Collaboration to Achieve Multi-State Water Quality, Soil Health and Habitat Improvements
In Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska, more than a dozen Field to Market member organizations are united in efforts to bring conservation to scale through the Midwest Agricultural Water Quality Partnership (MAWQP). Assembled in 2016 and co-led by the Iowa Agriculture Water Alliance (IAWA) and Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship (IDALS), MAWQP brings together nearly 50 partners from all different sectors, including agribusinesses, agricultural associations, conservation organizations, urban and municipal groups, state associations, and local, state, and federal governments, to improve landscape level environmental outcomes across the Midwest.
Funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), the project reaches an impressive scale by leveraging public and private funds, including $21 million from USDA coupled with more than $80 million from non-federal partners, to deploy targeted strategies to reduce nutrient loss and improve water quality, soil health and habitat for at-risk species.
“The Midwest Agricultural Water Quality Partnership represents a best-in-class example of public-private partnerships in conservation,” shares Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig. “With more than 45 partners committed to scaling conservation practices together, our collaboration with IAWA and Field to Market is positively impacting over two million acres of agricultural land in Iowa.”
As an Incubation project registered in Field to Market’s Continuous Improvement Accelerator, the MAWQP leverages Field to Market’s member-developed and industry-leading sustainability metrics and project framework to help farmers in adopting practices such as cover crops, no-till, and improved fertilizer management, as well as edge-of-field practices related to water quality and biodiversity such as bioreactors, saturated buffers, wetlands and buffers.
“By scaling up conservation agriculture practices, we’ve been able to reduce almost six million pounds of nitrogen on an annual basis, reaching more than 600 percent of our goal. For phosphorus, we’ve been able to reduces nearly 250 thousand pounds on an annual basis, nearly 500 percent of our goal,” says Sean McMahon, IAWA Executive Director. “Those numbers are attributed to our public sector cost-share practices, so we know that we’ve achieved even greater nitrogen and phosphorus reductions with our private sector partners.”
As part of the RCPP, a handful of project partners have made commitments to further improve their sustainability offerings to farmers by integrating Field to Market’s sustainably metrics directly into their own platforms. During the project’s lifespan, Field to Market’s network of qualified data management partners (QDMPs) has grown to include Syngenta’s AgriEdge Excelsior, Land O’Lakes’ Truterra Insights Engine and Nutrien’s Agrible, with other partners still exploring integrations. These partners joined an impressive list of QDMPs that also include Bunge’s Centerfield, MyFarm’s Software Platform, John Deere, Precision Conservation Management and The Seam.
“One of the things that we wanted to focus on was increasing the value proposition and lowering the transaction cost for farmers when it comes to the Fieldprint® Platform,” explains McMahon. “By embedding Field to Market’s Platform and those environmental metrics and algorithms into these private sector platforms that help farmers improve return on investment, farmers, the ag industry, the environment and society all benefit.”
Midwest Agricultural Water Quality Partnership (MAWQP)
Using its large and diverse set of partners, MAWQP has set out to engage farmers who typically have not entered into contracts with the USDA. The project uses Conservation Agronomists as force multipliers, training farmer-facing colleagues, specifically Certified Crop Advisors (CCAs) and sales agronomists, to be able to speak to conservation practices as part of a systems approach that also includes all agronomy, fertility and crop protection.
“By training farmer-facing staff in conservation practices through that systems approach, those CCAs and sales agronomists can pitch their farmer customers on adopting new conservation practices,” says McMahon. “Once they have some farmer customers that are interested, they can do what we call the ‘conservation handoff’ back to that conservation agronomist who can work to get that farmer enrolled in a state or federal conservation program.”
“Including sales agronomists and CCAs in the conservation conversation is crucial in expanding our capacity to deliver on conservation,” says Heath Ellison, CCA at the Iowa Soybean Association (ISA), one of the MAWQP’s many partners, and the coordinator for ISA’s Conservation Agronomist Network. “It elevates our ability to provide technical assistance to producers and provide them with meaningful and trustworthy options for their operation.”
The MAWQP is using its network to approach producers from different angles to meet producers’ needs. To ensure the project’s success, both IDALS and IAWA have put up funding so that private firms can walk farmers through the first six steps of the NRCS nine-step comprehensive conservation planning process. According to McMahon, they’ve found this to be incredibly helpful for those farmers who are not comfortable walking through the door of their local USDA office and initiating that conversation.
“With these strategies of engaging the private sector, we’ve been able to get further faster than if we were just preaching to the choir of people who already sign up again and again for conservation practices,” McMahon says.
The conservation work accomplished by the MAWQP is still growing. Renewed in March 2021, the MAWQP will continue to support farmers in advancing outcomes related to water quality, biodiversity, land use, carbon and soil conservation into 2026.
“We are so pleased that the MAWQP was renewed by NRCS in 2021,” reflects McMahon.“Thanks to the additional funding from NRCS and our many generous partners’ cash and in-kind match investments, the MAWQP is now a $100M project. Our partners have already helped to improve conservation on more than 4.5 million acres through the MAWQP, but the best is yet to come.
“The Midwest Agricultural Water Quality Partnership represents a best-in-class example of public-private partnerships in conservation. With more than 45 partners committed to scaling conservation practices together, our collaboration with IAWA and Field to Market is positively impacting over two million acres of agricultural land in Iowa.”
Mike Naig
Iowa Secretary of Agriculture
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