Close to 2,400 employees of the Natural Resources Conservation Service have accepted an offer to resign, leaving fewer hands to protect rural landscapes.
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Close to 2,400 employees of the Natural Resources Conservation Service have accepted an offer to resign, leaving fewer hands to protect rural landscapes.
June 23, 2025
Ranchers herd cattle across open range in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico, where conservation initiatives help restore grasslands and protect water resources. (Photo courtesy Ariel Greenwood.)
In the spring of 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officially offered Gretchen Troutman, 49, a job as a natural resource specialist. Elated, she packed up her life in Pennsylvania and moved close to 2,000 miles to a small town in Mora County, New Mexico, where she imagined she’d finally do the kind of work she had long hoped to do up until it was time to retire.
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For close to a year, her job at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS)—the agency division that helps farmers sustain land and ecosystems—was everything she thought it would be. Across vast expanses of arid sage and piñon-juniper rangeland, Troutman worked alongside ranchers, advising them on efficient irrigation for cattle, fencing methods for improved grazing, and federal grants to offset the costs.
“Land is being lost at very quick rates for many different reasons, and so the fact that we were trying to help these people make improvements to their land, but it also improved their lives, that was my interest in [the position],” she said. “I was actually feeling like I was helping people and helping the land as well.”
On Valentine’s Day, NRCS fired her.
While her notice cited poor performance, Troutman said she had only received positive feedback from superiors. Her experience was not unique: USDA and other federal agencies sent the same notice to thousands of “probationary” employees, who had either recently started or were recently promoted. On March 31, after a court found the action unlawful and ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the employees, Troutman got her job back.
Back at her desk, though, Troutman began to feel immense pressure to take an offer called a “deferred resignation package,” or DRP. With agency leadership warning of more mass “reductions in force” layoffs, Troutman worried that she would be fired a second time, and be stuck in a small town with few job opportunities and no access to unemployment benefits.
“It was just this constant barrage of, ‘You might get fired. You might keep your job. You might get fired. We don’t know,’” she said. “It wears you down.”
So, she and the only other specialist in her NRCS office both took the offer.
In an interview in late May, Troutman sounded pained as she explained her decision. “I didn’t want to leave my team shorthanded, [and] I also didn’t want to leave the farmers and ranchers,” she added, expressing a sense of guilt. “For future [conservation] applications, it’s going to be so much harder to do, because there’s just not the staff to go out and do a site visit. There’s nobody there to do the work.”
Across the NRCS, reductions in staff could jeopardize the agency’s work to protect land, water, and wildlife across vast swaths of U.S. range and farmland. According to a USDA document provided to members of Congress and reviewed by Civil Eats, of approximately 2,400 NRCS employees who accepted resignation offers between January and April, only about 30 were based in Washington, D.C. The rest were working with farmers in local offices across the country. New Mexico lost 43 NRCS employees. Texas, Kansas, and Wisconsin—major beef and dairy producers—all lost 100 or more people.
Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency has proposed shutting down more than a dozen NRCS offices nationwide, along with additional county USDA offices where NRCS staff work. In their 2026 budget requests, President Donald Trump and the USDA have also proposed eliminating an entire source of funding for farmer technical assistance from NRCS, which would result in a $784 million cut, although appropriators in Congress have reduced that in their spending bill, proposing a smaller $45 million cut instead.
“It was just this constant barrage of, ‘You might get fired. You might keep your job. You might get fired. We don’t know.’ ”
“On the ground in districts like mine, local FSA [Farm Service Agency], NRCS, and Forest Service staff are being let go,” said House Agriculture Committee ranking member Angie Craig (D-Minnesota) at a June hearing where lawmakers questioned Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. “Waitlists are getting longer, and fewer USDA staff are available to help family farmers navigate the agency’s incredibly popular and impactful programs.”
