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Conservation funding concerns in Illinois

The executive director of the Association of Illinois Soil & Water Conservation Districts says farmers are going to have less access to conservation expertise due to insufficient state funding.

Eliot Clay says for the second straight year, the state’s 97 local SWCD’s will receive only $4.5 million.

“We’re basically where we were at back in the ‘90s.”

He tells Brownfield a wide range of agricultural groups advocated on behalf of restoring funding to Fiscal Year ’24 levels, which were nearly twice current amounts, but to no avail.

“There are districts that we know have been financially hurting for a long time and are facing the real possibility of running out of cash to cash flow of these positions,” he says.

Clay says less conservation on the ground through local SWCD offices means the state’s greatest resources are at risk.

“They have issued drinking water alerts up in Iroquois and parts of Will County because of nitrate pollution.”  He says, “It sounds like fertilizer leaching into rivers from ag. That is a very real-world example of why this work is important.”

Clay says a bi-partisan proposal that would have funded SWCD’s by creating a new per-acre fee on land taken out of agricultural production failed to pass the General Assembly, but the organization plans to continue lobbying for it in the fall veto session.

AUDIO: Eliot Clay – AISWCD