Tim Wells is a busy guy. His day job is working at First National Bank in Paragould as an ag loan officer. In the evenings, he does excavation work and operates his own gravel quarry. And on top of that, he runs a generational cattle farm called Sugar Creek Ranch.
Wells says it was through his excavation work that he first started working with the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
"So I took a hill farm and I went up to my NRCS office and visited with our county supervisor there, and we drew out a plan."
Wells says the two of them worked on ways to maximize production for his sheep farm. They implemented an automatic watering system and cross-fencing that let the animals do rotational grazing. This plan kept his animals healthier and made the land healthier, too.
"It's one of those things I would have not been able to do had they not helped with that."
NRCS staff made it possible for Wells to come up with this plan through staffing in his county, and helped him subsidize some of the costs of the upgrades.
"This will be the lifetime improvements for my farm with the things that they've helped me do with this cross-fencing and these automatic waters. I had an investment on the front end, but it's going to be a lifetime of improvements for that farm."
Agriculture is Arkansas's largest industry. The Farm Bureau of Arkansas says farmers and ranchers add more than $20 billion to the state's economy annually. But farming in Arkansas is also at a crossroads. There were more farm bankruptcies in Arkansas last year than in any other state — 33 — and it's unclear how much help is on the way from the federal government.
"NRCS lost 22% of its staff last year overall, and that amounted to 2,673 employees between January and June 2025."
That's Rebecca Bartels, the executive director of Invest in Our Land. It's a national advocacy organization that works with farmers to bring more awareness to the roles of agriculture and conservation.
That time frame she mentions — January to June 2025 — was when Elon Musk worked alongside the Trump administration to cut the budgets and staff of almost every federal agency, from USAID to USDA.
"Most of those employees actually left voluntarily because they believed that their positions are going to be cut."
A review from the USDA Office of Inspector General found that during that time frame, more than 20,000 USDA employees left, which includes those 2,600-plus employees with the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Bartels says that people in local NRCS offices are not just paper pushers.
"These are very much people that walk the fields with farmers across the state and understand how their operations work and what can be done to help them."
Wells says he's spoken with a farmer in Louisiana who was feeling those cuts.
"In his area, it's like one office for seven parishes, which would be like seven counties here. And the problem that he's having is trying to get — the guys are great — but trying to get them there when they have time, they're spread so thin, and the time is so little. By the time they travel across seven counties to get to him, when they get to the farm, they really don't have a whole lot of time because they have to get back so they can get off work."
Bartels points out that the agriculture portion of the One Big Beautiful Bill provides substantial funding. Congress itself describes it as the largest investment in American farmers in at least a generation.
"The funding for the farmers is there. But another line item, which is the conservation technical assistance — which is the people that actually deliver that funding to the farmers in the form of programs — that line has been already down 20% and is now proposed to be cut 80-plus% more."
If the USDA's proposed fiscal year 2027 budget goes through, issues like the one Wells describes in Louisiana could be commonplace across the nation. The budget would cut conservation technical assistance by more than $738 million. And as Bartels points out, that would lead to even more staff reduction in NRCS offices. Nearly every state would be left with fewer than 10 NRCS employees. That includes Arkansas, which would go from 56 down to just 8.
Bartels says when it comes to the realities of Mother Nature and weather, being short-staffed can make or break a farm.
"Arkansas, in particular, was hit by 30 confirmed weather disaster events in the period of 2020 to 2024. And if you can imagine being a farmer with so much out of your control, and there is a dedicated office there to support you, and you've been hit with one of these massive events — you want to know what you can do to improve your resiliency to it in the future. You call in and no one's in office that day. It can take weeks to get back to you. That's not something that farmers are able to shoulder in the moment that they're sitting in right now. Margins are extraordinarily thin for farmers across the country, especially in Arkansas. Input prices are through the roof. Commodity prices are wildly volatile. There is limitation in access to labor right now. And so to take away some of the people that are most critical to helping them manage through these kinds of things is devastating."
She says the downstream effects of this could potentially impact the economy, too.
"If we think about the consumers that are listening and go to the grocery store on a day-to-day basis or buy clothes made of cotton — everyone is concerned about prices right now, and access to U.S.-made food, access to fiber to fuel. These are matters of national security. So it's one thing to think about a farmer who's had an operation in their family for generations losing it and the devastation of that. And it's another thing to think about everybody else that's affected by that. When farms, when farmland ceases to be farmland, when farms consolidate and prices continue to go up — it's a ripple effect that is truly a matter of national security."
Wells says what worries him the most is that the general public doesn't have a good understanding of the role of agriculture in both the state of Arkansas and in the U.S. broadly.
"So many people hear that, the government's doing this for a farmer, and they think, well, they're not doing it for me. And they do not understand the dynamics of food policy and having cheap food. And the reason that we depend on the government is because they use our products so many times in negotiations with other countries."
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently announced a new initiative called One Farmer, One File. The idea is to create a single, streamlined record that follows a farmer regardless of what resources or services they are seeking within the USDA, and reduce the administrative burden for farmers. Bartels says she has not heard anyone raise opposition to this program.
"It would be wonderful for farmers to have access to tools and platforms that would allow them to submit applications, review the status of their application, submit evidence that a practice has been implemented. Those kinds of tools are useful and should be brought into 2026, of course. But that's actually not a replacement for the staff that are on the ground and actually walking the field and saying, 'I see you have this problem with your groundwater. I see you have this problem with this pest. Here is a practice that could help you.' And then matching that practice — individual to that farm's need — to the program that would allow them to offset the cost of getting that practice in the ground."
Moore: Yeah. So it sounds like you're saying this is a tool that could streamline the process, but really the loss of a person is more consequential.
"It's 100% more consequential. These are not low-level workers. These are soil health specialists. These are field engineers. These are highly trained professionals that an app that submits and tells you the status of paperwork cannot replace."
Both Bartels and Wells commend U.S. Sen. John Boozman for his work on agriculture policy. Bartels describes him as someone who championed and locked in long-term conservation funding in the One Big Beautiful Bill.
"But what's really important to understand is that what's made into law can only be effective if it's delivered. And so it's incredible that they put this funding through, made it permanent and expanded it. But that funding can only get to farmers if the staff are there to deliver it. And without those staff, applications pile up and funding is delayed, and farmers could become so disillusioned that the demand that exists for these programs wanes and this funding ultimately gets clawed back."
We reached out to Sen. Boozman for our reporting. He was unavailable for an interview, but provided a statement that says, in part, that it's critical for Arkansas farmers to have access to the expertise of USDA personnel. He also says he will keep working to ensure the families and businesses in these communities have the support they need. He did not comment specifically on the USDA's proposed budget or the cuts to conservation technical assistance.
Wells says he recently traveled to Washington to speak with Sen. Boozman and other members of Congress.
"Trying to let them understand that we don't need these staffing cuts and we don't need our expertise leaving. One of the things they need to understand is we need these people probably now more so than we have in the past, because the savings that when the conservation district comes out and helps us do something, it in the long term will save a lot of input cost and it will save a lot of money."
And with the cost of goods and money front of mind for many Americans right now, he worries about what's to come.
"Our country is not going to have cheap food if we don't have our farmers out there doing it. And that's going to be a big blow to everybody."
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