Rollins, who was asked about staff cuts several times, said that overall USDA staffing had expanded significantly under President Joe Biden—by more than 20,000 employees—and that reductions would save taxpayers money. “No one has been fired,” she said, despite the record of probationary employees being let go. Pressed on the issue, she said: “We are adequately staffed to meet our mission.”
But many farmers and others who have worked closely with NRCS for years dispute that assertion.
From 2023 to 2024, Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) assessed how well NRCS was serving the farmers who are typically excluded from USDA services. One of their main findings, said Aaron Johnson, a policy director at RAFI, was that NRCS can’t serve small, diversified farms without increased staffing in local offices. And that was before the reductions.
“In the states we work in, that staff capacity problem is pretty acute,” Johnson said. “That was the lens we came into the year with: This is already a problem. Then the staff hiring freeze, rolling layoffs, etc., happened, and everything has just been made much worse. We hear this from Congressmen who are hearing from constituents, and we hear this from most farmers we talk to.”
In response to questions from Civil Eats, a USDA spokesperson said, in an email, that Rollins is “working to reorient the Department to be more effective and efficient at serving the American people by prioritizing farmers, ranchers, and producers. She will not compromise the critical work of the Department and will continue to put farmers first.”
NRCS oversees a suite of conservation programs authorized in the farm bill, including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), and the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). Those programs have long had bipartisan support and are so popular among farmers, there is never enough funding to meet demand. That’s because they allow farmers to do simple things to improve a farm’s long-term resilience, like build a hoop house or a manure management system—projects that might otherwise be out of reach financially. All the programs operate as a cost-share, so farmers pay a portion of a project and are then reimbursed for the NRCS portion.
But while the individual programs themselves get a lot of attention, Johnson said, the farm bill gives NRCS a toolbox containing them. “Whether and how that toolbox gets used is all up to that [local staff],” he explained. “They don’t just write you a check. “They have engineers and hydrology experts to help you manage your land and your farming systems in a way that conserves resources.”
Ariel Greenwood runs cattle on 120,000 leased acres in Mora County, New Mexico, where she’s used both EQIP and CSP over the years to reduce erosion, improve the health of wetlands, and retrofit fencing so that wildlife could move through the ranch without harm.
Across the NRCS, reductions in staff could jeopardize the agency’s work to protect land, water, and wildlife across vast swaths of U.S. range and farmland.
When Greenwood was putting together her last application, Troutman came out to the ranch and spent the day with her. She made practical suggestions and helped Greenwood navigate the process. “It’s just a special kind of person who works in that job,” Greenwood said. “Someone who has a passion for conservation and also has a brain for the really technical paperwork side of things, there’s not a lot of people like that. So when they’re good at it [and you’re] firing them, there’s no efficiency there.”
Since Troutman’s been gone, Greenwood said the staff at her district conservation office seem to be hustling to keep up, and little things have fallen through the cracks, like a form she had to resend after Troutman’s departure. But they have been able to keep services running for her so far. “That is completely to the credit to the individuals who work there,” she said.
In a very different climate, near Maine’s rocky coast, Seth Kroeck has been farming 187 certified organic acres of vegetables, small grains, hay, and wild blueberries for more than 20 years. In that time, his Crystal Springs Farm has used conservation funding for multiple projects, including improved irrigation and the planting of cover crops. Currently, he has one contract to put in pollinator-friendly plants around the edges of his fields and another to spread wood chips on his blueberry fields, to protect them from the hotter temperatures Maine is experiencing due to climate change.
Since January, many of the employees Kroeck had engaged with at his local NRCS office are no longer there. “There were two employees that were in that office that I’ve been working with directly on programs, and they’re gone,” he said. “There were two engineers that were helping us on different irrigation contracts, and they’re gone. It’s kind of a mess.” The USDA record shows 32 NRCS employees in Maine accepted the DRP offer.
