Cows graze at Nice Farms Creamery in Federalsburg, Maryland.  (Photo by Preston Keres/USDA)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Agriculture will spend $700 million to support regenerative agriculture as part of the Make America Healthy Again agenda, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Wednesday. 

The USDA pilot program for regenerative agriculture — a conservation management approach centered on improving the health of soil and increasing biodiversity — enacts part of President Donald Trump’s administration’s September “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy,” which offered more than 120 recommendations for addressing childhood chronic diseases.  

The pilot program will take funding from existing USDA conservation programs, which provide financial and technical assistance to farmers, with the aim of improving soil health.

“Protecting and improving the health of our soil is critical, not only for the future viability of farmland, but to the future success of American farmers,” Rollins said at a press conference alongside Kennedy and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz. 

“In order to continue to be the most productive and most efficient growers in the world, we must protect our topsoil from unnecessary erosion and boost the microbiome of the soil,” Rollins said.

Kennedy said a September report from the administration’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, which the health secretary chairs, included “the promise to make it easier for farmers in this country, to give them an off-ramp — farmers who are dependent on … chemical and fertilizer inputs — to give them an off-ramp where they can transition to a model that emphasizes soil health.” 

Kennedy has long advocated against use of chemicals in farming.

Repurposing funding

The department will dedicate $400 million to the initiative through the department’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program and $300 million from its Conservation Stewardship Program, according to a USDA press release.

“It’s baseline funding that we received through our budget, so we have the ability to tag that funding specifically for this pilot, and that’s what we’re doing,” Aubrey J.D. Bettencourt, chief of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, said.

Rollins also said she would seek corporate partners for the program using a 2022 law that authorizes USDA to channel private contributions to conservation programs. 

The move “will bring corporate label and supply chain partners directly into partnership” with NRCS, Rollins said.

The pilot program “connects the producer and the work that they’re doing on the farm, granting them the credit for that voluntary action of change in practice on their farm that then can transition into the supply chain, into the marketplace and directly back to the consumer,” Bettencourt said. 

SNAP waivers 

Meanwhile, Rollins and Kennedy also announced Wednesday six more states whose waivers were approved to prohibit Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits from being used to purchase certain non-nutritious items beginning in 2026. 

The effort, also part of the Make America Healthy Again agenda, adds Hawaii, Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee to the list of states that will have such bans. 

The bans restrict which items recipients of the federal food assistance program that helps 42 million Americans afford groceries can buy with their SNAP benefits.

Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and West Virginia already have similar incoming bans.

An oak savannah in southern Dane County that the Badgerland Foundation is working to conserve using Knowles-Nelson Stewardship funds (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

The looming shutdown of Wisconsin’s decades old Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program has put conservation projects across Wisconsin at risk as land trusts attempt to muddle on without the program that has protected more than 700,000 acres of land in the state. 

Without the stewardship fund, projects to conserve 1,300 acres of Northwoods forest near the headwaters of the Wisconsin River in Vilas County, hundreds of acres of “ecologically significant” wetlands in Door County and dozens of acres of prairie and grassland in Dane County could go unfinished. 

“It’s a bit bleak and it’s so disheartening to know that there’s so many beautiful, wonderful places kind of on the chopping block right now all across the state,” says Emily Wood, executive director of the Door County Land Trust. “It’s not just us. We hear from our partners that there are hundreds and thousands of acres that are just not going to be protected if [the program] goes away, and that’s going to have such an impact, domino effect, on future generations.” 

The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship fund was created in 1989 to fund land conservation in Wisconsin. The program provides grants to local governments and non-profits to cover some of the costs for purchasing and conserving land that can be used for recreation, preserving animal habitats and supporting local industries such as forestry. 

The program enjoys massive bipartisan support, yet in recent years, some Republicans in the state Legislature — largely from communities in the northern part of the state — have grown hostile to it, claiming that the program has too often been used to fund the purchase of land up north, depleting local tax bases. 

Republican legislators have also complained that they no longer have oversight over the Department of Natural Resource’s management of the program after a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision last year found that the Legislature had given itself an unconstitutional veto authority over the DNR’s grant decisions. 

Several attempts have been made to save the program from expiring next summer. In his initial state budget proposal, Gov. Tony Evers asked to extend the program for ten years with $100 million in annual funding. Republicans stripped that provision from the budget immediately. 

Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) and Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point) have authored a bill that would extend the program for four years at $28 million per year. The bill also includes a provision that would require the full Legislature to approve any land purchases that cost more than $1 million — a proposal that critics say would be far too slow for the speed at which real estate transactions need to move. 

A separate proposal from Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) would re-authorize the program for six years at $72 million per year and create an independent board made up of members appointed by the Legislature to approve large land purchases through the program. 

But there has been little progress made on advancing either proposal and now conservation groups are trying to plan for the next year without the support that Knowles-Nelson has traditionally provided.

