Announcing the FY 2025 Tri District EQIP Local Fund Pool

The Bennington County Conservation District is thrilled to announce the official opening of the application period for the Tri-District EQIP Local Fund Pool for 2025. This is the culmination of all the input we gathered with our partners at the Poultney-Mettowee Natural Resource Conservation District, the Rutland Natural Resource Conservation District, the Natural Resource Conservation Service Rutland Field Office, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets, the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, the Merck Forest and Farmland Center, the Vermont Community Foundation and most importantly our community.

NRCD staff gathered input from 294 community members at events all over Southwestern Vermont over two years, culminating in our Community Resilience Forum, Community Resilience Symposiums, and Local Working Group Meetings. Our team came together to review every single point of data we could find and compiled a list of resource concerns, ranking questions, and practices we believed, in our best professional judgment, could be successfully implemented on private lands throughout the Bennington-Rutland area. These practices are beneficial in the short term and could significantly and positively impact our working landscape, watersheds, and community. 

Vermont is leading the nation in adopting this unique process, which allows communities to direct how Federal resources are allocated on the ground and what concerns those resources should address.  

If you are a private land steward in Bennington or Rutland Counties, here's how to take advantage of this unique opportunity. 

1. Review the 'EQIP Right for Me' and the Approved Practices List pages and decide which practices could help you better help the land, diversify your farm or homestead, or build watershed scale resilience on the individual level. Our team selected practices that fall into four main categories: Agroforestry Practices, Soil Health Practices, On Farm Infrastructure Improvements, and Stormwater Mitigation practices. If any of these concepts call out to you, we should chat.
2. Click this link to schedule a virtual meeting or phone call with NRCD Staff to discuss your potential project and determine your eligibility: https://calendly.com/michael-bccd/technical-assistance-request.
3. Attend the Bennington Local Fund Pool Open House at Arlington Common anytime between noon and 5 p.m. on August 1, 2024, to discuss your proposed project in person. 
4. Schedule a site visit with NRCD staff Between August 2nd and August 21st, 2024, to do an initial in-field assessment of the project and fill out all the lovely forms linked to this page by following this link: https://calendly.com/michael-bccd/site-visit.
5. File the forms with your NRCD, the Farm Service Agency, and the Natural Resource Conservation Service at the Rutland USDA Service Center

This is a very tight turnaround time for everyone involved; we only received notice of approval on July 17, 2024, that the Local Fund Pools would be approved. At this stage, all we are doing is gathering initial applications. A great deal of work and planning goes into these applications on the back end on the part of NRCD and NRCS technical staff.

However, we want to emphasize that the Bennington County Conservation District wants to ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to participate in this initiative. Landowners and lessors are both eligible to participate, so if you're at all interested, do not hesitate to schedule a chat with our staff.