One size does not fit all: Customizing conservation to a changing demographic

Excerpt

In a 1983 article in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, Beverly Everett, speaking from the perspective of a farm woman, issued a call to engage more women in conservation (Everett 1983). At that time, the audience for conservation programs was a farmer, nearly always a male who owned and lived on the land. Some things have changed since then; some things have not. Today, the majority of farmland owners in the North Central United States do not farm the land themselves and are nearly as likely to be women as men, yet the audience for conservation is still mostly men. In this paper, we draw from research on Iowa farmland owners and our experience in conservation outreach to dig a bit deeper into the implications of the changing face of the farmland owner for land protection. Our primary concern is women who own farmland but are not directly engaged in the practice of farming.

We begin by sharing results from a county-wide, random sample survey we conducted in summer 2008 that asked farmland owners about their participation in decision making about their land. We will push our analysis beyond our data because our survey, focused primarily on individuals,…