Before we dive into the EQIP opportunities, we want to take a moment to acknowledge the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene. Our hearts go out to all those affected across the impacted states, and we are so sorry for the challenges you’re facing. We’ve included links to relief efforts to help support your recovery during this difficult time.
What is EQIP?
Each state gets federal money for EQIP – Environmental Quality Incentives Program. This is how farmers can get cost shares for things like installing water infrastructure, cover cropping, or fencing for rotational grazing.
Since EQIP is one of the biggest sources of funding for small farmers, we always try to point folks towards it. Which leads to the logical question – what’s the deadline? It changes for each state. Makes sense, each state has different priorities and time frames.
Finding EQIP Deadlines
Should still be an easy question to answer, right? Surely there’s a list somewhere on the internet… search “state EQIP deadlines”…. no… “EQIP ranking dates”… no… “EQIP timeframe Maine”… still no…
Ok, let’s have an intern call each state NRCS office. Surely the folks in the agency that administers EQIP would know the state’s deadlines. That got us dates for 25 states and 75 unreturned calls.
NRCS conference in late 2023, I stood up and asked why there wasn’t a list of EQIP deadlines. “Oh, that exists!” came the response, “just go to each state’s NRCS page… wait, no, it’s not there… Isn’t there a page with all the dates listed? I guess not, someone should do that!”
So we did. We subscribed to every state and county USDA newsletter. We set the emails up to forward into a database where an AI scans them to see whether EQIP is mentioned and extract the state and deadline if it is. The system took about 80 hours to set up, and it does pretty decently, we had 44 out of 50 deadlines when we ran it last week. So I hopped onto Google to see if I could fill in the last six.
“North Carolina EQIP Deadline”… 10/31… “Montana EQIP Deadline”… oh, right, they do theirs differently with targeted initiatives… “Illinois EQIP Deadline”…
You have GOT to be @%^($<! kidding me!!!
According to the Internet Archive, that page has existed since Fall of 2022. So somehow, in two years of looking, with multiple people searching (including NRCS employees) no one found it.
Too Long; Didn’t Read (TL;DR)
EQIP can provide funding for work on your farm you were going to do already. NRCS is, like every government agency, so bureaucratic that even the most basic tasks are a challenge. After spending hours trying to create a list of EQIP deadlines, we created a tool to parse emails for each state’s deadline. Only to find that the list we needed existed all along and nobody knew about it.
Weekly Funding Email Alerts
Our email parsing system also checks for funding programs other than EQIP, fortunately, so all our effort was not lost. We’re checking 700+ emails a week for programs you can use to get funds for your farm.
Would you like a weekly email with all the open programs you’re eligible for? Check out our Funding Notification Service email subscription. It’s $3/month, and you’ll never miss a deadline again.