Environmental Quality Incentives Program

In 1996, the Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) was introduced, which subsidized investments made to meet environmental objectives, with emphasis on animal waste management.

From: Reference Module in Food Science , 2016

US Department of Agriculture

Donald W. Sparling , in Natural Resource Administration, 2014

Farm Bill Conservation Measures

As mentioned above, one of the primary functions of the NRCS is to provide technical assistance on soil, water and farm wildlife. However, a huge fraction, more than three-quarters of its budget, is used to provide this technical support for programs mandated by Farm Bills.

Farm Bills are vast Congressional commitments to US agriculture, commodity price supports, crop and disaster insurance programs, farm loans, nutrition programs, international trade agreements, rural development, rural electrification programs, agriculturally based research, aid to dependent children, food stamps and many other elements. Sometimes huge bills such as the Farm Bill are called Omnibus Bills because of their complexity. The 2008 Farm Bill (formally known as the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008) obligated $288 billion over a five-year period.

Over the past several years, Farm Bills have included some very wide-ranging and important conservation measures. The NRCS is the principal advisor in these projects and finances some of the programs through the Deputy area for Programs, while the Farm Services Agency finances other conservation projects. There are two broad categories of conservation programs in this package: voluntary programs that provide financial assistance to growers for doing something positive, and mandatory ones that penalize landowners for harmful activities.

Some of the major voluntary conservation programs that provide financial and technical assistance to growers include the following.

1.

Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQUIP). 16 This program provides technical and financial assistance to farmers to plan and implement many kinds of conservation projects, including improvement of soil, water, plant, animal, air and related resources, on agricultural land and non-industrial, private, forestland. The criteria for receiving financial aid come from each State office of the NRCS – not everyone who applies is eligible. Financial aid is on a cost-share basis, where both the NRCS and the farmer contribute. In the fiscal year 2011 the program spent more than $864 million and included more than 13 million   acres (5.3 million   ha) nationally. 17 In terms of total acres and total budget, EQUIP is the largest conservation program funded by the NRCS.

2.

Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP). 18 In some states, 95% to 99% of the original wetlands have been drained and cultivated. In the conterminous United States, approximately 48% of wetlands that existed in the 1600s have been lost. 19 Wetlands provide many ecological services, such as flood control, water storage, enhanced species diversity, and habitat for fish and wildlife. The Wetlands Reserve Program provides assistance to landowners to protect, restore and enhance wetlands on their property. Landowners who contract their land into permanent or 30-year easements receive payments from the NRCS and up to 100% of the costs to restore the wetlands. Between 1992 and 2011, the NRCS signed more than 13,000 contracts and restored almost 2.5 million   acres (1 million   ha) of wetlands.

3.

Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP). 20 This is a voluntary program for landowners who wish to improve their lands for fish and wildlife populations. The NRCS provides up to 90% of the costs of approved projects. Specific objectives of the program include: (i) to promote the restoration of declining or important native fish and wildlife habitats; (ii) to protect, restore, develop or enhance fish and wildlife habitat to benefit at-risk species; and (iii) reduce the impacts of invasive species on fish and wildlife habitats; protect, restore, develop or enhance declining or important aquatic wildlife species' habitats; and protect, restore, develop or enhance important migration and other movement corridors for wildlife. Special attention is given to enhancing the habitat for species that are endangered, threatened or of special concern. In a given year, the NRCS enacts around 3800 contracts covering around 850,000   acres (344,000   ha) and costing approximately $60 million.

4.

Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). 21 The Conservation Reserve Program is a major program focusing on highly erodible soils. For this program the Farm Services Agency, through its Commodity Credit Corporation, provides the finances but the NRCS provides technical assistance. This is a voluntary program for agricultural landowners through which they can receive annual rental payments and cost-share assistance to establish long-term, resource conserving covers on eligible farmland. Participants enroll in CRP contracts, usually for 10 or 15 years, and receive payments from the government each year of enrollment. However, lands are required to meet certain criteria to be enrolled: (i) they must be held by the enrolling owner for at least a year; (ii) they must have been in production during four of the previous six years before their first enrollment; (iii) they must be highly erodible (Figure 7.13); and (iv) they must be in a CRP conservation priority area. Lands approaching the end of their enrollment period may be re-enrolled. Enrolled lands are initially planted in cover crops such as grasses to protect the soil and promote soil binding. However, in 2003 the USDA determined that lands in certain types of CRP had to be subjected to Mid-Contract Management 22 to enhance the land for wildlife. Much of the CRP in the Midwest, for example, had grown into rank, monotypic stands of grass that provided little wildlife value. On a 50% cost share with the FSA, farmers can use a variety of techniques to break open the habitat, induce more species of plants, and encourage grassland song birds and game birds.

