Farmers for Soil Health Climate-Smart Commodities Partnership

Notice: _On April 14, 2025, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the cancellation of the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities (PCSC). The USDA plans to reform the program into the Advancing Markets for Producers (AMP) initiative. Contact your local USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) for more information on how to apply to the AMP initiative. _

This project proposes to accelerate long-term cover crop adoption by creating a platform to incentivize farmers. The platform will quantify, verify, and facilitate the sale of ecosystem benefits, creating a marketplace to generate demand for climate-smart commodities.

This project plans to support the implementation of more than 1 million acres of crop crops across 20 states. It also plans to enable corn and soybean commodity groups to achieve greenhouse gas emission reduction goals while supporting their farmer members and advancing more productive and sustainable practices, using remote sensing, satellite imagery and other data science techniques while “ground-truthing” with a statistically significant set of soil samples from participating fields and a marketplace interface powered by an integrated monitoring, reporting and verification platform.

The project includes a 20 percent reserve for underserved producers and a survey plan to assist with recruitment.

Broad, clean producer eligibility — and you should read it on farmersforsoilhealth.com, not on the NFWF page this record links to. Individual farmers enroll directly; this is not partner-only or institution-only.

Who can enroll, verbatim. "Any corn, soybean, wheat, grain sorghum, or cotton farmer operating within the 20 participating program states is eligible to enroll in Farmers for Soil Health, regardless of cover crop history." There is no acreage minimum, income test, ownership or tenure requirement, or years-of-experience floor, and no beginning/veteran/underserved restriction gates entry. (The underlying USDA project "includes a 20 percent reserve for underserved producers" — a set-aside, not a limit on who may apply.)

Where. "The participating states include Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin."

What you must do and have.

• Plant the enrolled acres "according to state NRCS conservation practice standards for practice code 340 (cover crop), or an alternate practice standard pre-approved by USDA and Farmers for Soil Health partners."

• USDA farm, tract and field numbers. "Farmers without farm, tract and field numbers can obtain them from their local USDA Farm Service Agency field office."

• "Compliance with USDA Highly Erodible Land and Wetland Conservation requirements is required. If a producer's FSA Subsidiary Print indicates 'not filed' for this certification, the producer will need to complete form AD-1026 with FSA and provide an updated Subsidiary Print showing the status as 'certified.'"

• "Each field the farmer intends to enroll will need an approved NRCS CPA-52 Environmental Evaluation prior to implementing cover crops."

• Documents at enrollment: W-9, FSA Subsidiary Print, FSA 156EZ, CPA-52, plus SSN or EIN.

The disqualifier to check first. "They must confirm with their state TA that they are not concurrently receiving USDA NRCS cover crop payments, including other AMP projects, on the same acres." FSH payments "cannot be stacked with USDA NRCS cover crop cost-share payments," though they "can be stacked with other state or private (non-federal) incentives and cost-share opportunities, as long as the other opportunities allow stacking," and with payments for something other than the cover crop practice.

How you get in. Enroll online through DTN from the program's Enrollment page; then "your state TA will be automatically notified of your enrollment and will contact you within one to two weeks to walk through the enrollment requirements and next steps." Contracts are one-year and renewable.

Status. The farmer-facing incentive is enrolling and now runs under USDA's Advancing Markets for Producers (AMP), the successor to the cancelled Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities. The separate NFWF competitive grant slate that this record was originally built from was for organizations, not individual farmers, and is closed.

Two different things live under this name — be clear which one you want.

The farmer-facing cover crop incentive (open, and the reason a producer cares):

• "Farmers for Soil Health offers financial assistance of $35 per acre, per year, for planting cover crops on up to 2,000 acres."

• "Contracts can be renewed annually for the duration of the Farmers for Soil Health program."

• Payment timing: "The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) will issue payments in the next year(s) following the planting of cover crops in the previous fall." So expect to carry the seed cost first and be reimbursed after verification.

• Verification: "Cover crop planting will be verified by remote sensing and verification document uploads through the FSH Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) platform."

• No match or cost-share is published. Limited to the 20 partnership states: DE, IL, IN, IA, KS, KY, MD, MI, MN, MO, NE, NY, NC, ND, OH, PA, SD, TN, VA, WI.

The NFWF grant slate this record is built on (closed, and not for individual farmers): the NFWF page describes competitive grants to organizations — "NFWF awarded competitive grants to accelerate the voluntary adoption of cover crops on corn and soybean farms in 20 states" to "support and expand technical assistance, enrollment, and education programs." That page publishes no award ceiling, floor, rate or match, and its Application tab shows only a 2022 tip sheet and a 2023 grant slate — no open round.

Note the program's federal backing changed: FSH "is now supported by USDA's Advancing Markets for Producers (AMP) initiative," the successor to the cancelled Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities.

Application information posted here. Information updated as applications open and close.