The $700 Million Regenerative Agriculture Pilot Program That Isn't What It Seems

article + Regeneration

Words by Paige Faye

Published on December 17th, 2025

Location Los Angeles

Regenerative Agriculture Pilot Program

Words by Paige Faye

Published on December 17th, 2025

Location Los Angeles

It’s not that I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth. It’s not that I hate everything this administration does. It’s that they have a way of taking away a mountain, handing us back a mound, and convincing us we should be grateful for the view.

Politically, I’ve always been an independent. I went to university as a political science major; my freshman year started with the Arab Spring. I finished with a degree in Political Science and International Affairs from the University of Colorado, believing politics and policy should be shaped by the best ideas, not by party.

I would love nothing more than to believe this new “Regenerative Agriculture Pilot Program” is an incredible win for farmers and for the regeneration of our food and farming systems. But the more I dug into the numbers, the design, the staffing and the timing, the story that emerged looked very different.

What follows is:

A clear explainer of what this new regenerative pilot actually is (and isn’t).
A look at the multi‑billion‑dollar climate‑smart and regenerative programs it replaces or guts.
An honest assessment of whether a hollowed‑out NRCS can realistically run a bespoke, farmer‑first program.
And a timeline of what else the administration was doing the same week it unveiled its big regenerative headline.

1. What this “pilot” actually is

First, the basics: this is not a new bill. It’s not a standalone “regenerative agriculture act.” The administration chose to carve out about $700 million from existing Farm Bill conservation authority—mainly EQIP and CSP—that Congress had already authorized and rebrand that carve‑out as a Regenerative Pilot Program for FY 2026

The USDA press release and NRCS FAQ frame the pilot as part of Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, with soil health listed as a strategic priority. It promises to “reduce red tape,” “bundle” conservation practices into a single application, and route everything through a new Chief’s Regenerative Agriculture Advisory Council. Farmers apply through local NRCS offices using a consolidated EQIP/CSP “regenerative” application, complete a whole‑farm assessment, commit to at least one approved regenerative practice (from a list of around 15) and annual soil testing, then, if they rank high enough, sign a multi‑year contract.

In other words, most of the plumbing is old: the forms, the ranking, the field offices. What’s new is the branding, the 25 percent carve‑out of EQIP and CSP, and a promise that “regenerative” outcomes will be prioritized across whole farms.

2. What they took away first

Now let’s talk about the mountain that disappeared before this mound showed up.

Since January 2025, the administration has frozen, cancelled, or gutted the main federal programs that were actually paying farmers to adopt climate‑smart and regenerative practices or building markets for the food they grow:

Partnerships for Climate‑Smart Commodities (PCSC): about $3–3.3 billion in grants to 130‑plus projects, designed to run 1–5 years, paying farmers for cover crops, reduced tillage, managed grazing and more through large intermediaries. Existing awards were frozen, then effectively cancelled or forced into a rebranded “Advancing Markets for Producers” framework with narrower farmer‑payout rules. Roughly $2.6–2.7 billion in unspent climate‑smart money was left on the table when the plug was pulled.
IRA climate‑smart conservation add‑ons: additional conservation dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act, layered onto EQIP/CSP/RCPP for climate‑smart and regenerative practices; an early‑2025 funding pause left an estimated $2 billion in owed but unpaid conservation payments and put at risk part of a larger $20 billion conservation pot.

Taken together, that’s about $4.68 billion in climate‑smart and regenerative support either cancelled, frozen or being repurposed—and then, in December, a $700 million regenerative pilot appears as the supposed fix.

On raw numbers, that means the new pilot replaces roughly 15 percent of the prior funding for farmers adopting regenerative or climate‑smart practices. Or, put more bluntly: support for those practices was cut by about 85 percent.

The structure is different too. Under Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities (PCSC) and local food programs, big grants and cooperative agreements went to states, tribes, nonprofits, universities and companies, who then recruited farmers, provided technical assistance, did measurement and verification, and made the payments. The regenerative pilot, by contrast, routes money through individual NRCS contracts: NRCS ↔ farmer, not USDA ↔ big project ↔ farmer. That sounds cleaner—unless the agency in the middle has just lost a fifth of its staff.

3. Who’s supposed to run this?

Here are the upfront facts about the agency that’s supposedly going to deliver a more bespoke, “whole‑farm,” regenerative program:

NRCS staffing dropped from about 11,600 employees to roughly 9,000 in 2025, a loss of more than 20 percent of its workforce.
Many field staff now cover multiple counties, and NRCS was already turning away a majority of EQIP and CSP applicants before the cuts—often approving only a fraction of eligible producers.
The FY 2026 plan anticipates further reductions, not a hiring wave to match the extra “regenerative” workload.

At the same time, the regenerative pilot asks those same understaffed offices to:

Do new whole‑farm assessments.
Oversee multi‑year regenerative contracts.
Track annual soil testing and new outcome metrics.

Advocates are already documenting how NRCS, under pressure, tends to approve larger, more consolidated contracts that move the most acres or dollars per unit of staff time. With fewer staff and more complexity, it is hard to see how this doesn’t tilt even further toward big, well‑resourced operations who can show thousands of acres on paper and navigate the paperwork quickly—rather than the smaller, diversified producers often doing the most intensive regenerative work per acre.

In theory, cutting out grant‑holding NGOs and “middlemen” should simplify things. In practice, those intermediaries were part of the infrastructure that helped money reach smaller, newer and historically excluded producers.

If the federal government is not going to rebuild its own staffing capacity, “direct to farmer” risks becoming “direct to the biggest farmers.”

4. Why the timing matters

Finally, timing. This administration is very good at dropping the headline we want to hear at the exact moment it most needs a distraction.

December 1, 2025: The administration, via the Solicitor General, urges the Supreme Court to take Bayer’s Roundup case and adopt Bayer’s argument that federal pesticide law should block state failure‑to‑warn suits over glyphosate cancer risks—widely seen as siding with Bayer and seeking to limit thousands of pending claims.
December 7–8, 2025: The White House and USDA roll out roughly $12 billion in “bridge” aid for farmers, with about $11 billion flowing to major row‑crop producers hammered by trade wars and input costs, and around $1 billion for specialty crops. The money is structured as one‑time payments that overwhelmingly favor large commodity monocultures.
December 10, 2025: USDA announces the $700 million Regenerative Pilot Program, marketed as a soil‑health and public‑health pillar of “Make America Healthy Again.”

So in a nine‑day window, the administration: backs Bayer in court, pours billions into the most glyphosate‑dependent crop systems, and then unveils a sub‑billion regenerative pilot as its health‑and‑soil solution.

Once again this administration has brilliantly: cut social infrastructure and meaningful programs that were supporting small farmers in regenerative transition, shielded a flagship herbicide from liability, bailed out large monocultures, and in exchange handed us a small carve out of existing programs with zero new infrastructure or credible way of executing said program.

They took away the mountain we were slowly, imperfectly but intentionally building, they took a shovel and put a small mound of dirt aside and said, take this and enjoy the view.

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