Figure 7.13. An example of very erodible land planted into corn.

 Credit: Center for Rural Affairs.

The CRP's regulations dictate that some lands may not be enrolled. Each state is given a maximum amount of land it can enroll in various CRP programs. The state then determines how many acres it wants to enroll in the CRP program for a specific sign-up period, and the amount of funding it will provide per acre. Sign-ups generally occur twice per year, but some years have had only one sign-up since the program began in 1986. Each application is evaluated by NRCS staff according to an environmental benefits index. Contracts are offered in order of the index until the upper quota has been reached. In a recent sign-up, for example, 14% of the lands offered nationally were rejected. 23 The size of the program is impressive – about 714,000 contracts on 416,000 farms, encompassing 31.3 million   acres (12.7 million   ha); this is about the size of the state of North Carolina. Annual rental payments average about $53/acre for a total yearly cost of $1.7 billion. 24

Other, smaller programs provide landowners with technical and financial assistance on conservation stewardship, water programs, grasslands and forests.

So, what is the value of the Conservation Reserve Program to natural resources? The first value, of course, is to remove erodible land and protect it from further erosion, thus the program is instrumental in soil conservation. Over the years, over 329 million   acres (121 million   ha) have been conserved in all programs (Figure 7.14). Because lands are protected or improved there is less wind erosion, which provides a benefit to clean air and water. A second value, derived by the matching cost supports of the program, is enhancement of wildlife habitat. Mid-contract management, initial planting into native grasses, development of buffer and filter strips around field edges and between fields and waterways, and planting some areas into forests instead of grasslands, are measures that greatly assist the conservation of our natural resources.

Figure 7.14. Accumulated number of acres conserved by NRCS and CRP programs, 2004–2012.

 Data from US Department of Agriculture.

There are two major mandatory programs that penalize farmers for damaging the environment – Swampbuster and Sodbuster. Both of these were enacted with the 1985 Farm Bill and have been renewed ever since. The difference between these programs and those above is the approach. Swampbuster and Sodbuster provide penalties for violations, whereas CRP, EQUIP and the others provide support – they give landowners money to implement conservation practices. It is not difficult to guess which of the two methods has more appeal.

Swampbuster arose because the NRCS and other agencies are deeply concerned about the loss of wetlands in the United States. Between the mid-1950s and 1970s, about 87% of wetland loss was due to agricultural practices. During dry periods many farmers lay field tiles in wetter portions of their fields to keep them drained. Many of these wet fields are actually natural temporary to ephemeral wetlands used by migrating waterfowl, and provide the ecological services mentioned above when they are most needed. To combat this, Congress enacted the Swampbuster Act into the Farm Bill. According to this Act, farmers who plant an agricultural commodity on wetlands that were drained after December 23, 1985 are ineligible for program benefits in any year a crop is planted. Potentially lost benefits include all USDA farm programs including subsidies and price supports, and any cost-sharing of the NRCS programs mentioned above.

Sodbuster was established in 1984 because of continued soil erosion problems. The Act provides disincentives to farmers and ranchers who produce annually tilled agricultural crops on highly erodible cropland without adequate erosion protection. It operates similarly to the Swampbuster Act, in that farmers who till highly erodible lands are subject to a loss of their USDA program supports.

Study Questions

7.1.

Conduct a review of the Dust Bowl Era. What led up to the poor soil conditions that interacted with climate to cause this environmental disaster? Were there any effects of the Dust Bowl Era in your state – either directly or indirectly (e.g., through immigration of farmers)?

7.2.

Are you at a land grant university, or are you familiar with the land grant institutions in your state? Name some distinguishing features of land grant universities compared to non-land grant institutions that exist even to today.

7.3.

Was there any correspondence between the history of wildlife management and forest management in the United States in regard to specific periods and concerns?

7.4.

What do Aldo Leopold, Gifford Pinchot and Hugh Hammond Bennett have in common?

7.5.