Wood says that her organization is trying to protect the landscape in one of the most ecologically significant parts of the state. The challenge for her group is that Door County’s natural beauty draws tourists and increased development, yet too much development would damage the natural beauty. 

The Door County Land Trust has protected more than 5,000 acres of land in the county and Knowles-Nelson has covered half the cost in nearly every transaction, according to Wood. With the program shuttering next year, three projects totaling about $1 million — all of which scored highly on the DNR criteria — are at risk. 

“The county as a whole receives a ton of money from the Knowles-Nelson stewardship fund, because we are so geared towards tourism and access to natural resources,” she says.  The stewardship fund is critical for Door County to continue “to be the county that you know, everyone expects us to be when they get in the car and come up here.” 

Near the southern border of Dane County, Filip Sanna and the BadgerLand Foundation are working with the Driftless Area Land Conservancy and The Prairie Enthusiasts to protect and restore vital oak savannah and prairie in southern Wisconsin. 

Hundreds of years of agriculture have all but destroyed the native prairies in what was once one of the most ecologically diverse regions in the world.

The foundation has already conserved and gifted to the Driftless Area Land Conservancy hundreds of acres between Belleville and New Glarus that will soon be open to the public for hiking and hunting and used for sustainable practices such as regenerative agriculture. But future plans are threatened by the looming loss of stewardship funds. 

Recently, a tract of about 30 acres became available on the market within an area environmental groups have targeted as important for protecting grassland bird habitat. The Prairie Enthusiasts wanted to conserve the land but funds through the stewardship program wouldn’t be available fast enough. So the BadgerLand Foundation and the Prairie Enthusiasts reached an agreement in which the foundation would purchase the land and then sell it to the Prairie Enthusiasts once the stewardship grant comes through. 

Now those funds are uncertain and Sanna says it could sidetrack future plans.

One of the arguments Republican legislators have often made against the Knowles-Nelson program is that more populated areas in the southern part of the state should bear more of the land conservation burden. 

But the program dying off could jeopardize land conservation in the population centers because land is more expensive there. Dane County’s recently enacted 2026 budget doubled the size of the county’s conservation fund from $5 million to $10 million. That, Sanna says, can be a Band-aid for now. But county and local governments are facing their own budget challenges and smaller counties won’t be able to step into the DNR’s conservation shoes. In many places, the local governments are also dependent on stewardship program funds to conserve and maintain public land. 

“One of the responses we have to the uncertainty about Knowles-Nelson is to try to look to the county level and then some combination of county funding and private donations,” Sanna says. “That might work in Dane County, where we have a relatively strong tax base. But if you go to the neighboring counties around, Green and Iowa and Lafayette and all of those counties, that’s probably not an option.” 

“if [Knowles-Nelson] dies, the next step is going to be, now you’re going to have nice parks around all the wealthy people, but all the rest of Wisconsin that is smaller population centers that’ll just be like towns, rural housing, farmland, private land,” he continues. “There won’t be public land.” 

Way up in Vilas County, in the part of the state where the fight over land conservation has been most heated, a handful of administrative delays might end up killing a 1,300 acre conservation project because stewardship funds will no longer be available. 

The Northwoods Alliance and Partners in Forestry are working together to use federal and Knowles-Nelson funds to preserve two tracts of land west of the town of Land O’ Lakes. Joe Hovel, director of Partners in Forestry, says the project would include trails as part of the extensive Wilderness Lakes bike path system. 

Because the real estate deal on the project got delayed, and the slow speed at which the state and federal government have moved, it’s likely that the chance to use Knowles-Nelson dollars has already passed. 

Hovel says the complaints about land conservation up north discount the economic value of protecting the land for recreational uses. 

“It’s really short sighted in a sense that there isn’t enough respect for the recreational value of this land conservation stuff,” Hovel says. “The value of public access conservation land dwarfs, I mean it literally dwarfs, the value that timber revenue brings in.” 

A report from the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable found that recreation on federal public lands generates $128.5 billion in economic activity every year. All the logging on federal land generates $200-300 million per year.

The Legislature has just over six months to extend the program. Wood says it would be a self-inflicted wound if elected officials allow a program that other states look to as a model to expire. 

“It’s so disheartening to hear that the fund that has had so much success over the years, that other states look to how to fund conservation, they look to Wisconsin’s model on how to do it, and that we as a state, that same model is going to go down just because of partisan gridlock,” she says. “We really just need to keep it alive because funding it in a later year, or coming back and making changes to make it better are way more possible if it’s an existing program.” 

“But coming up with another one from scratch, it just seems like it would be an impossibility. So right now, it does feel like we are just screaming to keep it, just keep it alive. Just don’t kill it.”

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• The $111 billion state budget adopted last month doesn’t extend the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund, but it does include two conservation earmarks totaling $15 million in Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ district.

• The projects include repairs to Echo Lake Dam, which Vos said will save Burlington taxpayers $3,000.

• Environmental advocates are hopeful the Legislature will still extend the Knowles-Nelson fund before the end of the current session. A Republican bill would reauthorize it for four years at $28.25 million per year with additional legislative controls.

Wisconsin’s recently passed budget doesn’t include the extension of a popular land conservation program, but it does include two earmarks for environmental projects in the home district of the state’s most powerful Assembly Republican.

After Republican legislators declined to reauthorize the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund in the state budget, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed five natural resources projects, criticizing the Legislature for choosing “to benefit the politically connected few” instead of supporting stewardship through the statewide fund. 

“I am vetoing this section because I object to providing an earmark for a natural resources project when the Legislature has abandoned its responsibility to reauthorize and ensure the continuation of the immensely popular Warren Knowles-Gaylord Nelson Stewardship program,” Evers wrote in his veto message.

However, Evers didn’t veto other natural resources projects, including two totaling $15 million in Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ district in southeastern Wisconsin west of Racine. Asked why Evers spared those projects, his spokesperson Britt Cudaback referred Wisconsin Watch, without specifics, to the agreement between Evers and legislative leadership that cemented the $111 billion two-year budget. 

Local environmental earmarks in the state budget are nothing new, but the latest examples highlight how such projects can take on greater political dimension when not overseen by civil servants at the DNR and the Legislature’s budget committee, as has been the process for more than 30 years since the creation of the Knowles-Nelson fund. Legislators have allowed the program to inch closer to expiration while attempting to secure stewardship programs in their own districts.

The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund supports land conservation and outdoor recreation through grants to local governments and nonprofits and also allows the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to purchase and maintain state land. The program is currently funded at $33 million a year until the end of June 2026.

Local governments and nonprofit organizations can apply for Knowles-Nelson grants during three deadlines every year, and DNR staff evaluate and rank projects based on objective criteria including local public support, potential conservation benefits and proximity to population centers. 

Despite not authorizing the fund through the state budget, Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc, and Sen. Patrick Testin, R-Stevens Point, committed to reauthorizing the fund and introduced stand-alone legislation in June to reauthorize the stewardship fund at $28.25 million per year for the next four years.

Burlington receives $15 million for two natural resources projects

The two projects in Vos’ district received a total of $15 million in state taxpayer dollars from the general fund and were the only natural resources earmarks mentioned in the state budget agreement between Republicans and Evers.

The only larger natural resources earmark — a $42 million grant for a dam in Rothschild — was added by the Joint Finance Committee and included in the final state budget, though it wasn’t mentioned in the agreement. That grant isn’t funded with general fund revenue, but rather a separate forestry account, which includes revenues from the sale of timber on public lands.

In a statement on the inclusion of funding for the projects, Vos, R-Rochester, touted how $10 million for the Echo Lake Dam will save Burlington residents an average of $3,000 in taxes that would otherwise fund the project. Upgrades to Echo Lake will cost as much as $12 million including $3.5 million for dam modifications and up to $5 million for lake dredging. 

For years, city officials in Burlington have grappled with how to address the Echo Lake Dam. In 2022, the Burlington City Council considered removing the 200-year-old dam but ultimately voted to keep it after residents expressed support though an advisory referendum. The dam needs upgrades because it doesn’t meet DNR requirements to contain a 500-year flood.

The Browns Lake Sanitary District also received $5 million for the removal of sediment in Browns Lake. Local residents have raised concerns over sedimentation in the lake, affecting the lake’s usability for recreation and ecological balance. 

In a website devoted to the Browns Lake dredging, Claude Lois, president of the Browns Lake Sanitary District, thanked Vos for including $5 million for the project and advised residents: “If you see Robin Vos, please thank him.”

DNR spokesperson Andrea Sedlacek directed Wisconsin Watch to Evers’ spokesperson, declining to answer questions on whether the two projects in Vos’ district could have been covered by Knowles-Nelson funds. The Echo Lake Dam project tentatively received a grant for over $700,000 from the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund last fall for development of gathering spaces adjacent to the lake. 

Vos did not respond to a request for comment. 

Other conservation projects were vetoed by Evers, including a $70,000 dredging project on a section of the Manitowoc River in the town of Brillion. Ultimately, the DNR and the Evers administration provided funding for the project after Sen. Andre Jacque, R-New Franken, and local farmers criticized the veto, claiming that they were at risk of flooding without funds for the dredging project. 

Rep. Rob Swearingen, R-Rhinelander, said he was surprised and disappointed with Evers’ veto of the Deerskin River dredging project in his district. He called Evers’ reasoning a “lame excuse, using the Knowles-Nelson program as political cover” in an email statement to Wisconsin Watch. Swearingen said he and Senate President Mary Felzkowski, R-Tomahawk, were considering alternative funding sources, including introducing stand-alone legislation to finance the dredging project.

