This fall, dozens of farmers, universities, non-profits, and other entities kicked off the implementation of their Conservation Innovation Grants (CIG), after the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced awards earlier this year. As part of the USDA Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), CIG supports innovative approaches to conservation on private lands that can also boost farm productivity. Through its On-Farm Trials, CIG offers technical assistance and incentive payments to producers implementing new management practices to help assess conservation impacts.
While CIG has operated since 2004, this year’s projects stand out for their focus on soil health, measurement, monitoring, reporting and verification (MMRV), and support for historically underserved producers. We interviewed three project leaders to understand how their work addresses the obstacles that hinder the implementation of soil health practices. These projects aren’t just relevant to local realities — they offer a glimpse into how we can transform our agricultural system at large and shape policy to better address the challenges producers face today.
Carbon farming at New Mexico State University
Dr. Sawssan Boufous, a researcher in sustainability and agricultural economics at New Mexico State University, understands the imperative to transition to more regenerative agriculture: “We have the urge to preserve the environment, reduce carbon emissions…but for a grower, changing practices evokes other questions, too.” The newly awarded CIG project she’s leading, “Carbon Farming: What Do Growers Want?” will explore producer needs and preferences in farming carbon, with the long-term goal of increasing the adoption of climate-smart practices. Carbon farming, while not a rigidly defined term, generally involves agricultural practices that maximize carbon sequestration and maintenance. For many farmers, though, carbon farming can also mean navigating private sector contracts and voluntary carbon markets (VCMs), which are often complex and filled with challenges.
Dr. Boufous’s team will work with growers in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Florida — states that are not only heavily affected by climate impacts but are also home to many underserved farming communities. By identifying climate-smart practices suited to local conditions and helping producers understand available incentives for soil carbon sequestration, the team hopes to address the high costs and limited information that often deter farmers from implementing these practices. In the long run, the goal is to give growers a voice in shaping policy and to push both the private sector and government entities to design better programs that make sustainable practices easier to adopt. “We need to listen more to growers, and they need to be involved,” says Dr. Boufous.
She notes that despite the difficulty in transitioning to climate-smart practices, participating farmers have deep connections to their land and a strong desire to preserve it for future generations.
Empowering BIPOC farmers in Georgia
In Powder Springs, GA, Delroy Dennisur, operator of Dennisur Farm, aims to provide producer-specific assistance through soil health management systems. As one of CIG’s On-Farm Trials, his project, “Empowering BIPOC Farmers Through Soil Health Management Systems,” will harness the existing Soil Food Web program to develop custom soil health management systems (SHMS) tailored to BIPOC farmers in the area. Soil health management systems apply key soil health principles, including minimizing soil disturbance, and maximizing soil cover, biodiversity, and living roots.The project will provide vital technical assistance that, as Dennisur notes, “will arm farmers and earthworkers with the soil biology needed to make better decisions and be better land stewards.” There are intensive costs associated with transitioning to climate-smart practices, both in terms of labor and inputs, and Black and Brown farmers, in particular, often lack access to the traditional capital and resources necessary to support this transition sustainably in the long term.
By working closely with producers to understand their goals, Dennisur hopes to create customized solutions that meet farmers’ needs and promote long-term resilience. Through tailored soil health management systems, Dennisur believes that farmers can overcome cost and other barriers to meet their needs and help support climate adaptation, mitigation and resilience. In addition to bolstering producer knowledge, the project will engage soil scientists to guide the project. Through this data and the collaboration of the producers involved, Dennisur aims to connect soil biology directly to farmers’ needs, with the hope that this project could serve as a pilot for future large-scale federal programs.
Regenerative Agricultural Intensification in the Southern High Plains
In West Texas and Oklahoma, Dr. Joseph Burke of Texas A&M Agrilife Research is leading a project tackling the challenges farmers face in adopting soil health practices and examining how targeted implementation of climate-smart practices impact yields. With nearly $5 million in funding, this project builds off a previous National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant on regenerative cotton systems in the area. Dr. Burke’s team will expand that work by testing practices such as cover crop seeding rates, cover crop termination timing, and no-till methods across 10 innovation farms and 100 observation farms.
The team’s goal is to collect data on how these soil health practices affect both individual farmers and the broader region. They’re also investigating what motivates producers to adopt or abandon climate-smart practices, and analyzing economic impacts. Dr. Burke strives to clearly link soil health outcomes to agronomic outcomes, saying, “There isn’t a distinct link between the two yet, but I think we can explore how better soil mitigates climate risk and ultimately increases yield.” A connection between soil health and agricultural productivity could help inform future US federal policies and programs, by ensuring conservation programs are based on reliable ground source data. Dr. Burke emphasizes that the high-quality data that can be collected through US federal conservation funding is an important co-benefit of these programs but that the effectiveness of this data collection is significantly undermined when program funding is reduced.
Shaping future policy
These projects, just a handful of the 53 awarded this year, share a common goal: to mitigate climate risks while addressing the high costs producers face when adopting new practices. While the three projects we highlighted have different goals, their project leads articulated similar hopes for how learnings from these projects could transform policy and our agricultural system. Customized soil health data and technical assistance could ensure producers are able to make the best decisions for their operations amid a changing climate. Educating producers on the connection between soil biology and operational results could increase resilience while decreasing the need for expensive synthetic inputs. And with timely passage of the Farm Bill, federal incentives could be designed to prioritize real producer needs, ensuring that healthy lands are stewarded for generations to come.
Edited by Ana Little-Saña. Image by Tyler Lastovich