Trace the history of the US Forest Service from its inception to its present condition.

7.6.

Do you, or does anyone you know, have land that is enrolled in one of the NRCS conservation programs? What do you/they think of the program? Is it worthwhile?

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Progress in Best Management Practices

John F Hebblethwaite , Carol N. Somody , in The Triazine Herbicides, 2008

The Environmental Quality Incentives Program

The 1996 Farm Bill consolidated the functions of the Agricultural Conservation Program, the Water Quality Incentives Program, the Great Plains Conservation Program, and the Colorado River Salinity Control Program into the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) ( USDA-ERS, 1997). EQIP was reauthorized in the 2002 Farm Bill through 2007 with greater funding resources. EQIP gives priority to areas where state and local governments offer financial or technical assistance, or where agricultural improvements will help meet water quality objectives. The program initially established 5- to 10-year contracts to provide technical assistance and education. However, the 2002 Farm Bill modified the contracting length provision to stipulate a minimum term that ends 1 year after the implementation of the last scheduled practices and a maximum term of 10 years. EQIP pays up to 75% of the costs of structural practices, such as manure management systems, terraces, and filter strips. The 2002 Farm Bill provided additional authority to allow up to a 90% cost-share for beginning or limited resource farmers and ranchers. Additionally, the 2002 Farm Bill provides an overall payment limit of $450000 over the authorized life of the 2002 Farm Bill per producer, regardless of the number of farms or contracts. Producers who implement land management practices such as nutrient, IPM, and tillage management can receive technical assistance, education, and incentive payment amounts to be determined by the USDA Secretary. Activities must be carried out according to a conservation plan.

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The Future of Agricultural Landscapes, Part II

Nathan L. Haan , ... Douglas A. Landis , in Advances in Ecological Research, 2021

6.3 Conservation programs

Conservation programs are necessary to protect existing natural habitats and other uncultivated areas and to provide incentives for establishing new ones. Some U.S. Farm Bill programs, such as the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), support conservation practices on actively farmed land, while others like the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) pay farmers to take cropland out of production for 10 or more years and plant grassland, pollinator strips, or buffer strips instead. The landscape features incentivized by these programs can provide resources to service providers and enhance spatial heterogeneity in addition to improving soil conservation and limiting nutrient loss. Unfortunately, conservation programs are at odds with other parts of the Farm Bill—such as crop insurance subsidies—that incentivize the cultivation of a limited set of intensively managed crops. Furthermore, the amount of land enrolled in CRP has been declining steadily for over a decade, from a peak of over 35 million acres in 2007 to fewer than 24 million in 2018 ( Bigelow et al., 2020). Conservation programs could make a stronger impact on landscape structure if they were funded more aggressively and buffered from market forces that push farmers to convert them back to crops. While plantings occur at the field or farm scale, incentives could be designed specifically to catalyse change at larger spatial scales. For example, landscape-scale coordination could be encouraged by offering payments that compound when neighbouring farms adopt complementary practices (Goldman et al., 2007; Lefebvre et al., 2015). These types of "agglomeration bonuses" have been explored to enhance pollinator habitat conservation in a Wyoming landscape (Panchalingam et al., 2019). The same principle could be used to encourage neighbouring farmers to coordinate similar initiatives and produce landscapes that are richer in resources for service-providing organisms.

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Eligibility Criteria Affecting Landowner Participation in Greenhouse Gas Programs

Robert Johansson , ... Ralph Alig , in Managing Agricultural Greenhouse Gases, 2012

Additional Payments for Reduction in Tillage

A rising C price could facilitate changes in tillage systems as farm operators would likely attempt to take advantage of incentives to reduce GHG emissions from their operations. In the BAU scenario, a general decline in conventional tillage over time, from 63% in 2010 to 61% by 2050, and a countervailing increase in no-till systems, from 17 to 24% over the same period occurred. The scenario with the high C price path produced an extra 12.7 Mha of no-tillage cropping by 2045; however, this increase came from dedicated energy crops such as switchgrass for which there existed only no-till options. We simulated an additional scenario in which land use and bioenergy were limited as in the no bioelectricity scenario and cropland that adopted no-till practices would qualify for an additional land payment equal to the 2000 Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) cost share value. Such a program could be implemented in hopes of further increasing tillage changes to reduce GHG emissions and achieve other environmental benefits. A C market might also be developed in which agriculture operators receive payments for C sequestration resulting from tillage changes, as well as assistance payments for implementing tillage changes.

