SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — With Illinois agriculture under a national spotlight due to crop nutrient losses, an expert panel was assembled to discuss the results of the latest biennial Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy (NLRS) report during Soil Health Week. The panel discussion, “Sustaining Soil Health: Conservation Funding’s Impact on Illinois NLRS Goals,” was held online and featured Liz Rupel (Ill. Stewardship Alliance), Michael Woods (Ill. Soil and Water Conservation Districts), Corey Lacey (Ill. Soybean Assoc.), Eliot Clay (Ill. Environmental Council) and Dylan Cook (American Farmland Trust). 

The unifying theme of the panel discussion was that more emphasis needs to be put on state and federal-level funding for farm conservation programs to raise the current level of farmer participation and lessen the state’s agricultural contributions to nutrient losses in waterways. 

“There are calculations that we are losing at least four tons of topsoil per acre per year, and that may be due to heavy rain events or wind erosion,” said Rupel, who is the lead organizer for the Illinois Stewardship Alliance. “We’re not replenishing our underground aquifers if that soil is just running off into neighbors’ fields or into the Gulf of Mexico. We can see that cover crops and no-till practices are really important…in making soil spongy and allowing water to infiltrate.”

Rupel continued by saying that the ultimate goals of the Illinois NLRS — a 45 percent reduction in phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) loads entering state waterways — will likely go unmet due to too few farmers participating in recommended government-led conservation programs. Interim goals, including a 15 percent reduction in N and 25 percent decrease in P loads by 2025, will also be unmet. 

“Our biennial report back in December showed that nutrient levels in Illinois waterways continued to increase in 2021 and 2022 compared to some other baseline measurements. The NLRS partnership anticipates that the strategy is likely going to fall short of our 2025 goals, particularly in P. The current loads far exceed our 2025 goals, and the Illinois Environmental Council and (other stakeholders) have determined that it could be another 200 years to attain those goals based on the way we’ve been going,” Rupel reported. 

The panel discussion then turned to ways to involve more farmers in more federal and state soil and water conservation programs, many of which are currently over-subscribed and underfunded. According to Woods, one way to help the state’s farmers alleviate nutrient runoff is to increase funding that would allow the state’s 97 SWCDs to put more conservationists’ boots on the ground.  

“We need to help producers to identify methods to help them protect their most important natural resource, which is the soil and water that impacts their operations,” Woods said, adding that assistance should be coordinated at all levels of government to address the state’s nutrient loss issue. “We need to coordinate, and government needs to be an active part in this. We need to have SWCDs supporting all the efforts needed throughout the state.”

Funding must be increased for hiring and retaining conservationists to work for the state’s SWCDs, Woods said. “Not only for having these people there, but they need to have a living wage and be paid for the education and knowledge these people bring to the table. We need to determine a way to make sure they have adequate pay and insurance coverage to support these families if we want to have them in our communities,” he said. 

Illinois should put full support behind capturing as many dollars for soil health program funding as possible through the multi-year federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), added Clay. 

Lacey, who serves as environmental public policy manager for the Illinois Soybean Association, noted that the state of Illinois (including NGOs) has invested only $52 million in support of the NLRS since 2020. This, he said, is not nearly enough when compared to other Mississippi River-bordering states. 

“That’s an investment of less than a dollar an acre per year. That’s not enough to turn the tables, and not nearly as much as what we see in our neighboring states where the investments are more in the multiple hundreds of millions,” he said.

More appropriations-based funding for conservation programs is currently in the political pipeline, Rubel noted, including several at the state level. “This is really critical for meeting our goals,” she said, before detailing three bills currently under consideration, including Illinois HB 5225 which increases state SWCD funding. 

The bill seeks to stabilize SWCD funding by bolstering the Partners for Conservation Fund through tax-based appropriations. The bill, based on a similar mechanism that funds Missouri SWCDs, protects SWCD funding from being reduced or chopped entirely from the annual state budget. Under Gov. JB Pritzker’s proposed new budget, SWCD funding would be slashed to around half of the 2017 funding amount.  

Another state bill would increase the funding level for the state’s Fall Covers for Spring Savings program, which offers producers a $5 per acre savings on their crop insurance premium in exchange for planting cover crops. SB 3814-HB 5757 asks for funding for 500,000 acres of program enrollment, a vast increase over the 160,000 acres funded in 2023. 

“We had four percent of Illinois farmland, or around 1.37 million acres, in cover crops last year,” said Woods. “If we could get to just 40 percent of our cropland going into cover crops, we are looking at adding 10.8 million acres. One of the easiest methods we can look at to curb nutrient losses is to simply add cover crops.”

A third state-level bill, passed last year, creates a dedicated funding stream for farm conservation programs and SWCDs. However, a technical loophole within SB 1701 excluded $250,000 in funding for hiring within the Illinois Department of Agriculture. The Stewardship Alliance and other groups are lobbying for funding to bring the bill to life. 

“The funding will help bring the right people forward to help implement more conservation programs,” said Caly of the Illinois Environmental Council. “The $250,000 that is missing was included by the governor himself in the budget issued last week, so that is great. This sends a signal to legislative leaders that this is basically a priority to get done. We want to send a clear message to the budgeteers at the capitol that that money needs to be there.”