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The Natural Resources Conservation Service is another entity keeping farmers in business. The federal agency helps farmers protect soil and water. It has been around since the dust bowl in the 1930s. But nearly a quarter of its staff was cut last year. There might be more losses coming. Eva Tesfaye with WWNO in New Orleans reports on what that means for farmers.
EVA TESFAYE, BYLINE: River Queen Greens lies next to the Mississippi River just outside of the levee, a 20-minute drive from downtown New Orleans. The farm produces certified naturally grown vegetables. But summer is the farm's off season, which means it's time for cover crops. Annie Moore is a co-owner. She points out a field of sunflowers that has already grown up to our shoulders.
ANNIE MOORE: We get a huge amount of plant material over, like, two or three months, and it makes a really big difference for - like, every year we come back, and the soil is so much improved in the fall.
TESFAYE: Cover crops go on the fields between plantings of the regular cash crop. They trap nutrients in the soil and help prevent weeds so that the farm doesn't have to use chemical fertilizer or herbicides. But farmers don't sell cover crops, so they don't make money off of them directly, which is why farms like this rely on the Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, to pay for cover crop seeds. But Moore says, in the last year, it's become harder for farmers in the New Orleans area to get help.
MOORE: For a brief shining moment, there was an NRCS representative in New Orleans. He was just part of the community here, which was really special to have that.
TESFAYE: In the first six months of last year, NRCS lost more than 2,500 of its 12,000 employees, and there was a threat of more cuts when the USDA proposed to eliminate another 3,000 employees next year. Here in Louisiana, that would have meant going from 37 full-time employees to just five for the entire state. The USDA said in a statement it would ensure NRCS still had the resources and personnel it needed, even with the cuts. But farmers weren't buying it. Stephen Logan grows cotton, corn, soybeans and peanuts in northwest Louisiana. He says his family's farm has been relying on NRCS' experts for generations.
STEPHEN LOGAN: It's important to have personnel, you know, available that know your farm and that can come and look at your farm because just to get on a computer and click on practices, I mean, there's a lot more to it than that.
TESFAYE: Much of NRCS is made up of scientists and engineers. A big part of their jobs is visiting farms to make sure the conservation practices are done right. Andy Brown is the public policy director at the Louisiana Farm Bureau, which advocates for farmers. He says a lot of that institutional knowledge has been lost, not just in the last two years, but over the last 20 as people have retired.
ANDY BROWN: It's not as easy for NRCS to just go get Joe Blow (ph) off the street and expect them to be able to provide technical assistance to farmers who are already pretty well experts in those things.
TESFAYE: NRCS offices are one of the main ways that farmers work with the USDA. Its programs are also popular with farmers, and Brown says they've called their representatives about the cuts.
BROWN: We have heard from our membership that there has been difficulty getting the assistance they're looking for in a timely fashion. So we have fought back. We have a voice. We think that's a little deeper cut than we really want to see.
TESFAYE: The agency's fate now depends on an agriculture appropriations bill. It puts about $600 million back into NRCS, which would mean a smaller staff cut. It still needs to clear the Senate.
For NPR News, I'm Eva Tesfaye in New Orleans.
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