Vern Evans
One of my favorite and most productive pheasant hunting spots is a Walk-In Area tucked away in a desolate corner of South Dakota. I’ve had good luck calling in spring gobblers on a handful of Voluntary Public Access properties in Wisconsin. Even though I’ve hunted these properties for years, accessing private ground as a public hunter still feels like a special privilege every time.
These types of properties go by a variety of names depending on the state (walk-ins, PLOTS, Open Fields, Block Management), but the concept is the same everywhere. States give private landowners incentives to allow public hunting, fishing, and other recreation on their ground. There’s often funding within these programs to do habitat improvement projects as well.
In short, they are the best way to create public opportunities on private land, and states have been working to expand them all over the country. But that effort is going to become a lot more challenging in many places, at least this year.
This is because the recent farm bill extension does not include funding for the federal walk-in program, which is called the Voluntary Public Access and Habitat Incentive Program. Under normal circumstances states apply for VPA-HIP grants and then use that federal funding to power their access programs. But the last full farm bill expired in 2023 and now we’ll have two consecutive years with diminished access funding.
“Now without any funding, we’re definitely not going to see encouragement among new states to start a program or support a program they just got off the ground,” says Aaron Field, director of private land conservation for the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.
Farm Bill Breakdown
If you haven’t been following the details of the farm bill, here’s a quick and dirty breakdown of what’s going on.
- The last full farm bill was passed in 2018.
- The 2018 bill included $50 million for VPA-HIP.
- When the 2018 bill expired, an extension was passed in 2023.
- That extension included $10 million for VPA-HIP, but only states that were already receiving funds could apply. There was no opportunity for new programs to participate.
- Last month Congress passed another farm bill extension for 2025 and avoided a government shutdown. But that extension failed to include VPA-HIP funding.
What It Means for Hunters and Landowners
Fortunately, a one-year funding gap doesn’t mean certain death for walk-in access. Many states fund their programs through hunting license dollars and Pittman-Robertson money and then supplement them with federal VPA-HIP funds.
And because farmers and landowners typically enroll for multiple years at a time, it’s unlikely that a bunch of existing walk-in properties will suddenly disappear from the map in any given state.
“For the most part, access programs are going to be okay without VPA-HIP funding for one year,” says Shane Behler, the agricultural policy program manager for the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. “States may have to move some funds around or limit recruiting new properties, but they don’t expect a large-scale curtailment of opportunities. However, if we go more than this year without a farm bill, we could get into significant issues if that funding isn’t reauthorized.”
The problem is that for the past two years, new states haven’t been able to get VPA-HIP funding to spin up new walk-in access programs. And existing states haven’t been able to expand their programs with VPA-HIP dollars.
The last time VPA-HIP dollars were allocated under a full farm bill 26 states and one tribe were awarded funds. In other words, that’s $50 million split 27 ways over the course of five years.
“It’s pretty underfunded,” Behler says. “Ten million dollars were allocated annually [in 2020] and states asked for [a combined] $48.7 million per year, so much higher than what was available. And that’s with only 26 states and one tribe participating in the program. There are more states interested in applying, so it will be really important to get more funding to the program in the next farm bill.”
What Happens Next?
What hunters and conservationists can hope for now is that the next Congress gets to work and passes a full farm bill in 2025 that includes increased funding for VPA-HIP.
“Even under a best case scenario, if everything goes smoothly, if Congress can pass a farm bill before September 30 of 2025, USDA will likely launch a new competitive grant process for VPA-HIP in spring-summer of 2026, and get the money out the door for utilization for the 2026 hunting season,” says Ariel Alberti Wiegard, vice president of government affairs for Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever. “That is extremely optimistic and is dependent on everything going right, but we know that things in D.C. have not been going smoothly, so there are a lot of big ‘ifs’ there.”
Leaders in the conservation and hunting communities are asking Congress to bump up VPA-HIP funding from $50 million to $150 million in the next farm bill. And there were two bipartisan bills introduced last Congress that indeed would have tripled VPA-HIP funding, giving conservationists reasons to be optimistic.
