Fighting for Our Customers

Remarks [with edits] delivered by Arlen L. Lancaster, Chief, Natural Resources Conservation Service, at a meeting of the NRCS National Leadership Team (NLT)

Washington, D.C.
July 10, 2007

Almost 11 months ago I was in this room giving my opening remarks and holding my first conversation with our employees as Chief. And it’s been quite a time since then. I’ve visited 24 states and had a chance to interact with many of you.

I’ve learned a lot from each and every one of you, from our leaders here in headquarters, from the employees in the states, from our partners, and particularly from landowners. I’m looking forward to visiting the other states and interacting with more landowners as we move forward because that really is our core customer base.

What I thought I would do today is to review some of my priorities and then talk about some of the opportunities ahead for NRCS. I’ve been taking three key messages with me to the Hill, I’ve said them ad nauseam here in headquarters, and certainly in your states as I visited.

But, if you’ll bear with me, I’m going to repeat those again. The first one is making sure that we’re prepared and able to meet new challenges as an agency and as a conservation community. Making sure that we can make conservation easier is the second and the third is to demonstrate the benefits of conservation through accountability and transparency.

I’m going to expand on each of those. When I talk about the challenges that we need to be able to rise to meet, there’s a whole swath of things that come to mind, including personnel issues. For instance, 80 percent of our workforce in mission critical occupations will be eligible to retire by the year 2010.

It’s a sobering number when you think about the potential leadership gap, it’s something that we need to make sure that we’re addressing and we’re developing that next level of leadership. When I talk about the future, I talk about these workforce challenges; it’s incumbent upon us to develop that next generation of leaders and for us to embrace diversity.

When you look at NRCS we’re not as diverse as our customer base and we need to and can do a better job. I know that with this leadership, we’ll find ways to do that. Our Human Capital Strategic Plan is a roadmap for us; it talks about recruitment and retention, staff and core competencies, training and efforts to again make sure that we have a workforce that will take us into that next generation, to meet those new challenges.

Leadership is a responsibility that I want each of you to sit down and think a little bit about. What can we do to develop that next leadership generation for NRCS? What can you do to take employees and build their skills so that we can deal with this retirement bubble?

And I hope that as you think about that, you’re going to think about tours of duty here in headquarters. It’s an area where you get a bigger picture, you understand the national impact of what we do and it’s something that’s rewarding. It should be a part of all of our careers with NRCS. Look at your workforce in the states and the centers and encourage them to spend time in national headquarters and I hope you will be champions for that.

When I talk about challenges, I also talk about our business processes. What can we do in the field to make sure that we’re able to meet the new demands on us as an agency, new demands in terms of cultural resource assessment, the Endangered Species Act, working with a new customer base.

You know I would like to see a day when our folks are spending 70, 80 percent of their time in the field because we’ve been able to streamline the paperwork processes and we’ve been able to streamline the analysis portions of our efforts. To do that, we’re going to need to take a hard look across our deputy areas and across our missions, and to recognize that the face of conservation is changing.

As an agency, we will be asked and like we always do, we will step up to do more with less. And I need your direct involvement here; I need your efforts to look at your state, to recognize that with the budget pressures we face, we need to find new ways of doing business, new ways to reach out to our customers, new ways to make sure that we have a workforce that is technically capable.

When I talk about challenges I also talk about our venture goals, air quality, energy—you’ve heard me talk about that before and our role is to help landowners meet their challenges. And as those challenges change, we need to make sure we have the capacity, both in infrastructure and technology, to help them meet those challenges.

We need to make sure that we’re serving our entire community out there. Every acre really counts when you’re talking about conservation, every landowner is important, every acre can have conservation applied to it and we need to do a better job in reaching out to some of those underserved communities.

You know, as we were preparing for this, I asked some folks to look at the Ag Census data and give me some demographics on our customer base. From 1997 to 2002, with respect to the numbers of principal operators, the increases are staggering when you look at minority farmers.

We’ve seen an 8.6 percent increase in African-American principal operators, a 20 percent increase for American Indian and Alaska Natives, a 51.2 percent increase for Hispanic and Latino farmers and a 13.4 percent increase in women farmers as principal operators.

