Betraying MAHA, Senate GOP farm bill would erase progress on regenerative agriculture
Anthony Lacey
Overview
- Regenerative agriculture is part of the Make America Healthy Again agenda that top Trump administration officials often tout.
- Conservation funding for regenerative practices from one program decreased by over $400 million in 2025.
- House and Senate Republicans are trying to cut conservation funding in the farm bill, which would lead to even less money for regenerative agriculture.
Leaders in the Make America Healthy Again movement like to tout their support for regenerative agriculture as a way to cut farm pollution and pesticide use, among other benefits.
But Senate Republicans’ farm bill includes drastic funding cuts that would stall progress made by farmers adopting regenerative agriculture practices, undermining MAHA’s goal.
The practices include cover crops and riparian buffers. These efforts can help decrease air pollution, including nitrous oxide emissions, and increase farm resilience and profitability, while also improving the environment. Although they need reform, these programs help reduce agriculture’s climate emissions and water pollution, add to farm resilience and improve food safety.
Considerable progress had been made in farmers adopting regenerative agriculture practices, thanks to increased funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. But that progress had already started to slide backward when conservation funding for regenerative practices from just one program decreased by over $400 million between 2024 and 2025.
The Senate bill would make a bad situation even worse. The bill cuts over $2 billion from two of the nation’s most widely used conservation programs – the Agriculture Department’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, and the Conservation Stewardship Program, or CSP. The programs give farmers and ranchers incentives to implement conservation practices on their land, including regenerative practices.
Last year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., leader of the MAHA movement, announced the administration’s MAHA plan, which laid out a clear vision for EQIP and CSP. The plan pointed to efforts aimed at “empowering farmers and keeping solutions voluntary by expanding programs like” the two conservation programs.
Kennedy continues to highlight the benefits of regenerative agriculture and why these conservation programs are successful.
Instead, Senate Republicans’ farm bill joins the House counterpart in committing to cuts in funding for these programs – despite their growing popularity.
If the cuts became law, there would be considerably fewer regenerative practices on farms and fewer environmental and climate benefits – and thousands of farmers would be turned away from conservation funding.
Progress is being undone
Much more funding went to farmers for regenerative practices in 2023 and 2024, thanks to the IRA. But that decreased substantially in 2025, during the Trump administration, and will continue to go down if the farm bill cuts are adopted.
The 2022 IRA established almost $20 billion in new funding for farmers through multiple conservation programs. This conservation funding was required to go to farmers for regenerative agriculture. Because of the additional funding, total EQIP obligations to farmers went up, from $1.1 billion in 2022 to $1.5 billion in 2023, and then even higher, to $2.5 billion in 2024.
Many of the climate-smart practices that farmers received IRA funding for in 2023 and 2024 were regenerative agriculture practices like cover crops, reduced or no tillage, and nutrient management.
EWG has identified a list of 43 regenerative agriculture EQIP practices that lessen climate emissions from farming and help farmers become more resilient to extreme weather.
In the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, congressional Republicans retained the extra conservation funding from the IRA, but removed the requirement that it be spent on regenerative practices. Now lawmakers are going back on this promise and attempting to cut conservation funding.
EQIP obligations for regenerative practices on EWG’s list went up in 2023 and 2024 but then dropped in 2025. The USDA under the Trump administration designated significantly less total EQIP money in 2025 at $1.8 billion.
Obligations for regenerative practices went from $415.9 million in 2022 to $546.0 million in 2023 then all the way to $1.18 billion in 2024, before decreasing to $773.6 million in 2025. That means regenerative funding fell over $400 million between 2024 and 2025. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1. EQIP funding for regenerative practices went up in 2023 and 2024 before decreasing in 2025.
Source: EWG, from USDA, Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, Financial Assistance Program Data
Additionally, the number of regenerative practices that were among the top 10 that received the most money went up in 2023 and 2024 but down in 2025. Four of the top 10 practices were regenerative in 2023, while five were regenerative in 2024, and only four were regenerative in 2025.
Farmers received more funding in 2023 than they did in 2022 for 29 of the regenerative practices on EWG’s list. Then in 2024, farmers received more money for 33 practices than they had in 2023. But that dropped in 2025 – farmers only collected more money for 16 of the practices in 2025 than in 2024, meaning that 60% of the regenerative practices lost money in 2025 compared to 2024.
Funding for some of the regenerative practices declined steeply in 2025. Cover crops were the top paid EQIP practice every year from 2022 through 2025. But spending for cover crops went down by half, from $352.7 million in 2024 to $176.3 million in 2025.
There were also three regenerative practices that didn’t get any funding at all in 2025: strip cropping, contour buffer strips, and herbaceous wind barriers. And four other practices got less than $100,000 each nationally: contour orchard and other perennial crops, filter strips, riparian herbaceous cover, and salinity and sodic soil management.
As EWG has found, among all conservation practices, some of these unfunded and low-funded practices have the biggest potential for reducing climate emissions.
The majority of states also lost money for regenerative EQIP practices in 2025. There were 54 states and territories that got payments for regenerative practices in 2025, but of those, 43 had less funding for regenerative practices in 2025 than in 2024. Only 11 states had more money in 2025 than in 2024. (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2. The 10 states with the biggest losses in regenerative EQIP funding between 2024 and 2025.
Source: EWG, from USDA, NRCS Financial Assistance Program Data
MAHA’s pilot program won’t have much of an impact
While the Trump administration claims to care about regenerative agriculture, this analysis shows that funding for regenerative practices actually went down during the first year of the administration.
The administration’s only real action to support regenerative agriculture was establishing the Regenerative Pilot Program, or RPP. But the program prioritizes a small amount of conservation funding to regenerative practices, without providing any new funding for them.
The RPP prioritizes EQIP and CSP funding for regenerative practices, with $400 million going to regenerative practices through EQIP and $300 million through CSP. However, RPP only includes 15 primary regenerative practices funded through EQIP, which is much fewer than the 43 practices on EWG’s regenerative list.
And $400 million for regenerative practices may not actually change how any of the EQIP funding is spent. Over $400 million already went to farmers for these practices in previous years: $775.9 million for the 15 primary RPP practices in 2024, and $470.8 million for those practices in 2025.
Assigning $400 million to a list of practices that were already receiving over $400 million a year means the program won’t increase funding for these practices at all.
The House and Senate Republican farm bills even block the implementation of the RPP as it was designed by prohibiting funding from going to testing soil health or whole-farm planning. Farmers and ranchers looking to access the regenerative market would have to pay for their own testing, rather than get help from the federal government.
USDA conservation funding must be protected
When federal conservation programs have adequate funding, more farmers sign up and put the money toward the most environmentally beneficial and cost-effective regenerative agriculture practices. But the House and Senate Republican farm bill proposals would further reduce funding for the EQIP and CSP.
The Senate Republican farm bill, which recently passed out of the Agriculture Committee along party lines, would leave more than 56,500 valid farmer applications unfunded by EQIP over the next few fiscal years. Many of those unfunded applications would be for regenerative practices.
The bill would undermine efforts to advance regenerative agriculture, running counter to the MAHA agenda.
The farm bill instead must maintain conservation funding, especially for regenerative practices. Farmers and ranchers have been promised this money – Congress shouldn’t take it away.
Restoring funding for EQIP and CSP would not only reduce agriculture’s environmental and climate impact. It would also provide reliable support to tens of thousands of farmers and potentially reduce the costs of ad hoc disaster assistance and crop insurance payouts covered by American taxpayers.
