Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) U.S. data at state, county and individual practice level for soil and environmental health, 2009-2018

There is increasing enthusiasm around the concept of soil health, and as a result, new public and private initiatives are being developed to increase soil health-related practices on working lands in the United States. In addition, billions of U.S. public dollars are dedicated annually toward soil conservation programs, and yet, it is not well quantified how investment in conservation programs improve soil health and, more broadly, environmental health. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) is one of the major U.S. public conservation programs administered on privately managed lands for which public data are available. In this research, we developed a multi-dimensional classification system to evaluate over 300 EQIP practices to identify to what extent practices have the potential to improve different aspects of soil and environmental health. Using available descriptions and expert opinion, these practices were evaluated with a classification system based on the practice’s potential to exhibit the following environmental health outcomes: i) principles of soil health to reduce soil disturbance and increase agrobiodiversity; ii) a transition to ecologically-based management to conserve soil, water, energy and biological resources; and iii) adaptive strategy to confer agroecosystem resilience. Further, we analyzed nearly $7 billion U.S. dollars of financial assistance dedicated to these practices from 2009 through 2018 to explore the potential of these investments to generate environmental health outcomes. This data publication includes a complete record of contracts and funding initiated through the EQIP program for a ten year period (2009-2018), on a state, county and individual practice level.The U.S Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA NRCS) maintains a database of contract information for the EQIP program. The research team acquired it through a public records request from the Strategic Information Team in the Resource Economics and Analysis Division of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The dataset includes the classification systems utilized in the analysis of Basche et al. (2020) to quantify the investments in the EQIP program that is dedicated to soil and environmental health.These data were originally published on 12/08/2020. Minor metadata updates were made on 07/22/2022.