Like Greenwood, Kroeck said his NRCS county director has held everything together based on her work ethic. “She’s the only employee there, where there used to be six,” he said. “She is answering the phone, she is opening the letters, she is doing all the contracts.”
The loss of the NRCS engineers could particularly hurt farmers, he said, because many depend on them to answer technical questions about project implementation.
“If the work isn’t done exactly to spec for the contract, we don’t get paid,” Kroeck said. “It really means that sometimes there’s no one with the expertise on a particular practice to reach out to, so our agent has had to reach out to other parts of the state or other states to get advice on the specifics of our projects.”
Kroeck’s trust in USDA’s support for farmers has been particularly shaken because his wood chip project was also caught in the funding freeze. By the time USDA unfroze the funding, the supply of wood chips in his area had been diminished, and he could only purchase enough to cover 4 acres instead of the planned 12.5. Now, because of the particulars of blueberry plant growth, he’ll have to wait two years to cover the remaining acres while the plants struggle amid rising temperatures.
Staffing challenges at NRCS offices have not been uniform from office to office or state to state.
At Sunset Springs Ranch, in Nacogdoches, Texas, for example, Marty French said no one in his local NRCS office took the resignation offer. As a result, he’s seen no delays on inspections or his cost-share payments for his active EQIP contract. “The only issue is they cannot hire yet for their open engineer position,” he said, due to a hiring freeze.
On the other hand, wider impacts do exist for farmers relying on conservation programs, because NRCS contracts out some of the technical assistance.
“Waitlists are getting longer, and fewer USDA staff are available to help family farmers navigate the agency’s incredibly popular and impactful programs.”
The environmental organization Point Blue Conservation Science, for example, has long provided wildlife biologists for California NRCS offices to work with farmers on wildlife protections. However, the organization had to pull those biologists when the Trump administration froze grant funding earlier this year, and the situation is still in flux, Bonnie Eyestone, Point Blue’s working lands conservation director, told Civil Eats in an email. “We understand the value and importance of the role biologists play in the field offices in assisting farmers and ranchers to carry out their conservation plans,” she wrote, “and hope to continue providing that service if our agreement is allowed to move forward.”
Farmers also said they’re worried about NRCS offices not having enough staff to help them complete the complicated paperwork involved in applying for a conservation program grant. “Most people who’ve started farms do not have a background in grant writing, and it’s such a specific language,” said Jake Mendell, who grows vegetables at Footprint Farm in Starksboro, Vermont, with his wife, Taylor Mendell. Taylor happened to have some previous experience in grant writing, he said, which helped them apply for EQIP grants to build hoop houses, infrastructure that allows them to extend their growing season and ultimately survive as a small farm. Even with that advantage, Jake said, the process was still a little daunting for him.
“We know how to grow things and maybe talk to customers, but farmers are asked to do a lot,” he said. “You have to be a small-engines mechanic and a marketer and also a biologist, and to add grantwriter onto that, it’s another thing. So to have people whose job it is to help our food system improve and help people get the financial assistance they need is such a benefit.”
In the emailed response to Civil Eats, the USDA spokesperson said that USDA remains “committed to working with producers to ensure they have the support and tools needed to address natural resource concerns and achieve their conservation goals.”
Back in New Mexico, Greenwood said that as discussions about cutting conservation spending and staff focus on how taxpayer dollars should be used, she wishes more people understood not just how NRCS conservation programs help farmers, but also the value they provide to the American public.
On her ranch just east of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, she’s used the funding to help restore land that was degraded long before her cattle arrived. Here, where every drop of water matters, she’s taken bare, hard dirt and created diverse pasture with spongy soil beneath. That soil captures water when the rain falls, allowing it to percolate through the bedrock and into the springs that the nearby communities rely on for drinking water.
She did that work with the help of NRCS and, more specifically, with the help of Gretchen Troutman. “These programs do a pretty darn good job for farmers to make improvements on ag operations that really affect the health of the land and in turn affect everybody else,” she said.
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