To examine the impacts of the C and cost share payment on tillage practices, we focused on two primary crops, corn and soybeans, that together accounted for over 47% of the nation's cropland. At low C prices and supporting reductions in tillage, little difference arose in tillage practices for these two crops until 2040 (Figure 25.3). When assistance payments and C payments were both included, cropland planted using no-till increased for corn (Figure 25.3A) and was roughly offset by reductions in no-till acres of soybeans (Figure 25.3B), resulting in an aggregate acreage for the two crops equivalent to BAU. Although the change in GHG mitigation from BAU (Table 25.3) showed that short-term gains in additional C flux were greater than at the low C price point, at the high price point and in the long term the results were for less mitigation than C price scenarios and even less compared to the sector-specific no bioelectricity scenario. This suggested that to optimize farm revenue, agricultural operators shifted toward tillage practices that captured additional income from the payment and converted to more GHG intensive cropping practices when afforestation and bioelectricity options were limited.

FIGURE 25.3. Simulated changes in corn and soybean land utilizing no-tillage production relative to business as usual (BAU) under two CO2e prices (CPS) and with CO2e prices and an additional payment for no-tillage and no land exchanges between agriculture and forestry (NTILL).

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The Evolution of US Agricultural Policy

Gordon Rausser , David Zilberman , in Reference Module in Food Science, 2016

Land Conservation and Environmental Preservation

Over the years, the United States and other countries have developed distinct agricultural input policies. Potential environmental side effects of agriculture are controlled at the different levels of government. Local governments may set zoning rules that affect where and how agricultural practices can be executed. The state government may establish property rights and liability roles for air pollution. In many countries, as in the United States, the federal government may establish laws, such as the Clean Water Act, that regulate polluting activities that affect bodies of water.

The design and implementation of agroenvironmental policies allows governments to expand the environmental benefits valued by the society, such as reduced soil erosion, reduced farm runoff, carbon sequestration, and habitat protection. By transferring financial resources to farmers, Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs incentivize individuals to undertake conservation activities that were previously undervalued by the market. The design of these policies can be evaluated on the basis of their efficiency, namely, how able are they to achieve the greatest environmental benefit for the lowest cost?

At its core, environmental policies directed toward agriculture are conservation programs that aim to conserve natural resources. Conservation programs play two roles. On one hand, they are a mechanism to address the environmental side effects of agriculture, particularly soil erosion, 7  many of which originated after the Dust Bowl of the 1930s (Hansen and Libecap, 2003).

Another motivation for conservation programs was to divert land from agricultural production and thus control supply (Rausser, 1992). Historically, entitlement to some of the agricultural deficiency payment was associated with requirement for farmers to divert farmland from production to conservation activities.

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was formally introduced in the Food Security Act of 1985. These traditional agricultural policies sought to maximize acreage taken out of agriculture and enrolled in conservation. This led the government to emphasize policies that target and pay farmers to enhance environmental quality. The CRP asked farmers to bid for how much they would willing to be paid to carry out certain environmental activities. In principle, the government is selecting the portfolio of activities that provide the maximum benefit for the dollar spent. The CRP's transition from maximum acreage enrollment to a bidding system that optimizes for the environmental activity for the dollar spent reflects environmental policies' growing sophistication in using cost–benefit analysis. However, there are a range of factors that environmental policies can incorporate to increase their efficiency.

In contrast to land diversion programs, other PES programs target working lands, which incentivizes farmers to switch to certain farming practices with greater environmental benefits while maintaining the land in production. Programs targeting working lands gained traction beginning in 1985 with the introduction of cross-compliance requirements, which made eligibility for income support payments dependent on farmers practicing both land-diversion and working-land activities (Claassen et al., 2008). In 1996, the Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) was introduced, which subsidized investments made to meet environmental objectives, with emphasis on animal waste management. Later, in 2002, the creation of the Conservation Security Program, now known as the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), used crop-management activities as the basis of alternative conservation contracts available to farmers. 8

In evaluating PES programs, the first best criterion is one where the policy intervention allocates resources in accordance with maximizing the net social benefit. 9  But since it may be very difficult to quantify the benefits from environmental amenities, the second best criterion is often employed that minimizes cost for a given environmental objective. Of course, the problem with cost-minimization is that it does not necessarily guarantee that net benefits are being maximized. Environmental policy interventions can target two different types of objectives, the first being performance-based (for example, reduction in nitrogen runoff or greenhouse gas emissions) and the second being practice-based (for example, planting certain trees or engaging in certain soil management practices). All else equal, performance-based programs are able to achieve the same environmental objectives more cost-effectively than practice-based programs because they allow for flexibility in meeting these goals and encourage innovation and technology adoption (Fuglie and Kascak, 2001; Sunding and Zilberman, 2001).

