during the 2023 fiscal year and was able to successfully dole out $2 billion in overall conservation program funding, including $391.2 million from the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA gave the agency an additional $3.06 billion in net budget authority for the 2024 fiscal year, which will ramp up to $5.65 billion in FY 2025 and $7.49 billion in FY 2026.
Following the IRA’s passage, agency officials determined they needed a total of approximately 14,000 employees to handle the additional demands expected in the law’s lifespan, according to Deputy NRCS Chief Louis Aspey. The goal is to hire 1,600 this year, 1,200 next year and 1,100 in 2026. Attrition should then pare staffing numbers back down to around 11,000 when the law expires in 2031, Aspey said.
“We realized that money is finite,” Aspey told Agri-Pulse. “It ends in 2031. We had to taper that and plan for attrition and with attrition, take that back down to what our regular level would be.”
Direct hiring authority is a temporary power the Office of Personnel Management grants that allows agencies to bypass certain federally mandated rating, ranking and veterans’ preference criteria when hiring for certain jobs. Using it should help the agency fill 1,600 positions while also complementing the other key pieces of Cosby’s staffing strategy: leaning on partner organizations to fill gaps, relying on help from interns and retirees, and hiring in bundles (advertising for one position and hiring multiple candidates to fill that role in different offices).
A history of ups and downs in the NRCS workforce
The aggressive workforce strategy is the latest effort in NRCS’s years-long battle to keep up with the incessant turnover that plagues federal employers like itself.
Several forces are at play: Young and mid-career employees jumping jobs. Long-time staff retiring. Shortages of specialized workers, like engineers or human relations professionals. Restructuring inside the agency. Philosophical differences between administrations.
The overall number of employees at the agency, including those working in its D.C. headquarters, hovered at around 10,500 in 2015 and 2016, before dropping to 10,231 in 2017, according to data obtained by Agri-Pulse through a Freedom of Information Act request. It continued to fall for the next two years, reaching a low of 9,078 in 2019 — a 13.5% decrease in just three years.
Former Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue put “tremendous scrutiny” over hiring decisions when he took office in 2017, according to Tom Christensen, a former associate chief of operations at NRCS and deputy chief operating officer for business services at the Farm Production and Conservation Business Center, which provides support functions to NRCS and two other agencies.
Christensen, who went through “many a meeting” with the former secretary, said Perdue paid close attention to productivity metrics and the functions of individual employees. This approach, he said, put a “real slowdown” on hiring for a couple of years.
“Even when we got approvals for hiring, it was generally a much smaller amount,” Christensen said. “We were not getting our full request, basically, is the way I would put it. At the same time, you’re losing people because of attrition and retirements and you’re not filling back at the same rate. So you’re losing ground.”
Internal restructuring also accounted for some of the drop in both field and D.C. headquarters staff between 2016 and 2018. Several of NRCS's state-level human resources, contracting and fiscal management employees were reassigned to the agency’s Washington D.C.-based team in 2016, said Kevin Norton, who formerly served as NRCS’s acting chief, associate chief and state conservationist for Louisiana.
Soon after taking office in 2017, Perdue reorganized USDA to combine the NRCS with the Farm Service Agency and Risk Management Agency to create a single mission area for key farmer-facing programs.
The new Farm Production and Conservation Business Center was a centralized office intended to handle customer service, human resources, budgeting and strategic planning functions for the three agencies. Roughly 870 or so NRCS positions, Christensen said, were “realigned” to the business center when it was first stood up, a likely cause for some of the decline reflected in the data.
When Matt Lohr served as NRCS chief between December 2018 and September 2020, he recalls it being a struggle to replace not just the approximately 900 people leaving the agency per year, but to hire an additional 2,000 candidates to reach the roughly 11,000-employee ceiling Perdue had set.
Staffing levels began rising again between 2019 and 2020 after OPM granted the agency direct hiring authority, which Norton called a “blessing,” and continued to climb through the end of 2021.
But the upward trajectory wouldn’t last. The overall number of agency staff fell between 2021 and 2022, as a “tremendous onslaught of folks” left in the waning months of the pandemic, Lohr said. At least 346 were agency veterans who decided to hang up their hats for good.
“That loss of experience was just so hard,” Lohr said. “You’re not just losing an employee, but you’re losing people with so many years of experience.”
The FOIA-sourced data only goes back to 2015, though numbers published by the Office of Personnel Management indicate the NRCS workforce has declined since 1998, when the agency had a total of 13,379 full-time employees. Wage increases and higher contributions to health insurance and retirement plans amid a relatively flat agency budget are likely drivers, Norton said.
Impacts of NRCS employee turnover felt on the farm
At the county and state levels, employee departures can have repercussions for the farmers who rely on NRCS specialists to help them apply for federal programs and implement on-farm conservation practices, even as agency officials work to fill the gaps left behind.
Of 1,715 conservation professionals — including 887 NRCS employees — surveyed by the Soil and Water Conservation Society in 2021, 91% believed high employee turnover negatively impacts conservation momentum. In addition, 78% said a lack of field staff reduced their capacity to get conservation on the ground.
In another survey conducted earlier this year, SWCS CEO Clare Lindahl said that when asked to rank what additional support local offices need to plan and implement conservation practices out of 22 options, respondents indicated the highest level of need was for “more capacity to provide farmers/landowners with technical assistance.” Full results won't be officially released until later this fall.
