In the next few months, Congress will seek to pass the 2023 Farm Bill , its major piece of agriculture and food policy legislation that comes just once every five years. Yet annually, we are seeing extended heat waves, droughts, and fires harm the productivity of our working lands.

Farmers — just 2% of our population feeding the other 98% — are experiencing these impacts firsthand and are looking for help. Weather and climate-related disasters caused over $21.4 billion in crop and rangeland losses in 2022 alone, causing significant disruptions to America’s food supply. The farm bill’s conservation programs, which support farmers in making their lands more resilient, are now heavily oversubscribed, allowing just 1 in 3 farmers to access them.

Voluntary conservation programs included in the farm bill conservation title provide technical and financial assistance to farmers implementing conservation practices such as cover crops, expanding wildlife habitat, and rotational grazing on their land. Apart from ensuring the productivity and livelihood of farmers, these practices improve the sustainability of the land by improving soil health, reducing runoff of fertilizer into streams, conserving wildlife habitats, and other important goals.

Conservation practices that build organic matter in soils and thus enable them to retain more moisture will make them more resilient to extreme weather events such as droughts and heat waves. As an example, according to a 2020 University of Nebraska-Lincoln report , “increasing organic matter by only one percent increases available water capacity by about 3400 gallons per acre in a medium textured soil.”

Moreover, building soil organic matter sequesters carbon and enables farmers to generate credits that they can sell into the multimillion-dollar voluntary carbon market , further diversifying their income. Similarly, improving wildlife habitats through programs such as the Conservation Reserve Program can help producers generate new income streams from hunting. We should make it easier for them to take advantage of these opportunities by investing federal funding in popular, voluntary conservation programs.

Farmers understand firsthand the importance of stewarding the land to protect soil health, water quality, and habitats. Their knowledge not only results in better environmental outcomes but can increase yields, resilience to natural disasters, and farm income. As such, these farm bill conservation programs are extremely popular among farmers. In fact, a recent survey from the National Wildlife Federation found that 74% of farmers support increasing funding for voluntary conservation programs. The bottom line is that farmers are all-in on finding ways to implement conservation practices on their land. But the unfortunate reality is that resources are not always available to help all the producers that seek assistance from the Department of Agriculture.

Oversubscription is especially prevalent in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program , one of the farm bill’s top conservation programs, where nearly 60% of 113,000 applications were deemed valid, but only half received funding in fiscal 2021. Another popular program, the Conservation Stewardship Program , has witnessed a steep decline in acceptance rates in the past several years, corresponding to budget cuts.

As Congress works to update the farm bill in the coming months, it should extend and improve the programs under the conservation title in support of America’s farmers. Don’t just listen to us. America’s farmers are saying it loud and clear. They want to be at the vanguard of resource conservation, and these farm bill programs can help make that possible.

Lesley Jantarasami is the managing director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Energy Program. Christopher Barnard is the president of the American Conservation Coalition.