As mentioned earlier, the challenge with performance-based programs is that it is often difficult to quantify environmental performance. If the linkage between practice and performance is well understood, it is possible to use practice to estimate performance, such as the effect of soil tillage (practice) on soil carbon sequestration (performance). In cases where this linkage is not well understood, it may be more expensive to calculate the environmental objective under a practice-based standard than to implement a practice-based standard (Weinberg and Claassen, 2006).

One of the challenges of designing PES programs is the heterogeneity across regions. Namely, the same activity performed in different areas can have different results, depending on the biophysical and socioeconomic characteristics of that region (Antle et al., 2003). Since different areas might provide more environmental amenities than others at the same cost, an efficient policy takes cost–benefit analysis into consideration. Doing so allows the government to ensure that it is maximizing the amount of environmental benefits for the dollar spent. The transformation of the CRP program from one that maximized acreage enrollment to one that uses performance-based payments centered on observed practices exemplifies the gains from implementing benefit–cost targeting. Feather et al. (1999) estimated that this shift in the CRP would almost double the realized environmental benefits.

CSP and EQIP, both conservation programs targeting working lands, also utilize performance-based payments. The CSP has a menu of environmental practices from which the farmer can select from and is paid accordingly. EQIP is designed so that payments for water quality and other conservation efforts are determined at the local level. The tailoring of the program at the local level allows for heterogeneity and increases the program's efficiency (Claassen et al., 2008; Cattaneo et al., 2005).

Incorporating a flexible payment scheme in the design of PES program also increases its efficiency, because it allows farmers to make production and conservation decisions in response to prevailing market and climatic conditions (Xabadia et al., 2008; Bulte et al., 2008). Furthermore, flexibility in PES payments is important because the cost and benefits of environmental practices will fluctuate depending on random changes in economic and climatic conditions that affect agriculture. The drawback to flexibility is that some environmental amenities may accrue only once land has been taken out of production for years. Designers of conservation programs will have to weigh the benefits of flexibility with those of longer contract commitments.

In addition to heterogeneity and flexibility, there are a few other challenges in the design and implementation of effective agricultural PES programs. The relationship between many environmental practices and their impact on performance is not well understood. The uncertainty and lack of measurement accuracy make it difficult to compare the effectiveness of one environmental practice against another. Ongoing technological progress and research have introduced sophisticated models and instruments, such as Geographic Information Services (GIS), which increased monitoring capabilities while reducing the cost of computing to monitor outcomes. As technology becomes increasingly powerful, PES programs should evolve to incorporate improvements in modeling and measurement.

Another factor to consider is how to weight and aggregate multiple benefits. This is because conservation programs in the United States, such as the CRP, compensate farmers to engage in practices that often yield multiple environmental amenities. Furthermore, certain amenities (such as air quality improvements) are more valuable when generated close to densely populated, urban areas than sparsely populated, rural areas. As such, the 'Environmental Benefit Index' has been created to represent multiple benefits (such as reduced erosion and improved water quality) in order to calculate cumulative benefits, adjusting for locational differences. The accuracy of the weights in representing the social values of these amenities determines the efficiency of the conservation program. Political economy considerations shape the order of ranking of environmental objectives and thus the allocation of funds for conservation practices (Wu and Boggess, 1999). These politicized decisions likely result in efficiency losses.

The CRP does consider regional differences in scoring environmental amenities; however, the ranking of environmental benefits is determined at the national, rather than the local level. As a whole, the CRP weighs soil conservation more favorably (Claassen et al., 2008), which could potentially lead to the disproportionate allocation of funds to regions that can provide soil conservation amenities over regions whose benefits (such as water quality improvement) are underweighted.

