National Association of Conservation Districts
This project aims to expand climate-smart Row Crops, Livestock, Forest and Specialty Crop markets nationwide and support farmer, rancher and forest landowner implementation and monitoring of climate-smart practices. NACD, through its project partners and network of 3,000 conservation districts, will advance grassroots efforts that ensure producers and local communities are prepared to meet growing demand and have access to climate-smart commodity markets
Farm Eligibility
Apr-23
Nationwide
Conservation Cover
- Conservation Crop Rotation
- Cover Crops
- Forest Stand Improvements
- Grassed Waterways
- Integrated Pest Management Plans
- Irrigation Water Management
- Nutrient Management
- Pasture And Hay Planting
- Prescribed Grazing
- Reduced or No-Till
- Tree/Shrub Establishment
- Waste Separation Facility
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Money Matters
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Refer to program category descriptions for general stackability potential. Reach out to the program contact for more information.
Not applicable
Contracting Info
Up to three years
All projects are required to include plans to (1) quantify greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits and (2) monitor/verify those benefits over time.
Conservation Districts have existing infrastructures and communications channels for conducting proactive farmer outreach and recruitment. District employees lead and attend community workshops and forums, work with local producer groups and co-ops, and are known to have “hours” in local coffee shops. Their follow-up includes site visits to walk the land and understand producers’ specific production goals and issues.
Technical assistance will be delivered by conservation districts and their selected partners (e.g., Rural Coalition, Kansas Black Farmers Association, Rural Advancement Fund of the National Sharecroppers Fund, Agricultural Conservation Experienced Services (ACES) program). Additionally, NACD is pleased to partner with Cornell University to develop a series of educational materials, tools, and templates that can be used with producers to deliver integrated financial and conservation planning, with the goal of advancing climate-smart operations and supporting producers financial viability.
Technical Info
National Association of Conservation Districts
Conservation Planners will assess the inventory of available tools and work with producers to identify the measurements that need to be taken based on the selected quantification model. At minimum, data will be input into COMET-Farm. Should producers elect to enroll in a third-party market (e.g., carbon or ecosystem services market), then measurement and quantification will be performed by the entity responsible for verifying and generating credits.
NACD will verify soil organic carbon (SOC) changes through soil sampling on a representative subset of fields. Soil sampling will be conducted by a combination of conservation districts and contractor support. All SOC stock measurement will be conducted following harvest. Soil samples will be taken with push probes to 0-30 cm depth at a 10-acre density (i.e., 10 locations for a 100 acre field). To ensure accurate measurement of bulk density, 8×2 cm diameter push probe cores will be composited within 20m of each sampling location. Sampling locations will be determined by stratified sampling in a Bayesian approach that employs readily available auxiliary data (e.g., Sentinel-2 surface reflectance and topographical data) for a priori maximization of SOC stock representativity at the field scale. SOC concentration will be quantified by dry combustion and normalized by bulk density values to calculate the SOC stock. We also expect that a small fraction of the enrolled fields would have historic soil sampling data. We will prioritize soil sampling over those fields such that we can verify the SOC changes, whether quantified by COMET-Farm or SYMFONI.
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