Conservation targeting: Success or failure?

James Nielson

Excerpt

IN 1981 the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched a national program to target conservation efforts in critical resource areas. This targeting approach grew out of the realization that many natural resource problems are concentrated in limited geographic areas. USDA's previous conservation efforts were spread widely and uniformly throughout the nation's agricultural areas.

USDA officials envisioned targeting as a way to increase the effectiveness of federal expenditures for conservation. Targeting emerged as a central thrust in the national conservation plan, an outgrowth of the Soil and Water Resources Conservation Act of 1977. Support for targeting was not universal in 1981, nor is it now. But USDA launched targeting with broad support from the executive and legislative branches of the federal government and from a large majority of the people who responded to the proposal in the RCA planning process.

Under targeting, USDA allocates additional Soil Conservation Service technical assistance and Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service cost-sharing funds to multicounty areas with critical resource problems. With this increased technical assistance and cost-sharing, USDA hopes to encourage those farmers with the most serious soil erosion problems to apply conservation practices.

The national conservation plan called for …

Footnotes

James Nielson is an agricultural economics consultant, 5310 N.E. 85th Street, Seattle, Washington 98115. Prior to his move to private consulting, he led the Agricultural Research Service-Economic Research Service research project on targeting. The author acknowledges the assistance of Harold Stults, who at the time of the research coordinated the ERS inputs to the project. Other researchers working on the project included Herbert Hoover, ERS, Lincoln, Nebraska; Robert Dawson and Walter F. Domka, ERS, Corvallis, Oregon; Daryll Raitt, ERS, Columbia, Missouri; Jerry Williams, ERS, Little Rock, Arkansas; and Peter West, ARS, Corvallis, Oregon. The interpretation of findings, recommendations, and comments in this article are those of the author. They do not represent policies of the U.S. Department of Agriculture or necessarily the views of the other research project personnel.
Copyright 1986 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society

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