Another challenge is scale effects, or the magnitude of the environmental benefit. There are instances in which considering a per-unit change in an amenity is not useful unless it has surpassed a minimum threshold. For example, reduction in aggregate regional pollution must reach a certain level before it has a meaningful impact (Wu and Boggess, 1999). In other cases, there is an agglomeration effect, such as when the survival of an animal species depends on having sufficient contiguous habitat, rather than unconnected land spread across various regions for roaming (Drechlser et al., 2010).

Efficient PES programs should also take into consideration the problem of slippage. Land diversion conservation programs reduce the supply and increase the price of land. This could incentivize farmers to use previously unused marginal land, which would offset some of the gains from participation in the program. A related challenge is increasing PES program additionality, or to ensure that the payments are incentivizing conservation practices that would not have taken place otherwise.

Lastly, the largest obstacle is enforcement of conservation practices. In particular, enforcement is more challenging for working lands because practices are not easily monitored by remote sensing or other cost-effective methods. As the cost of conservation practices increase, the rate of noncompliance and cost of monitoring are likely to increase (Giannakas and Kaplan, 2005). Claassen et al. (2008) found that the government routinely underinvests in enforcing completion of EQIP conservation practices.

US conservation programs have moved toward greater efficiency in providing environmental amenities through the use of cost–benefit analysis. The range of practices covered by PES programs expanded to include not only soil health, but also improved water and air quality and protection and enhancement of habitat. The targeting of both land diversion and working land allows for the achievement of a variety of environmental objectives. The continuous evolution of PES design and incorporation of technological advances will enhance the level of environmental benefits at the lowest possible cost for taxpayers.

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Synopsis of Forest Management Plans of North America

Kevin Boston , ... Jacek P. Siry , in Forest Plans of North America, 2015

Sustainability Issues that Have Arisen from the Plans

There were many chapters that described the role of certification in the forest management planning process. The three most common systems described in the book are the American Tree Farm System (ATFS), Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), and Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). The owners of several nonindustrial forests have the honor of being named ATFS Tree Farmer of the Year. There was a common thread among the certification system that the recognition provided by the certification system added to the legitimacy of the owners management of the property. Some, such as the Michael Tree Farm in East Texas (Chapter 3 ), used the ATFS to assist in obtaining funding from organizations such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resource Conservation Service through their Environmental Quality Incentives Program.

The SFI certification program has been adopted by larger REITs in the United States. Rayonier has included additional requirements on the size, shape, and spatial arrangement of harvest units and has incorporated these requirements into its customized algorithm. Weyerhaeuser has used SFI to recognize its environmental performance and set the standards for managing biodiversity on its lands in North Carolina.

Those chapters prepared by the two NGOs, the Conservation Fund (Chapter 19) and The Nature Conservancy (Chapter 26), both use FSC certification as a method to promote their sustainable practices, despite the fact that the properties are in California and Washington, respectively, and both states have significant forest practices rules and enforcement of those rules. Additionally, organizations that practice forestry in politically sensitive areas, such as the Arcata Community Forest (Chapter 8) in the redwoods region of northern California, have selected to participate in FSC certification to create an environment that allows for adaptive management of the plan with third-party oversight to validate the process with a skeptical public. There are many others that have not adopted certification due to the cost but hope to in the future.

Many chapters in this book provided limited explicit information on sustainability issues, perhaps because of the impression that this section was meant for discussing issues that were negatively affecting the sustainability of resources. We were, in fact, looking for any thoughts the authors might have had with regard to sustainability. Therefore, limited information in this section likely implies that the authors thought that the plan they described was actively guiding the property to a sustainable state or maintaining the property as such.

The relative paucity of information on sustainability issues may simply result from the fact that most chapters in this book indicate in their introductory sections that sustainability is of primary importance for their owners and managers in developing forest plans and managing forest lands. Therefore, in their minds, sustainability is of paramount importance and by no means is neglected. Furthermore, many forest owners and managers apply very stringent rules for ensuring forest sustainability including, for example, the requirement that the volume of harvest cannot exceed the of volume growth and that harvested parcels must be successfully regenerated before adjacent forests can be harvested. These requirements may go beyond and above by what is required by forest laws in the respective countries and even by forest certification programs.

