USDA surveys nearly 23,000 farms on how they conserve soil and water

The US Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) announced in Washington on 29 May 2026 that, from June, it would contact farmers, ranchers and agricultural landowners to collect detailed information about the conservation practices on their land. The work is the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) survey, run in partnership with USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and nearly 23,000 operators nationwide were to receive it.

According to NASS, typical questions cover farm production practices; chemical, fertiliser and manure applications; tillage; irrigation use; and installed conservation practices.

The agency said the data would help evaluate the resources needed in future to protect soil, water and habitat, identify the conservation techniques farmers use, strengthen the technical and financial programmes that help landowners install conservation practices, and support programmes that protect natural resources while also benefiting producers' profits.

“Responding to the survey gives farmers the opportunity to provide the most accurate picture of conservation practices on their cropland,” said Joseph Parsons, the NASS administrator. “Information from CEAP, which is made stronger by robust survey response, will help inform programs that benefit producers by protecting the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend.”

First, in cooperation with NASS, local representatives of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) were to visit farmers, ranchers and landowners between June and August 2026 to decide whether their operations and properties were eligible. Eligible producers might then be asked to take part between November 2026 and March 2027. NASS would afterwards pass the survey data to NRCS, the agency that analyses it and publishes the findings in its CEAP Cropland Assessments.

Information given to NASS and analysed by NRCS is kept strictly confidential, as federal law requires. The agencies publish only aggregate data, so that no individual respondent or operation can be identified.

CEAP is a multi-agency USDA effort led by NRCS to quantify the effects of conservation practices on the nation's working lands. Its cropland assessments evaluate the conservation benefits achieved by adopting and applying conservation practices on agricultural land. NASS said the new data would support the third set of CEAP national and regional cropland assessments. According to Iowa State University's Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology, which works on the survey, the CEAP cropland survey began in 2003, with national assessments roughly every ten years and regional surveys in the years between.

In the previous stage of the same effort, in October 2024, NASS said almost 12,000 operators had received the 2024 CEAP survey. NRCS Chief Terry Cosby said then that “there are more than 300 million acres of cultivated cropland across the United States,” and NASS said NRCS would combine the survey results with modelling to report on cropland conservation trends and their outcomes from 2024 through 2026.

Photo: Lynn Betts, USDA NRCS / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Sources: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (29 May 2026), NASS Northwest Regional Field Office (October 2024), Iowa State University Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology