NRCS Conservation Technical Assistance — a free conservation plan

What this actually is

A professional conservation planner walks your land with you and writes an engineering-and-agronomy plan for your specific acres — resource assessment, practice design, resource monitoring — at NO COST, and you are under no obligation to enroll in any program afterwards. People pay consultants for a weaker version of this document. Ask for it before you apply for anything, because it is what the applications are built on.

Who qualifies, and what trips people up

Farmers, ranchers and forestland owners. Walk into your local NRCS field office — typically in the same building as the FSA office. Certified Technical Service Providers can do design work too, and where a TSP is written into an EQIP contract the technical services may be paid out of the contract rather than out of your pocket (7 CFR 1466.21(a)).