Swearingen declined to say what he thought about the projects in Vos’ district getting funded. Other Republican lawmakers with vetoed projects in their districts didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Rep. Deb Andraca, D-Whitefish Bay, a member of the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee, told Wisconsin Watch she supports Evers’ vetoes because the earmarked projects did not go through the process the DNR uses to evaluate the benefits of particular projects.

Andraca said while several earmarked projects were likely strong contenders for Knowles-Nelson, without the DNR’s process of evaluating project merit, the most beneficial projects may not receive funding.

“We need to make sure that we’re taking into account that the best, most important projects are being funded, not just the projects that are in someone’s (district) who might have a little bit more sway in the Legislature,” Andraca said.

Paul Heinen, policy director for environmental advocacy organization Green Fire, lobbied for the first stewardship fund in 1989. Heinen said legislators have pushed for stewardship projects in their districts through the state budget process for as long as the stewardship fund has existed.

“The DNR has a process by which they go through to analyze projects, and that’s all set up in the code and everything,” Heinen said. “But of course, just like Robin Vos and any other legislator, if they can get something in the budget, it’s faster and you don’t have to go through the steps in order to get something done.”

In the 2023-25 budget cycle, the largest natural resources earmark was $2 million for dredging Lake Mallalieu near River Falls. 

Heinen said legislators are faced with a conundrum — they claim to oppose statewide government spending on stewardship, but want projects in their own districts. 

“Publicly, they say they’re opposed to government spending in this boondoggle stewardship fund,” Heinen said. “But then when it gets down to something in their district, they are at the ribbon cutting.” 

State Supreme Court decision complicates reauthorization

For years the JFC halted Knowles-Nelson conservation projects by not taking a vote on them, something critics referred to as a “pocket veto.” The Evers administration sued over the practice, and in July 2024 the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 6-1 the Legislature’s pocket veto was unconstitutional.

“What the court said was that the finance committee by going back after the fact and blocking an appropriation that had already been approved by the entire Legislature, and that was an unconstitutional infringement on executive authority,” said Charles Carlin, director of strategic initiatives for Gathering Waters, an alliance of land trusts in the state.

Republicans have said trust issues with both the DNR and the Evers administration prevented them from releasing Knowles-Nelson funds without more control.

Kurtz and Testin’s proposed bill also includes new requirements for legislative approval for larger projects over $1 million in an effort to allow legislative oversight without the pocket vetoes.

The bill’s funding level is below the $100 million per year for 10 years that Evers proposed in his budget, but close to current funding levels of $33 million per year. 

In 2021, the fund was reauthorized with $33.2 million per year for four years. In 2019, the fund was reauthorized for only two years, breaking a cycle of reauthorization in 10-year increments.

A poll of 516 Wisconsin voters commissioned by environmental advocacy organization The Nature Conservancy found 83% supported Evers’ proposal, with 93% of voters supporting continued public funding for conservation. However, most respondents were unaware of the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund.

Funding for Knowles-Nelson peaked in 2011 and was reauthorized under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson was the first governor to approve funding for the stewardship fund in 1989.

“There was a lot of talk initially from mostly Republican legislators who were skeptical of the governor’s proposal,” Carlin said. “But it’s really only a huge amount of money in comparison to how the program had kind of been whittled down through the years.”

In a January interview with the Cap Times, Vos said the chances of Republicans reauthorizing the fund were less than half. 

Andraca said she hears more from constituents about the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund than almost any other program.

“I seriously hope that my Republican colleagues are serious about passing something because it would be a real tragedy to lose something like this that has bipartisan support and has been so instrumental in preserving Wisconsin’s natural areas,” Andraca said.

‘Totally uncharted territory’ for stewardship funding

Carlin said the failure to reauthorize Knowles-Nelson puts land stewardship organizations and local municipalities — the typical recipients of Knowles-Nelson grants — in “totally uncharted territory.” 

Although Knowles-Nelson funding is set to expire at the end of next June, Carlin said local governments and land trusts face uncertainty in planning because they aren’t sure the Legislature will get the new reauthorization bill done.

“Similar to what you’re probably hearing from folks about federal budget cuts … this just totally scrambles the planning horizon,” Carlin said.

Heinen, however, is more optimistic the Legislature will vote to reauthorize Knowles-Nelson. 

“90-plus percent of the people in the state of Wisconsin want the stewardship fund,” Heinen said. “Legislators know that. They’re not going to go running for reelection in November of next year and have their opponents say, ‘Why are you against the stewardship fund?’ So I’m really not worried about it at all.”

Budget deal’s $15 million in earmarks for Robin Vos’ district highlight politicization of Wisconsin’s conservation funding is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.