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Stewardship, Concept of

Peter Alpert , in Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, 2003

III.B. Economic Factors

Among the many economic factors that impinge on stewardship are disincentives and incentives for conservation, degree of industrialization, and trade across ecological boundaries. When land is taxed based on its most lucrative potential use instead of its current use, landholders are more likely to sell or develop their land. Many laws, such as the Williamson Act in California, have been passed to remove this economic disincentive for farmers. Often, farmers agree not to develop their land in exchange for current use valuation of the land for tax purposes. Laws have also been passed to create economic incentives for stewardship of biodiversity. One widely used instrument is the conservation easement, an agreement under which a landowner agrees not to use his or her lands in certain ways in exchange for relief from taxation. The Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 created or redirected a set of U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that provide economic encouragement to private landowners to protect wildlife habitats. The Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program provides cost-sharing for habitat improvement, the Conservation Reserve Program pays farmers to fallow cropland under a vegetation cover for a decade, the Wetlands Reserve Program provides conservation easements and cost-sharing for restoration and protection of wetlands for 30 years or more, and the Environmental Quality Incentive Program combines education and technical and financial assistance to help landowners adopt practices that reduce environmental problems.

Economic conditions in developing countries have been linked to poor stewardship of biodiversity in several ways. Poor people in rural areas are likely to depend heavily on local natural resources, and a large proportion of land area is likely to be settled by farmers. Over time and with population growth, use tends to become unsustainable. Governmental agencies are likely to lack the resources to enforce protection of species in nature reserves. Wood and charcoal are a main source of fuel in cities, leading to deforestation for hundreds of kilometers into the countryside, as around Kinshasa in Congo. On the other hand, it is by no means clear that economic development improves stewardship. In central Africa, "de facto" conservation of biodiverse areas by their remoteness and local economic poverty has probably been as effective as intentional stewardship in the region. One hypothesis is that development will tend to improve stewardship of biodiversity where subsistence resource use is the main cause of its loss, as is probably the case for forests in Madagascar, but not where commercial exploitation is the main cause, as in the forests of Cameroon.

The differences between economic conditions in developing and industrialized countries are often held to require different approaches to stewardship. Conservationists in developing countries largely argue that local rural communities must receive economic benefits from protected areas. This is the basis for the spread of integrated conservation and development projects, which generally link biological conservation within a protected area to human development in the surrounding communities (Wells and Brandon, 1997). These projects are mainly limited to developing countries.

The globalization of commerce has to some extent reversed the mismatch of scales between ecology and society. It is increasingly the case that trade occurs across ecological boundaries. Global trade is often held to threaten stewardship of biodiversity because it makes it more likely that parties using or profiting from resources will live outside the region from which the resources come, and that they will therefore be less concerned about stewardship or constrained by environmental regulations. This is one basis for "bioregionalism," advocated by Sale Kirkpatrick and others, which counsels that people use only the natural resources from within their ecological region.

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Policies for Ecological Intensification of Crop Production

Lucas A. Garibaldi , ... Lynn V. Dicks , in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2019

Supporting Ecological Intensification

Soil health (Box 1, target 3) is linked with key biological and physical processes (carbon transformations, nutrient cycles, soil structure maintenance, and the regulation of pests and diseases) that support agricultural productivity [10] (Table S1). However, soil organic matter and below-ground biodiversity (both proxies for soil health) are declining in many agricultural systems [5,10,11]. Practices such as crop diversification, including legumes into rotations, efficient use of organic fertilizers, and reducing tillage can prevent or reverse such trends [5] (Table S1). In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, the Zero Budget Natural Farming initiative (incorporated into government policy at the state level) seeks to help farmers build soil fertility and transition from using chemical to organic inputs. In the USA, California's Healthy Soils Initiative has five main goals to enhance soil health: to protect and restore soil organic matter; to identify sustainable and integrated financing opportunities; to provide research, education, and technical support; to increase governmental efficiencies on public and private lands; and to promote inter-agency coordination (Table S1).

Conservation or restoration of natural or semi-natural areas in agricultural landscapes (Box 1 , target 4) can enhance diversity of beneficial organisms by providing resources that are not available in crop fields, such as nesting sites or food (Table S1). It can be achieved through incentives such as voluntary agri-environment schemes, or mandatory Ecological Focus Areas in Europe, or the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), Conservation Stewardship Program, and Environmental Quality Incentives Program in the USA. In Brazil, set asides or 'legal reserves' are mandatory. A portion of each farm must focus on the conservation or restoration of ecological processes and biodiversity, protection of the native fauna and flora, and sustainable use of natural resources (such as rubber extraction or Brazil nut harvesting in the Amazon forest). The size of the legal reserves varies as follows: 80% of the farm when it is in the forest area of the Legal Amazon biome, 35% of the farm when it is in the Cerrado area of the Legal Amazon biome, and 20% percent of the farm in all the other regions of Brazil.

