Assessing technical assistance programs

Excerpt

The list of environmental challenges confronting agriculture and private landowners is large and in some cases growing larger. Addressing agriculture's environmental challenges requires substantial new investment to build the rich and dense technical support and assistance network needed to support environmental management.

An essential federal role in US agriculture conservation policy should be to build and maintain a technical support and assistance network suitable to meet the resource conservation and environmental management needs of the 21st century. A stronger technical assistance network-built from partnerships with federal, state, and local governments, for-profits businesses, nonprofit organizations, universities and other entities-will allow the United States to capture the benefits of rapidly advancing conservation science and technology. Currently, our nation's technical assistance network can't keep up-good ideas, new tools, and innovative practices stay on the shelf because USDA and its partners don't have the capacity to move science into practice as fast as they could. As a result, taxpayers and producers are getting less from their investments in conservation than they could-and should.

Science-based technical assistance is the foundation for resource conservation and environmental management on the nation's …