Agricultural Incentives Program

Since the adoption of the Clean Water Act in 1972 the United States has made substantial progress toward clean up of point source discharges into our waters. However, progress on non-point source pollution lags far behind. Agricultural runoff of surplus nutrients is causing significant degradation of our nation’s fresh and marine waters. The most profound example is the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico affected immediately by Mississippi River discharge but approximately 80% of the nation’s estuaries face significant eutrophication problems. This degradation results in the loss of productive habitat for fish and wildlife, billions of dollars in lost economic activity, businesses and municipalities being forced to bear the cost of cleaning up contamination generated by others and contributes to increasingly well understood implications for human health. This is one of the nation's most significant environmental problems, yet there is not any systematic policy to address it.

Sand County Foundation has undertaken a long-term commitment to develop a model for reducing non-point source pollution through the use of market based targeted incentives. This initiative focuses specifically on reducing nitrogen runoff into our waterways but has the potential for adaptation for other environmental amenities. The model is designed for large scale regional and national replication.  This initiative can help improve many conservation programs that are currently in place as well as be very helpful in shaping future conservation policies. This project provides four key innovations in the delivery of conservation programs: First, it will demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of alternate nitrogen management strategies to reduce agricultural discharge. Second, it will deploy a new model for addressing non-point source discharge through market targeted incentives to farmers. Third it allows more effective targeting of conservation investments to improve the conservation value of invested funds. Fourth, it will provide the tools to shift the metrics of evaluating effectiveness of conservation programs from regulatory compliance or program penetration to where the most improvement of environmental quality is delivered from the investment of conservation dollars.