Congress has introduced the Forest Conservation Easement Program (FCEP) Act of 2023. The bipartisan legislation will fill a critical gap and help keep private forestland intact and sustainably managed for timber, allowing the lands to continue providing numerous benefits to rural and urban communities. The legislation was introduced with the goal of including the legislation in the 2023 Farm Bill.
While it seems like just yesterday that the Farm Bill was last reauthorized, the Land Trust Alliance has been out front preparing for the 2023 reauthorization cycle.
The Alliance worked alongside our members, most notably the 100+ members of our Farm Bill Working Group, to develop a series of targeted recommendations to streamline program administration and implementation while ensuring that critical conservation dollars are available to preserve farmland, ranchland and forested land across the country.
Through stakeholder meetings with our land trust members, who work hand in hand with landowners to conserve and restore working lands, the Alliance has developed the following targeted recommendations to streamline program administration and implementation, ensuring critical conservation dollars fund good projects. Click each recommendation below to learn more.
With the Farm Bill reauthorization on the horizon, the Alliance is leading the charge to ensure land trust community needs are top of mind for policymakers.
The Farm Bill Toolkit is your one-stop shop for Alliance resources and tools to advocate for sound Farm Bill policies that help you support landowners in conserving the farmland, ranchland, forestland and wetlands that are critical to providing a healthy future for all people.
On December 20, 2018, the 2018 Farm Bill was signed into law. The Land Trust Alliance played a significant role in advocating for provisions that will result in conservation of lands across the United States. On behalf of our members we secured provisions that will streamline the Agricultural Land Easement program to make it more effective and more efficient and, most importantly increased funding for the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program by $2 billion over 10 years.
Our success would have not been possible without our members who worked collaboratively to develop a set of Farm Bill recommendations that are good for our community and for private land conservation. Your efforts made all the difference. Moving forward, we will continue to involve our members through the rulemaking process and with monitoring implementation. Together with many land trust professionals, the Alliance will achieve the best possible result for land conservation across the United States.
The 2018 Farm Bill adopts many of the Alliance’s highest priorities including:
View a comparison of the Alliance’s 2018 Farm Bill recommendations and the final bill.