“Pretty much everyone likes the program,” says Field. “Lack of access is the number one issue that hunters and even anglers will identify. The program is tailored to the individual states and is set up in a way that landowners in the state want. It’s not some federal program that’s dictating, ‘This is what your access needs to look like.’ It’s a competitive grant program that provides funding to the existing state program that already fits what people need in that state.”
States are using VPA-HIP funding for a variety of creative purposes that help and recreational access and habitat improvement. Pennsylvania uses it to create streambank easements to increase fishing access. Kentucky is using funds to create access to dove hunting fields. Arkansas is paying rice producers near select wildlife management areas and refuges to increase duck hunting access on private fields while improving wildlife habitat. The list goes on and on.
“I would encourage sportsmen to contact their federal lawmakers now to get a farm bill done and make sure the VPA-HIP extension is included ideally with our request to [increase funding] to $150 million,” Wiegard says. “But they should also be contacting their state lawmakers letting them know that they utilize these programs.”
Plus, adding hunting access bolsters rural economies. In 2021 Southwick Associates compiled an economic impact study looking at VPA-HIP access in 12 states. The report found:
- The programs generated an estimated $47.1 million of additional trip and equipment-related spending.
- $5.79 million in VPA-HIP funds were invested, meaning $8.13 were generated for every $1 invested.
- If VPA-HIP investments hadn’t been made, local economies would have been smaller by $83.6 million in 2021.
- These local economies received $25.8 million in additional income (salaries, wages, and business earnings) associated with the 725 full- and part-time jobs supported by VPA-HIP investments.
The Bigger Budget Battle
No matter how effective and beloved walk-in access programs may be, their funding gets tied up in the politics of the farm bill — and the unpredictable politics of Congress.
This was seen clearly in a failed attempt to roll Inflation Reduction Act funding into the farm bill extension in December. When the previous Congress passed the IRA in 2022, it included an additional $19.5 billion for farm bill conservation programs to help with climate-change mitigation and carbon sequestration on private lands. This was a one-time investment that needs to be spent by 2031.
As of Spring 2024, about $14 billion of that nearly $20 billion had not yet been spent. Through some congressional budgeting magic, which I will not pretend to understand, that unspent $14 billion could have been rolled into the conservation title of the farm bill when Congress worked out the extension. It then would have carried over to future farm bills in perpetuity and effectively increased the conservation title in the farm bill by 25 percent.
“We had bipartisan support for doing that, especially on the Ag committee,” says Field. “In fact chairman GT Thompson (R-PA) has been very vocal over the past few weeks that it’s something we should do.”
But this budgeting maneuver stalled over whether the IRA funding should be tied to conservation programs that specifically benefit climate-change mitigation, or if those dollars could be spent with more flexibility. Democrats wanted the funds tied to climate mitigation; Republicans wanted to apply them to conservation programs more broadly.
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And while we wait for the next full farm bill, the USDA will continue spending those IRA funds.
“What that means is that $14 billion is going down,” Wiegard says. “When the Congressional Budget Office next reviews how much money is available under the IRA, that number could be down to $12 billion or $10 billion, so by waiting … the amount of money available to us for permanent conservation funding is dwindling.”
More troubling is that within the new Congress’ reconciliation package, it’s possible that Republicans could try to use the unspent IRA funding to offset other spending priorities around border, tax, and energy policies.
“One of our concerns is that by not pulling [IRA funding] into the farm bill sooner — Republicans have already expressed interest in repealing the IRA entirely — it raises some red flags that this funding could be directed away from farmers and sportsmen if Congress can’t find the political will to lock it down for the things it was intended for,” Wiegard says. “We are hoping that Republican leadership looks at it and realizes that even though [the Inflation Reduction Act] was a Democrat-only bill, that a number of the provisions in there, especially around the farm bill conservation programs, are very bipartisan and have a lot of support from farmers and ranchers in rural areas.”
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