Training to Meet Our Objectives

Remarks by Bruce I. Knight, Chief,
Natural Resources Conservation Service,
at the Tenth Annual Training Conference
of the National Organization
of Professional Black
NRCS Employees

Arlington, TX
December 3, 2002

Thank you for your kind words. Good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to be here for the Tenth Annual Training Conference of the National Organization of Black Professional NRCS Employees. I want to recognize Bill Hunt on completion of his term as president and his reelection to another term as president. And to thank all the people who made this training conference possible. Finally, I understand there are a number of students here from the 1890 land grant institutions. Welcome to the conference. I’m sure you will find the conference informative and that we will learn from your presentation related to your work experiences with NRCS and other agencies.

It’s great that the National Organization of Professional Black NRCS Employees has such a long track record of promoting and providing training for its members. Training is more important every year, as we come to rely more on technology, both to develop our scientific base and to make it available to our employees and the public through e-government. When our customers can get all our latest technical information on line, we have to keep up to date, or we will no longer be perceived as the experts on private land conservation.

The training you are offering this week from the National Employee Development Center will go a long way toward keeping you current and on the cutting edge in such areas as water quality, nutrient and pest management, waste management, and conservation planning. I notice you also have sessions on our state-of-the-art computer tools, including the Customer Service Toolkit, the Electronic Field Office Technical Guide, the Soil Conditioning Index, the Manure Management Planner, global positioning systems, and geographic information systems.

While I am talking about training, I want to mention that I have asked Regional Conservationist Charles Adams to head up a team that will conduct a training review for NRCS to determine our needs during farm bill implementation and beyond. It is important that we have the right training for the right people when they need it. Your conference this week is a good example of that concept, and I congratulate you for your initiative and energy in having this conference every year.


Civil Rights Policy Statement

I would like to begin today by talking a bit about the NRCS Civil Rights Policy Statement. Every employee should have received a copy of this policy by now. In working with Andrew Johnson to formulate that statement – and in signing it – I came to a whole new appreciation of my role as Chief in the civil rights and equal employment opportunity programs here at NRCS.

Many of you may know that being Chief of NRCS is my first job with a government agency. My life’s work has consisted of being a farmer and rancher, working on Congressional Staffs, and working for Commodity groups. Each of these stages in my life has had strong conservation aspects, but none of them really prepared me for civil rights issues.

Let me read to you two sentences from the Civil Rights Policy Statement: “I expect everyone associated with NRCS to comply with every aspect of our Nation’s civil rights laws and policies. Those who do not will be held accountable through appropriate disciplinary action.”

I stand behind every one of those words – not because they are laws and policies, but because they are the right thing to do.

I will work hard to make sure NRCS lives up to the commitment represented by this policy. As an agency, we need to live up to this policy with regard to our workforce. We need to match the diversity of our recruiting to the diversity of our nation. We also need to retain the diversity we already have, even as we face the upcoming loss of many of our older employees.

You have all heard about the so-called retirement bulge, when thousands of our employees become eligible to retire. Retirement is a natural phenomenon. All of us will eventually retire, the good Lord willing. But, as long as we enjoy our work and feel valued, we won’t rush into retirement.

The retirement bulge presents both a challenge and an opportunity with regard to workforce diversity. It is an opportunity because there will be vacancies to fill, and vacancies mean opportunities for younger employees, including many of you here today. It is both an opportunity and a challenge because we must work hard and recruit to improve our diversity among groups where we are still under-represented. The retirement bulge is a challenge because it means we have to do everything we can to retain younger employees, including those who represent most of the diversity we have today. In plain English, we need to have good opportunities for advancement, good training, and a good work environment if we are to keep our younger employees from moving on.

I have learned the hard way what a waste it is to go to all the effort of recruiting promising new employees, only to have them move on to a new job, to some other agency, or to the private sector simply because we failed to make this a good, enjoyable place to work. In the retail business, they say it costs five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to retain an old one. I know from my own experience that it’s even more expensive to lose an employee and then have to recruit, train, and develop a replacement. So we must do more to make NRCS a good place to work, so we retain and reward the employees we have.

Many of your career-related training topics during this conference go a long way toward helping people understand the workplace and succeed in it, including, writing good KSAs to help get a promotion, taking advantage of educational programs to aid you in your present and future jobs, developing presentation skills to be more effective, mentoring others and working with a mentor, anticipating the pressures of relocation, and even learning about professional etiquette and retirement planning.

