Implementing Agricultural Conservation Practices

Sustainable agricultural practices enable more efficient use of natural resources, mitigate the impact of agriculture on the environment, and strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change and climate variability. Because these practices usually require substantial effort or resource allocation from farmers, incentives are necessary to support farmer adoption. Despite growing interest, there has been little systematic evaluation of the incentives–adoption–outcome chain—that is, which incentives best promote adoption and which lead to desired sustainability outcomes. This brief presents the results of a literature review that examined (1) uptake agricultural practices under three kinds of incentives, market and nonmarket, regulations, and cross-compliance, and (2) the impact on productivity, profitability, and environmental sustainability. Based on this review, it offers a set of seven tested principles to follow in designing and implementing incentives for sustainable agriculture.

"From 2004 to 2006, the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) (formerly the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service) and the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service jointly funded 13 watershed projects across the nation. These NIFA projects were established to evaluate the effects of agricultural conservation practices on water quality at the watershed scale. The overall goal of these watershed studies was to determine the measurable effects of agricultural conservation practices on spatial patterns and trends in water quality at the watershed scale. Conducted under the name Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP), the projects were intended to increase understanding of the following: How the timing, location, and suite of implemented agricultural conservation practices affect water quality at the watershed scale ; How conservation practices implemented in a watershed interact with respect to their effects on water quality ; What social and economic factors facilitate or impede implementation of conservation practices ; The optimal set of conservation practices and their optimal placement within the watershed needed to achieve water quality goals. As these 13 NIFA-CEAP watershed studies were nearing completion, the USDA NIFA funded another project to synthesize the information gained from the projects in order to build an aggregate knowledge base that both evaluated impacts of conservation practices and programs on water resources in order to improve the management of agricultural landscapes and achieve environmental goals that could inform future policy decisions. This book describes the outcome of the synthesis effort."--Preface.

Beginning, limited-resource, and socially disadvantaged farmers make up 40% of all U.S. farms. Some Federal conservation programs contain provisions that encourage participation by such ¿targeted¿ farmers. This report compares the natural resource characteristics, resource issues, and conservation treatment costs on farms operated by targeted farmers with those of other participants. Targeted farmers tend to operate more environmentally sensitive land than other farmers, have different conservation priorities, and receive different levels of payments. The different conservation priorities among types of farmers suggest that if a significantly larger proportion of targeted farmers participate in these programs, the programs¿ economic and environmental outcomes could change. Tables and graphs.