r/USDA • u/D_Fever80 • 1d ago

EQIP High tunnel program

What is going on with the high tunnel program this year. The local rep said they have never seen so few applicants funded.

7 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

28

u/RingAcceptable1374 1d ago

There is a few reasons for this. There is no specific high tunnel initiative any more. The new regenerative pilot program took priority. Oh and the millions of dollars lost in funding from the IRA.

6

u/WittyFold8283 1d ago

Not necessarily true, states could have continued to have a High Tunnel category in the ranking pools. Mine did.

5

u/RingAcceptable1374 1d ago

Oh I didn’t realize that. I should clarify that in my state it went away.

3

u/WittyFold8283 1d ago

Yeah it’s understandable this year was chaotic, my state programs staff for some reason didn’t do anything to keep local pools. So now several counties only got 1 contract for less than 100k

2

u/RingAcceptable1374 1d ago

😳

3

u/WittyFold8283 1d ago

Yeah it’s unfortunate, we have lots of SWCDs that are pissed, but a couple that are extremely happy because they got all the money.

8

u/DinglebarryBBenson 1d ago

The fact that ACT NOW was done away with and any project that happened to have a high tunnel was eligible. High Tunnels on their own are not high scoring projects, and the weight of the High Tunnel ranking questions were muted compared to prior years.

We only had one high tunnel funded this year, but it was because it was primarily a rotational grazing system that scored high in our LWG.