Our Civil Rights agenda does not stop with recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce. It must be embodied in how we serve our customers. We need to do more in terms of promoting program delivery among traditionally underserved populations. You all know that the Department of Agriculture has historically had problems with delivering programs equally to all farmers and ranchers. Our job, yours and mine, is to change that!

Just as we affect change in the physical environment on a daily basis, we can affect change in our service to our customers and the reputation of USDA. All of the agencies within the Department have been working hard to correct this situation, and NRCS is no exception. But there is much that needs to be done. The new farm bill makes more resources available to more farmers than ever before. It is important that we all work hard to extend the benefits of the new farm bill to everyone who is eligible. That means doubling our efforts to serve all kinds of farmers. It means reaching out to all communities. It means being open, fair, courteous, and responsive to all farmers and ranchers.

USDA is being held increasingly responsible for delivering Agriculture programs to all citizens in this country, and that responsibility flows through agreements and contracts to everywhere Federal dollars are involved. NRCS and all of its partners must live up to this responsibility in everything we do, from meetings with landowners to delivery of services.

As I say everywhere I go, the purpose of the new farm bill is to help every landowner reach his or her conservation goals. We can only do this if we are serving every landowner equally.


NRCS Priorities

The other topic I would like to cover today is the NRCS priorities for the current fiscal year. We made these priorities available during the summer to managers throughout NRCS. You see them embodied in Bill Hunt’s president’s greeting. They are implementing the new farm bill (job one), implementing the President’s management initiatives, increasing outreach activities and workforce diversity, and strengthening our technical delivery system.

Implementing the farm bill fully means implementing it for all farmers and ranchers, not just for some. I’ve said it before – We must deliver our programs equally to everyone. Having an additional $13 billion for conservation over the next six years means we can deliver conservation programs to many more farmers and ranchers. We will be depending on employees in the field, including those of you here today, to do their part in making America’s farmers and ranchers aware of the availability of our programs. Many of you are well positioned in your local communities to lead that effort.

One challenge will be to increase participation by traditionally underserved populations, and – there again – many of you are in a position to get our messages out to those who could benefit from our programs and services.

Implementing the President’s management initiatives has implications for each of you as well.

One initiative is strategic management of human capital. This relates to issues I addressed a minute ago, including recruiting, managing the retirement bulge, and retaining employees.

Another Presidential initiative is competitive sourcing. Our use of technical service providers to help us implement the farm bill will be the largest effort in our history to rely on the expertise of others, rather than always doing the job ourselves. We must be sure we have a diversity of technical service providers, and we must be sure our technical service providers do a good job of serving all farmers and ranchers. We can’t – and won’t – let conservation languish in underserved communities.

One of the things you can do to help in the technical service provider process is to talk up the program in the community, so that a wide diversity of third party vendors come forward to do the work. We must ensure that these are people landowners will trust to give them quality service.

Another Presidential initiative is to expand e-Government. We must make sure the benefits of e-Government are available to all farmers and ranchers – and that traditional modes of service remain available for those who do not choose to interact with us electronically. Promoting e-Government and its alternatives will take additional outreach. Perhaps most importantly, e-Government delivery will free up our own in-house resources for traditional outreach endeavors.

Finally, we will be working to increase accountability with regard to our financial performance. Through a better accountability system, we will be able to tell how good a job we are doing in delivering our services to all of America’s farmers, ranchers, and landowners.

Strengthening our Technical Delivery System is our last objective. We must have a strong technical delivery system for farmers and ranches, in every community. One aspect of strengthening our technical delivery system is to be sure we focus on conservation and not on programs.

Our goal is to help producers reach their conservation goals. Frequently we are involved in helping producers set goals, or translate existing goals into plans. We help producers do good things for the land within the context of maintaining a strong economic operation. With all the new farm bill money, there will be a temptation to focus on programs – numbers of applications received, numbers of contracts approved, numbers of acres treated. But this approach drifts away from our 75-year history of providing conservation assistance. So, focusing on conservation goals, rather than programs, is one aspect of improving our technical delivery system. Another aspect is making sure underserved populations have equal access to our technical delivery system.


Conclusion

In conclusion, we have done a good job of identifying underserved communities, and we have been introducing these communities to our services and programs. Now we need to get them involved -- to deliver more of our goods and services to them. So, there are challenging times ahead for all of us.

I know, because you are attending this week’s conference, that you have the dedication and the energy to help NRCS meet these challenges. I wish you good luck and continued success.

Now, I would be happy to hear your comments or answer your questions.