Josh Nelson, who farms near Belmond, Iowa, told Agri-Pulse his local office at one point went roughly five years without a conservationist. Agents from other parts of Iowa would come into Wright County on six-month “special assignments” to help fill the gap, and office staff in neighboring counties also assisted where they could, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a full-time employee was permanently hired for that position, he said.
Nelson bounced from one NRCS employee to another as he attempted to secure and implement an Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) contract for planting cover crops, making adjustments to his application based on each one’s approach. “It’s frustrating,” he said of the “ping-ponging.”
Mark Copenhaver, who raises cattle in Montana’s rugged Hill County, has seen his Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) contract pass through five sets of hands despite only being in place for three years. He’s noticed a pattern of fresh recruits taking NRCS jobs in the “tough, inhospitable country” of north central Montana and, after gaining a year or two of experience, leaving for opportunities in other parts of the U.S.
“It’s cold and it’s windy and it’s dark and it’s tough,” Copenhaver said of the area. “If they make it two winters, it’s shocking.”
Iowa farmer Beth Hoffman says her local office has seen at least seven conservationists come and go over the past six years. North Dakota farmer Justin Sherlock, meanwhile, has worked with three different conservationists in the 10 years he’s been participating in CSP.
Employee shortages still appear to exist in some areas. Kendria Ray, a field representative for the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board, told Agri-Pulse earlier this year that she knows of some NRCS offices in her state that are staffed by only one person and others where “there’s just nobody there because they can’t get anybody to apply.”
Agency data indicates Texas was home to a total of 817 NRCS field staff in 2015. But as of Friday, that number was down to 730, though that’s still an uptick from the 668 employees reported by Texas state conservationist Kristy Oates in February.
“We’re happy with the hiring progress we’ve made so far, but understand we have more to do,” Oates told Agri-Pulse in a statement.
Click here to see a chart showing state-level changes in staffing between 2015 and 2023.
Salary limitations, onboarding times challenge NRCS workforce efforts
When it comes to hiring and retaining employees, some challenges remain, current and former officials and leaders of conservation groups told Agri-Pulse. Competition with the private sector is one, particularly for high-demand specialists like engineers, Aspey said.
Paying competitive salaries has been one barrier to keeping staff at a number of USDA sub-agencies, as pointed out by Secretary Tom Vilsack himself. NRCS is no exception.
“Low pay is a huge issue,” said Michael Happ, program associate for climate and rural communities at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. He said newly hired employees tend to end up “hanging on for a few months” before taking better-paying positions as private-sector crop advisers, engineers or agronomists.
Civil engineers earned an average of $68,009 in their first year at NRCS in FY2023, but that increased to $77,627 after three or four years on the job, according to Office of Personnel Management data. Salaries for five- to nine-year civil engineers at the agency reached $85,241, on average. An engineer serving 25 to 29 years took home an average salary of $111,183.
Still, it generally took civil engineers at NRCS 10 years or more on the job to reach $95,890 per year, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs as the median annual salary for that profession.
Soil conservationists, another common position at the agency, average $49,444 in their first year. Those serving for three to four years average $63,116, while those on the job for five to nine years are paid an average of $72,378. Soil conservationists at the agency for 25 years or longer hold average salaries of $102,054 or more.
Conservation scientists, a category that includes soil conservationists, generally hold median salaries of $68,750, according to BLS. Based on the OPM data, it would likely take an NRCS soil conservationist around five years on the job to reach that level.
Robert BonnieEven when the agency does find a candidate to fill a job, it can take a while to get them in the field. In some cases, it's taken as long as 80 or 90 days to get an employee hired and onboarded, Undersecretary for Farm Production and Conservation Robert Bonnie told Agri-Pulse.
“Time to hire is an important thing,” Bonnie said. “If it takes us 90 days, we lose lots of people.”
Marc Thalacker, who manages the Three Rivers Irrigation District in Central Oregon and has worked alongside the agency on a number of projects, told Agri-Pulse he’s seen the hiring process in his state take almost a full year, from the time the position is posted to when the candidate is actually hired. “It’s just ridiculous,” he said.
There are a number of factors shaping how quickly candidates can get through the onboarding process, but having sufficient human resources, information solutions, budget and financial management resources inside of FPAC is one. Agency leaders this spring asked for a $4.5 million boost in the FY2025 budget to fund more staff within that division.
Bonnie said the agency was working to speed up the process by streamlining security clearances and extending offers to employees more quickly.
While the billions of dollars in additional funding created through the IRA will test the agency’s capacity, it offers some potential in luring an increasingly climate-conscious generation into public service jobs. The IRA money is reserved for practices the agency classifies as climate-smart. That focus, coupled with NRCS’s mission to improve soils, clean up waterways and make the nation’s lands more resilient, could be enough to draw interest from young people eager to make a difference.
“You’re working on addressing the challenge of our lifetime, which is climate change,” said former NRCS chief Bruce Knight, who served during the George W. Bush Administration. “How do we get ahead of it? How do we stay ahead of it? How do we unleash biological processes to do it? NRCS is pretty darn sexy that way.”
Next week: The benefits and challenges of using outside organizations, including advocacy groups, to provide conservation assistance.
