Assistance program
Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program
$100.8 Million committed in FY2019–FY2026
- Agency
- Natural Resources Conservation Service, Agriculture, Department of
- Assistance
- Direct Payments for Specified Use
- CFDA number
- 10.913
- What it does
- To provide funding to eligible entities to purchase conservation easements to limit conversion to non-agricultural uses of farm and ranch lands that contain prime, unique, or important soils; that contain historical and archaeological resources; or that support the policy of a state or local farmland protection program.
- Who benefits
- Landowners must be in compliance with the Wetland Compliance (WC) and Highly Erodible Land (HEL) provisions of the Farm Bill and met the Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) limitations in the Farm Bill.
- Who applies
- An eligible entity was any local or State agency, county or groups of counties, municipality, town or township, soil and water conservation district, or Indian tribe or tribal organization, that has a farmland protection program that purchases conservation easements for the purpose of protecting agricultural use and related conservation values by limiting conversion to non- agricultural uses of land, and that has pending offers. This program was available in all 50 States, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Mariana Islands, and the Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands. The program was repealed by the Agricultural Act of 2014 effective February 7, 2014. No new enrollments are authorized after that date.
- Authorized by
- Food Security Act of 1985. This program was repealed by the Agricultural Act of 2014 (2014 Farm Bill), effective February 7, 2014. Therefore, no new enrollments are authorized for this program after that date.
- Program site
- http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/ ↗
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
How the money flows
Committed dollars by how this program's money is paid out.
Grants
$100.1M
99%
Other
$741.4K
<1%
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments