Analyzing the 2023 RCPP Awards…and here comes 2024.
On November 1st, USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) announced the tentative awardees of the fiscal year (FY) 2023 Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) competition. The awards were announced just 2 ½ months after the proposal deadline, record time for NRCS. The awards were announced in style, with President Biden making the announcement (alongside other announcements) in Minnesota. This post will review the awards and take a deep dive into what potential RCPP applicants can learn for future competitions.
When the FY 23 competition was announced, NRCS initially made available up to $500 million, split almost equally between Farm Bill funding and the first year of Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding. When the awards were announced, however, it was revealed that NRCS was making just over $1 billion to 81 awards. Why did the agency do this and where did the extra $500 million come from?
There were two drivers behind the increased NRCS investment. First, applicants submitted 163 proposals to the FY 23 competition. This was the second largest number of submitted proposals under the 2018 Farm Bill, second only to 2019. The 163 proposals requested approximately $2.2 billion, which was made possible by NRCS increasing the maximum award to $25 million. So the demand existed for NRCS to increase its award investment beyond the initial $500 million.
Second, NRCS is motivated to commit and expend as much IRA funding as quickly as possible. Republicans in Congress have explicitly stated their desire to move the ag conservation IRA funding to other priorities, whether as part of the next Farm Bill or through the appropriations process. Moving IRA funding forward from future years (though in this case, the FY 23 awards were actually announced in FY 24, so there were no hurdles to pushing some FY 24 funding forward) ensures that the IRA funding is used for private lands conservation. The IRA authorized $800 million for FY 24, so $300 million remains available for the FY 24 RCPP competition (though no one would be surprised if the agency pushes some or all of the FY 25 funding forward into the FY 24 awards, as discussed below).
Doing some quick math, NRCS funded almost 50% of the submitted proposals. The average award amount was around $13 million, which is amazing considering that until the FY 23 competition, $10 million was the award cap. Equally amazing, NRCS funded 11 projects (almost 14% of the total) at the maximum $25 million (and there was even room for one exceedingly small project, a $650,000 urban farmland preservation project in NW Arkansas).
Below are some additional analyses of the 2023 awards:
Avid RCPP followers will know that RCPP funding must be split 50/50 between the Critical Conservation Area (CCA) and State/Multistate fund pools. Typically, there are fewer CCA proposals, making it less competitive than the S/M pool and this proved true in 2023. Out of 163 total proposals, 54 were submitted to the CCA pool. 55% of those CCA proposals were funded, compared to 47% of S/M proposals.
In past years, substantially more RCPP Classic proposals were submitted than Alternative Funding Arrangement (AFA) proposals. That changed this year as the 163 submitted proposals were almost evenly split between the two types. However, more Classic proposals (51) were awarded than AFAs (31), though AFAs had a higher per award funding average. Remember that NRCS is limited to no more than 15 AFAs using Farm Bill funding but there is no AFA limit using IRA funds. It will be interesting to track this metric in future competitions since RCPP is the only Farm Bill program where NRCS can use partners (through AFAs) to help implement the enormous windfall of IRA funding facing the agency. One might anticipate that AFA spending will rise (assuming enough quality proposals are submitted) in the coming years.
Twenty-one (21) projects were funded with Farm Bill funding, 60 with IRA funding.
Below is a table showing the States with at least three awards as the Lead State on a 2023 RCPP project. Note that there are substantial differences in competitiveness between States—Illinois had all four of its proposals funded, while others had less than half. On the extremes, North Carolina got two awards for its nine submissions, and Minnesota got a single award for its six submissions. There were 11 States (AK, CT, DE, LA, MA, NV, NH, NY, OK, RI and WV) plus Puerto Rico that didn’t receive any Lead State awards (of these, only Louisiana, New York and Oklahoma had at least one proposal submitted).
To sum up, for the FY 2023 competition, the CCA fund pool was less competitive than the S/M pool, it was more difficult to get an AFA proposal funded than a Classic proposal, qualifying for IRA funding is a big advantage, and the lead State on any given proposal helps determine its competitiveness.
On to the 2024 competition! All signs are pointing to a January 2024 release of the next funding announcement, far earlier than in 2023. With the Farm Bill extended for up to a year and IRA funding under constant Congressional threat, NRCS appears to be expediting release of the 2024 funding announcement. Importantly, the agency has also signaled that it is likely, once again, to push out year IRA funding forward. Since the FY 2024 awards are unlikely to be obligated until after the 2025 fiscal year begins, as much as all the authorized FY 2025 IRA funding--$1.5 billion—could be rolled into the 2024 competition, which would then have over $2 billion available ($250M or so from the Farm Bill, $300 million from FY 2024 IRA and up to $1.5 billion from 2025 IRA). Depending on how next November’s elections pan out, the 2024 RCPP competition could be the last, best chance for organizations to get an RCPP proposal funded.