We have this new customer base that we need to reach out to, we need to effectively insure that they’re provided the assistance that they deserve and need. And meeting these challenges requires leadership from you, respect for diversity and increasingly, it will require one of our foundation goals, one of our critical approaches, which is cooperative conservation.

So that’s the first one. The second is making conservation easier and I’ve said this over and over again as we talked about this conference and the focus on technology. I think that’s an important area to bring in, making conservation easier, because in order to remain relevant for landowners, we need to make sure that we give them timely and authoritative information.

We need to have a good base of resource data behind us, we need to have good technical standards so that customers can trust and have confidence in the advice we’re providing, the structures we’re designing, and the practices we’re implementing. And as we do that, we need to make sure that we are customer friendly.

We need to have a user-friendly application process and we need to make sure that we have transparency in our systems so that producers know what they’re getting into. And importantly, we need to make sure that we’re designing these practices for them, not for us, because they’re the ones who are going to make conservation work on the ground.

You know, two-thirds of the land in this country is in private agricultural hands. Participation in our programs is voluntary. If we want to effect change for the resource, it’s through influencing those landowners and to do what we need to do to make sure that they trust us and that they recognize that our programs have the flexibility to accomplish their goals. Through that we will be able to accomplish our goals.

When I talk about making conservation easier, I also talk about making it easier on us because that’s a critical part of it. Our folks are the best in the world and we need to allow them to do their jobs and focus on that. The Secretary’s proposal for the 2007 Farm Bill does that.

Overall his package is one that’s reform minded, that’s merit based, that’s market oriented. When you look across his Farm Bill proposal, it’s a comprehensive bill that really addresses the needs of agriculture in this country from a conservation perspective. His investment in conservation reflects the faith that he has in us.

It reflects the importance of conservation in this country. What he’s proposed in conservation is to streamline and simplify and consolidate these programs, making it easier on us, which in turn I think will make it easier on the landowner. So again, when we look at all these things, all these priorities, they interrelate. And we talk improving our business processes to meet new challenges; that will in turn make conservation easier for us.

The last thing I talk about is accountability, really finding ways to demonstrate the benefits of conservation. You know, when NRCS saw the big increase in conservation in the 2002 Farm Bill, we weren’t the only ones who noticed. The rest of the country stood up and took notice.

We appreciate DoD being here. I think that their presence is a recognition of the resources that Congress has provided to NRCS to accomplish conservation. And what I would say is that with that comes greater accountability, greater scrutiny.

We’re going to have to learn to live with audits. We are going to have to learn to live with increased attention to our financial management and we need to do that proudly; we need to do that openly and transparently. We need our books to be wide open to the world so that we can show “You know what? This is a wise investment in conservation!”

We’re not embarrassed by every dollar that we get or where it goes, we can account for every penny we get and we can show you how conservation is occurring because of that, and how landowners are benefiting. And we need to be very open to that.

But accountability also means quantifying the benefits of what we’ve done. I’m a big proponent of the CEAP program. I think this idea of finding what the impact is out there, what impact we are having, is going to be critical for us as an agency, and it’s going to be critical for landowners. For them to get recognition for what they’re doing to improve the quality of our air, quality of our water, the wildlife habitat that’s out there—and not just from the market-based approaches that we talk about, but just from the sheer fact that they’re facing increasing scrutiny, too.

We need to find ways to make sure that landowners get credit for what they’ve done and through that we’ll get credit for what we’re doing to help them. When we can demonstrate the benefits of our practices in a tangible, quantifiable way, we can show this is a wise investment: you place your tax dollars here, the public as a whole is going to benefit.

We need to definitely go back and look at the benefits of our past actions, but also look at what we’re providing for the future. Those are the three priorities that I’ve talked about for a year and I know you’ve heard them many times, but again I think this is a core focus for us. If we focus on these core priorities, we’ll insure that we have a long and sustained opportunity to affect our natural resources.

I also wanted to touch briefly on some opportunities. My father told me that challenges are all opportunities, so we have a wealth of opportunities in front of us.

