NEW ORLEANS — River Queen Greens, as the name suggests, lies just outside of the levee blocking the Mississippi River, a 20-minute drive from downtown New Orleans. The farm produces certified naturally grown vegetables to sell to local restaurants and at farmers markets.
But summer is the farm’s off-season, which means it’s time for cover crops. One of the fields has already grown a lush crop of sunflowers that reach shoulder height.
”We get a huge amount of plant material over, like, two or three months, and it makes a really big difference. Every year we come back and the soil is so much improved in the fall,” said Annie Moore, the farm’s co-owner.
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, saving money and reducing environmental impacts. They also hold more water in the soil and reduce erosion.
While cover crops have these long-term benefits, farmers don’t sell them, so they don’t make money off of them directly. This is why farms like River Queen Greens rely on the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to pay for cover crop seeds.
But Moore said, in the last year, it’s become harder for farmers in the New Orleans area to get help.
“For a brief shining moment, there was an NRCS representative in New Orleans,” she said. “He was just part of the community here, which was really special to have that as a representative. And he was also very proactive about reaching out to us when there was some funding available.”
NRCS offices across the country, including the one in New Orleans, were impacted by the Trump administration’s sweeping federal cuts. The service lost more than 2,500 employees in the first six months of last year, according to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of the Inspector General.
More cuts could be coming. The USDA’s next fiscal budget takes away about $700 million from NRCS technical assistance which pays for staff. That means cutting another 3,000 employees.
In Louisiana, that would mean going from 37 full-time employees to just five for the entire state.
Farmers push back
When word got around, more than 500 farmers signed onto a letter urging Congress and the Trump administration to prioritize USDA staffing.
“ Farmers are used to really tightening their belt and saying, ‘We will make do with less,’” said Rebecca Bartels, the executive director of Invest in Our Land, the organization that wrote the letter. “But when it comes to these staff members, these are not a nice-to-have. These are a need-to-have. They are our expert advisers that help us get through the kinds of headwinds that we have been facing for quite a while now.”
Bartels said the One Big Beautiful Bill expanded and made permanent a lot of these conservation programs, but they still need people on the ground to implement them.
“It's one thing for something to be made into law, but then it actually has to be delivered, and these are the staff that deliver the programs,” she said.
NRCS offices are one of the main ways that farmers get direct help from the USDA. Many of the staff are scientists and engineers, who not only process applications but also make sure farmers are putting in these practices correctly. They also answer questions such as how to deal with pests and weeds.
Stephen Logan, a farmer in Gillam, Louisiana, grows cotton, corn, soybeans and peanuts. He said his family’s farm has been relying on NRCS’s experts for generations. He also started introducing cover crops with their help and he said it’s been critical to have people actually come out to the farm.
“They look at your cover crop. And then the next year during the summer, sometimes they come and look at the residue that's available and certify that, yes, that cover crop did increase organic matter or the amount of soil cover to reduce erosion from rainfall,” he said.
“So you can't really have those programs and make them beneficial and not have personnel there to assist.”
NRCS are also extremely popular with farmers. Every year, these programs are oversubscribed, meaning there are more applicants than funding. And Bartels worries about application processing and payments getting stalled.
“We saw two freezes on funding in 2025 alone and what we don't want is for farmers to become disillusioned with the government as a funding partner,” she said.
Delays hurt farmers because they pay for practices first and then get reimbursed, only after NRCS has determined they put in the practice correctly. A government shutdown last year led to a delay in payment to River Queen Greens, said Moore.
“ There was a month or two delay. We were supposed to have the NRCS come out,” she said, “and they couldn't make it out because they weren't working.”.
How conservation practices benefit the public
These programs not only improve farm productivity, but they also protect the environment and fight climate change.
In 2022, the agriculture sector was responsible for 11% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Anne Schechinger researches agriculture and climate at the Environmental Working Group. She said NRCS is the main way farmers get funding to do practices that reduce greenhouse gases and other forms of pollution.
“When you have less NRCS staff there to put less conservation practices on the landscape, this is really bad for the public since it reduces the benefits to water quality, air quality and the climate that we're getting from conservation programs,” she said.
NRCS program pay for what the USDA calls “climate-smart” agriculture. For example, cover crops make soil more resilient to extreme weather and store carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere.
In its notes on the proposed budget, the USDA says it is removing money for technical assistance so it can provide more money directly to farmers in the programs themselves.
“Secretary [Brooke] Rollins understands the array of mission critical positions and programs at the Department, and she will ensure that those areas, including NRCS, have the resources and personnel they need to continue serving the American people,” a USDA spokesperson said in a written statement.
The agency’s fate now depends on an agriculture appropriations bill. It puts about $600 million back into NRCS technical assistance, which would mean a smaller staff cut.
“People could always call their congressman and talk about prioritizing conservation spending,” said Schechinger. “And also talk to their elected officials about trying to build back up this NRCS staff.”
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