Protecting and efficiently using water resources (Box 1, target 5) can enhance agricultural productivity and minimize negative externalities. Common measures include engineering solutions to prevent droughts or floods, using drought-resistant crops, enhancing soil health (Box 1, target 3), and protecting natural or semi-natural areas (Box 1, target 4). Riparian zones are at the intersection of water resources, biodiversity, and agriculture, and their importance has been recognized by the Water Resources Commission of Ghana in developing the Riparian Buffer Zone Policy (although implementation has been lacking; Table S1). In the main row crop region of the USA, the incorporation of prairie strips directly contributed to improved biodiversity and was able to reduce total water runoff from catchments by 37%, resulting in retention of 20 times more soil [12]. This practice can be supported, in part, by farmer cost-share under the CRP. In our view, policies that promote the strategic restoration of riparian zones should be able to provide disproportionate environmental benefits (relative to the investment), especially in the most productive cropping systems.

Enhancing habitat diversity (Box 1, target 6) can create agroecosystems that are capable of self-regulation, including resisting pest and disease infestations. Measures include enhancing the variety of flowering crops, providing different resources that can be exploited across time and space by beneficial organisms (Table S1). However, agricultural landscapes are increasingly under monocultures, mainly of a few cereal and oil crop species, which compromise habitat diversity [13]. Some countries where monocultures prevail are promoting new initiatives, such as the Strategic Development Plan of the Agricultural Sector of Benin, to create more heterogeneous agroecosystems through crop diversification (Table S1). A recent law proposal (December 2017) for 'minimum budgets for biodiversity in agricultural landscapes' presented to the Argentinean Senate, states that at least four different habitats should be established per 200   ha, each covering a minimum of 5   ha with natural areas making up one of the four units.

The benefits of ecological intensification are context dependent [14] and creating habitat to support beneficial organisms must consider the surrounding landscape (Box 1, target 7). For example, the need for species richness to deliver sufficient services increases with spatial scale as the number of crop types accumulates, as demonstrated for crop pollination [15]. For large-scale farms, there are many examples of extensive networks of flowering strips between production units (Figure 2), with multiple benefits for both crop pollination and biotic pest regulation [7]. To support healthy populations that provide ecosystem services to all farms in a region, agricultural policies in the EU promote green infrastructures that facilitate connectivity across crop dominated landscapes (Table S1). Such strategic, landscape-scale conservation demands coordinated actions that can be beyond the means of individual land managers [16]. Support can be provided for farmers to work together, such as in the Countryside Stewardship facilitation fund in England that supports coordinated action by 'farm clusters' (Table S1).

Figure 2

Figure 2. Recently Planted Habitat for Natural Enemies and Pollinators Incorporated into a Landscape Design at a Large Holding in California's San Joaquin Valley (USA). This 2.3-mile (3.7-km) corridor of hedgerows and meadow was planted as part of the Xerces Society's Bee Better Certified™ program. Photo: Peter Allbright, Woolf Farming Co.

Compared with conventional inputs such as pesticide or synthetic fertilizer, ecologically intensive practices can take time to deliver results, thus requiring their evaluation over the long-term (Box 1, target 8). Habitat interventions such as floral strips for pollinators work by building up populations over seasons [7]. These can then increase agricultural productivity, returning initial investments in management [17]. Similarly, benefits derived from good soil structure and healthy below-ground communities accrue slowly (Table S1). The stability and resilience of agricultural productivity derived from greater species richness are only realized over time frames that include cropping seasons with adverse weather, extreme climatic events, or pest outbreaks (Table S1). Policies that consider these longer time frames include the financial support in the EU for establishment and maintenance of agroforestry. Also, the establishment of risk management insurance schemes, parallel to those that exist as part of climate smart agriculture [18], could cover crop loses in years when the ecological intensive practice has not delivered as expected. Being aware that solving current agricultural threats requires long-term and sustained actions, the National Landcare Program in Australia was conceived for covering a period of more than ten years (2014–2023; Table S1).

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