Excerpt
THE conservation compliance provisions of the 1985 Food Security Act have placed new, unprecedented workloads on conservation personnel at the local level. Several questions thus naturally arise: How have local Soil Conservation Service (SCS) and conservation district field offices reacted to this new challenge? What compliance planning variables determine initial levels of success and might pinpoint aspects of the process that are obstacles to completing individual compliance plans?
These questions are a major focal point of an ongoing study of landowner attitudes to conservation compliance in Missouri. As part of that study, we interviewed SCS personnel in 32 Missouri conservation districts during the summer and fall of 1988. Most of the districts are located north of the Missouri River in regions with the largest highly erodible land acreage and heaviest workloads.
Several factors in the compliance planning process and the districts' approaches to planning seem to be the most widespread and salient. We should note that the present levels of planning success in each office are affected by influences not included in this present discussion, including the date on which actual planning began, the …
Footnotes
J. Sanford Rikoon is a research assistant professor and William Hefferman is a professor in the Department of Rural Sociology, University of Missouri, Columbia, 65211.
- Copyright 1989 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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