Excerpt
IN the spring of 1982, the American Farmland Trust (AFT) embarked on a comprehensive analysis of the nation's soil conservation programs, in part because of congressional concern about soil erosion and the effectiveness of current programs to deal with the problem. Earlier, AFT had received a request from the U.S. House Agricultural Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit and Rural Development to provide Congress with a private-sector evaluation of cost-sharing, technical assistance, and other conservation programs at the federal, state, and local levels.
The project steering committee, which included a representative from the Soil Conservation Society of America, and the AFT staff settled on a three-pronged approach to the analysis. First, AFT undertook a series of interviews with nearly 700 farmers and ranchers in six states to find out what land owners and operators were doing and thinking about soil conservation. Second, AFT commissioned experts in various professions to prepare 25 technical papers on such important soil conservation-related issues as tax policy, cross-compliance, set-aside programs, education, funding, targeting, regulatory approaches, technology transfer, and state and local programs. Third, and perhaps most important, the project involved an indepth review of the 1977 National Resources …
Footnotes
Norman A. Berg is a senior advisor to the American Farmland Trust and serves as a consultant to AFT on its soil conservation study Robert J. Gray is director of policy development for AFT, 1717 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
- Copyright 1984 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
This article requires a subscription to view the full text. If you have a subscription you may use the login form below to view the article. Access to this article can also be purchased.