Sep. 20—PARK RIVER, N.D. — As watershed coordinator for the Walsh County Three Rivers Soil Conservation District in northeast North Dakota, Josh Anderson knows the challenges of implementing conservation on a shoestring budget.
Educating landowners on
ways to reduce soil erosion
and collecting weekly water samples to monitor water quality throughout the Park River Watershed are priorities for Anderson, one of only three full-time staff members in the Walsh County Three Rivers SCD office.
Watershed grants from the federal Environmental Protection Agency through the Clean Water Act have funded a significant portion of the Walsh County SCD office’s recent water monitoring efforts, Anderson says, allowing staff to check for nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, total suspended solids and E. coli. But the change in federal leadership and cuts in the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget have made those funds harder to come by.
As a result, offices such as Anderson’s have to be more reliant on local funding sources such as mill levies. A mill, in tax-speak, represents $1 of tax for every $1,000 of taxable property value.
“The context of this is the importance of federal funding for issues related to soil and water conservation,” Anderson said. “We run a very lean office here, reliant on mills from our county, but those mills would not be enough to make a dent in the issues that we’re facing here.
“A lot of land has been converted into agriculture, and we’ve seen a lot of soil blowing over the past … for about as long as there’s been agriculture here.”
The funding challenges aren’t unique to Walsh County, Anderson says.
Rebecca Phillips, executive director of the Hazelton, North Dakota-based Ecological Insights research nonprofit, said funding uncertainty threw a wrench into a statewide study of soil carbon on ranches that are restoring cropland back to grassland for habitat and soil health purposes. Funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the project is part of the
Meadowlark Initiative, a statewide partnership
that includes the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, NRCS, North Dakota Natural Resources Trust and others to enhance wildlife habitat and restore native grasslands while supporting ranching operations and educating producers about ways to store more carbon in the soil.
Phillips was awarded a competitive grant from NRCS to be reimbursed for costs and materials associated with the project, only to be told at one point this past winter that she might not be reimbursed, even though a contract had been signed and the project was partially complete.
“(USDA-NRCS) program managers just said, ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen to these projects’ — even though we were three-quarters of the way done and we were trying to do our last year of sampling and everything,” Phillips said.
As a result, Phillips says, she had to lay off the nonprofit’s only two employees.
“It put me in a position where I couldn’t with certainty pay staff, not knowing if I would be reimbursed for their time,” she said.
Weeks later, Phillips says, she was told she would get reimbursed after all but now had to finish the project by the end of September. By that time, the laid-off employees had made other plans, Phillips says, forcing her to “shoulder the load” of completing the work on time.
“It impedes our productivity, it makes us less efficient, to (the point) where we can’t accomplish the goals that we had intended to accomplish because we’re not getting that partnership with the federal administrators,” she said. “We won these awards competitively after putting in a lot of work, and then to be 50%, 75% through with it and to have, all of a sudden, all of that called into question — whether or not the government is going to honor their contracts — that’s just never been done before.”
That’s just one example, Phillips says.
“Every one of the government contracts I was involved in was affected,” she said.
In Walsh County, federal funds generally have covered about 60% of the SCD’s costs associated with the Park River Watershed, Anderson, of the Walsh Three Rivers SCD, says.
The watershed grant also “pays for 60% of the producer or farmer’s costs for most practices that are involved in protecting water quality through soil health practices,” Anderson said.
The SCD, which has been working with Phase 2 of a federal EPA Clean Water Act grant, wrote a Phase 3 grant that was accepted by the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality, which administers and distributes EPA Clean Water Act funds in the state, Anderson says.
This year, the SCD expanded the number of stream-sampling sites it monitors from three to five, but they will need to receive the next phase of funding for the stream sampling to continue, he says.
“Even though that grant application was accepted, the funds have not been distributed, and there’s no timetable as to when those funds are actually going to be distributed because of higher-up battles over where to put money toward conservation — or if to put money toward conservation,” Anderson said.
The EPA grants also funded a cost-share program for Best Management Practices — BMPs, for short — allowing the SCD to reimburse farmers who plant cover crops to reduce soil erosion, Anderson says.
Funding for Phase 2 of that grant runs out Nov. 30, the end of the fiscal year, he says.
“Even though we do have an approved budget for the next three years, we can’t guarantee that that will actually be distributed at this time,” Anderson said. There’s “lots of uncertainty, lots of limbo.”
In another case, Anderson says, the SCD worked with counties in both Minnesota and North Dakota to apply for a $5.75 million Working Lands Cover Crop Initiative grant that was funded by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and the USDA’s Climate Smart Commodities Program.
The National Association of Conservation Districts accepted the grant application, Anderson says, and plans were in the works to partner with about 10 other districts in Minnesota and North Dakota to convert 8,500 acres of monocrop fields into full-season, multispecies forage grasses and implement livestock grazing to mimic the disturbances that historically occurred on the tallgrass prairie landscape.
The funding would have provided incentives for historically underserved farmers and ranchers and first-time producers to help build local and regional markets for local grass-fed beef, Anderson says.
With its staff of three full-time employees and two seasonal employees, the Walsh County SCD office was leading the effort to deliver the funding to willing producers, Anderson says.
“Over 75% of those funds were going to go directly to farmers and ranchers in the region to help offset their risk and offset their costs,” he said. “We were just working through the machinations of getting final approval from the USDA to receive those funds this winter, and we learned that the Climate Smart Commodities Program had been cut as part of a broader federal sweep of cuts to conservation.
“Pretty much anything, honestly, that had the word ‘climate’ in it got cut.”
Phillips had a similar experience trying to rebudget a federal contract with NRCS for a hemp production and soil carbon project working with the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Historically “a normal typical request” with federal contracts, Phillips says she couldn’t get anyone to help.
“We couldn’t get any response,” Phillips said. “There was a chain of people who were either fired or resigned, and I couldn’t manage to get these simple administrative things accomplished, which previously was not an issue.
“Well this year, it became an enormous issue.”
Upon eventually reaching an administrator in Georgia, Phillips says she was told the paperwork couldn’t be processed because the word “diversity” was in the contract title.
“I’ve been doing this kind of work for 30 years in different capacities, either as a USDA scientist, as a university scientist or as a private nonprofit dealing with the USDA or other federal agencies,” Phillips said. “This is the first time that we have ever, ever seen anything like this.”
Tree planting efforts have been a bright spot in Walsh County, thanks to federal funds, Anderson says. Two $25,000 federal Community Forestry grants, funded by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act through the North Dakota Forest Service, paid for planting about 70 trees in the Grafton City Park last spring. In Park River, the funds paid for signage in the community arboretum, providing information about the many varieties of trees onsite.
The funds also paid for a city arborist, Anderson says.
The SCD applied for another round of “the exact same community forestry grants” and was denied after the Trump administration significantly cut Inflation Reduction Act funding, Anderson says, including funds for community forestry projects.
Private grants through various conservation organizations and programs such as North Dakota’s Outdoor Heritage Fund can help, but with a tighter federal budget, “there’s more competition for the scraps of dollars,” Anderson says.
Without funding beyond county mill levies, SCDs essentially become “just tree planting services,” Anderson says, especially in rural counties with smaller tax bases.
“When you lose a big primary source for conservation funding throughout the country, then every organization like ours is scrambling to find those exact same other sources of money,” he said. “And so, those sources of money dry up fast. …
“When you lose that federal funding, there’s a lot of belt tightening in other areas.”