Fiscal Year 2007 has been a difficult year. In your states, in the centers, you’ve faced the crunch from this interesting budget we’ve been presented. I’ve had a lot of questions about Fiscal Year 2008 and what it’s going to look like.

I can tell you I’m optimistic. I think it will be a tight budget when you look at what Congress is facing, when you look at the allocations—the essentially mandatory increases—that the committees are faced with, they’re going to have to make tough choices. I think it will be a tight year for us, but I also think we will continue to be able to pay for our people and to put conservation on the ground.

So, I am optimistic. If we’ve been able to survive 2007, we’ll survive Fiscal Year 2008. With the Farm Bill, this is an interesting time to hold an NLT, because we’ve got mark-ups on appropriations and mark-ups on the Farm Bill, all at the same time.

My message on the Farm Bill is this: the Secretary has a proposal that is positive, that we’re going to continue to stand behind, that we’re going to continue to advocate for. I’ve been involved in Congress and Farm Bills long enough to know that this dynamic is constantly changing, and we’re still early in that game.

These bills progress, week after week, month after month. The House has proposed a chairman’s mark which is, you’ll notice, very substantially different from the subcommittee mark. And I think what comes out of the full committee will be different from what the chairman’s mark has proposed. I think that what comes to the floor will be different from what the chairman has proposed.

I think when you look at what the Senate proposed, the bill that passes the committee will be very different. I think when you look at what happens on the floor, that will be different and what happens ultimately in conference will be different. So my message there is, recognize that this is a changing process.

I was not going to touch on any individual aspect of the bills because, again, I want to focus on the administration’s proposals because that’s really what we think is the best way forward. But I’ve had a lot of questions last night, today, over the weekend, about some language in the chairman’s mark, over who administers the conservation programs.

I can tell you the administration believes that the current system is the one that works, that that’s the most effective, efficient way. And we’ll continue to work with Congress to make them aware of that. I hope you understand that this is something we are working with Congress very closely.

We’ll continue to meet with them, continue to share issues. There are some ideas that quite frankly there’s enough opposition to in the community at large that we have a lot of allies going in and, frankly, this is one of those. Those are a couple of the challenges that I’ve had a lot of questions on lately, that I wanted to address upfront.

For 2008, I have reason for optimism but again, these will be tight budgets and we need to look at this continued trend of decreasing discretionary dollars. On the Farm Bill, I think we can be optimistic. I think there’s plenty of opportunity for us in the future and the investment and interest in conservation are there. We’re not going to solve every problem, but if we focus on those core missions we’re going to be alright.

When I first started preparing for this, I thought to myself: “You know, meetings are not my thing. Since meetings are not my thing, maybe I ought to do everything that I would not do if it were my choice.”

I thought about a PowerPoint that I was going to share with you. Many of you have heard my thoughts on PowerPoint. Then I thought about some things that I’m actually going to do. One is, there’s a poem I memorized when I was running my first marathon, because when your mind is distracted you forget about the pain. It’s proved very inspirational to me.

The poem is “If” by Rudyard Kipling. Many of you have heard it. I’ve heard it described as “a blueprint for personal integrity, behavior and self development.” I’ve not used it as that; I’ve used it as something to again inspire me and provide optimism and to help me understand some of these challenges.

The first stanza is one that I want you to keep in mind when you get these constant pressures on the budget and these constant questions from your staff and your partners about Farm Bill and everything else. And the first stanza is this: “If you can keep your head when all about you are loosing theirs and blaming it on you…if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.”

The poem goes on, but to me it’s something that reminds me we need to be calm in the face of adversity. We need to make sure that we are self critical and self aware, but as long as we keep our focus, we’re going to be okay.

As agency leaders, everyone in this agency looks to you—our partners, staff, and especially in these changing times. So I thank you for your leadership, for your example, for the innovation and flexibility you’ve shown and particularly for the dedication to conservation that you’ve provided.

In closing, I want to do something else that’s not like me. I want to close with a short video on customer service because our work is all about our customers. This is something that I hope you all take to heart as a model for how we need to work for our customers, making sure that what we do is for them. [video]

Let’s remember we’ve got a proud history of fighting for our customers!