Progress report for ENE22-177
Project Information
Problem or Opportunity & Justification:
The agricultural sector in the Housatonic Valley (MA, CT, and NY) and Hudson River Valley (NY) must reduce its nutrient loading to improve water quality at the watershed level and meet EPA Clean Water Act standards for phosphorus. Many farmers believe there is a trade-off between farm income and ecologically beneficial agricultural practices (e.g. Kooistra et al. 2017, Liu et al. 2018). These perceptions can limit progress toward achieving environmental and conservation goals. Anecdotal evidence collected by the project leads from technical services providers in the Berkshires-Taconic region suggests that it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify farmers and landowners who are interested in reforesting their land. Increasing the awareness and technical skills of technical service providers to design multifunctional riparian buffers, like for-profit agroforestry or for pollinator habitat conservation, provides an opportunity to generate both water quality benefits, profits for farmers, and conservation outcomes for area land conservation organizations. Speaking to a farmer’s bottom line or the co-benefits of adding pollinator habitat can increase the probability that they want to plant riparian buffers on their land and the support for these services. However, there is a gap in technical service providers having the technical expertise to assist a farmer in how to design, install, and maintain these systems through maturity and beyond (20+ years).
Solution & Approach:
There is an opportunity to craft a regionally-adapted training program that also fosters inter-agency networking amongst technical service providers to accelerate the adoption by farmers of multi-functional riparian plantings. This project will bring together industry experts to train local technical service providers on how to design and implement multifunctional buffers for pollinator habitat and commercial agroforestry as a strategy for overcoming barriers to riparian buffer adoption. Commercial agroforestry is the strategic integration of fruit, nut, and timber trees and shrubs into an existing farming operation. We have crafted our educational programming to include a ‘cohort design’ that will encourage networking and future collaborations amongst the attendees. Together, these efforts will inspire agricultural producers to add more trees to their farms both for water quality, pollinator support, and financial returns. We will train 30 service providers through a 2-year educational program, and the service providers will be grouped into 10 groups of three people. Over the course of the 2 year program, each group will craft a shovel-ready design, complete with landowner outreach strategies, planting plan, economic insights, maintenance plan, and funding strategy, ultimately leading to a high likelihood of implemented projects after the completion of this professional develop grant.
Service Provider Performance Target: 30 agricultural service providers will prepare a total of 50 multi-functional riparian buffer plans with recommendations for clients in their service area. Plans will average 0.5 acres of buffer land or potential buffer land, and at least 25 acres of multi-functional riparian buffers will be designed, developed, or managed in the proposal target area.
Farmer Performance Target: Of 50 service provider plans created for clients, at least 20 clients will adapt management strategies to create or improve riparian buffers on their land, and at least 5 clients will fully implement SP plans (including design, installation, etc.) during the project time frame.
Problem or Opportunity & Justification:
The agricultural sector in the Housatonic Valley (MA, CT, and NY) and Hudson River Valley (NY) must reduce its nutrient loading to improve water quality at the watershed level and meet EPA Clean Water Act standards for phosphorus. Many farmers believe there is a trade-off between farm income and ecologically beneficial agricultural practices (e.g. Kooistra et al. 2017, Liu et al. 2018). These perceptions can limit progress toward achieving environmental and conservation goals. Anecdotal evidence collected by the project leads from technical services providers in the Berkshires-Taconic region suggests that it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify farmers and landowners who are interested in reforesting their land. Increasing the awareness and technical skills of technical service providers to design multifunctional riparian buffers, like for-profit agroforestry or for pollinator habitat conservation, provides an opportunity to generate both water quality benefits, profits for farmers, and conservation outcomes for area land conservation organizations. Speaking to a farmer’s bottom line or the co-benefits of adding pollinator habitat can increase the probability that they want to plant riparian buffers on their land and the support for these services. However, there is a gap in technical service providers having the technical expertise to assist a farmer in how to design, install, and maintain these systems through maturity and beyond (20+ years).
Solution & Approach:
There is an opportunity to craft a regionally-adapted training program that also fosters inter-agency networking amongst technical service providers to accelerate the adoption by farmers of multi-functional riparian plantings. This project will bring together industry experts to train local technical service providers on how to design and implement multifunctional buffers for pollinator habitat and commercial agroforestry as a strategy for overcoming barriers to riparian buffer adoption. Commercial agroforestry is the strategic integration of fruit, nut, and timber trees and shrubs into an existing farming operation. We have crafted our educational programming to include a ‘cohort design’ that will encourage networking and future collaborations amongst the attendees. Together, these efforts will inspire agricultural producers to add more trees to their farms both for water quality, pollinator support, and financial returns. We will train 30 service providers through a 2-year educational program, and the service providers will be grouped into 10 groups of three people. Over the course of the 2 year program, each group will craft a shovel-ready design, complete with landowner outreach strategies, planting plan, economic insights, maintenance plan, and funding strategy, ultimately leading to a high likelihood of implemented projects after the completion of this professional develop grant.
Educational Approach
Engagement
We will draft and publish a formal request for participation through our partner organizations’ communication channels. The 30 organizations contacted for our full proposal’s needs assessment will be contacted directly; note that of 15 survey respondents, 15 agreed to be contacted about this training opportunity. We will gain commitment by clearly structuring the training opportunity as a two-year program to manage expectations from the outset. Participants will be supported through a group contact list, fact-sheet library, series of educational videos, and the educational programming events. BAV, Propagate Ventures, and Landscape Interactions will organize these materials in an easily shareable format (likely Google Drive) for participants. A technical assistance budget will be allocated for key personnel to provide participants with on-call support as needed (capped at 8 hours per participant). Advisory committee members will support outreach and recruitment where necessary, and will convene quarterly to assist with overall project management.
Of the 30 participants, we will divide the group into 10 working groups who will each be required to identify a site to work towards creating a ‘shovel ready’ project - complete with planting design, owner outreach, funding strategy, and procurement plans by the end of two years. This cohort approach is specifically designed to encourage inter-agency collaboration and networking building beyond the timeframe of this grant funding.
Learning:
Educational Content:
(1) the process of designing, installing, and maintaining a multifunctional buffer (for-profit agroforestry buffer & pollination habitat focused buffers (2) the financial and ecological benefits of such buffers (3) Techniques for improving landowner outreach communication (4) Opportunities to leverage funding for these projects
Please see the ‘Curriculum Document’ in the supplementary materials for more information.
We will use a multi-pronged approach to maximize the success of adult learning: in-person experiential, written information, visual with short online videos and diagrams, and opportunities for coaching/discussion through the cohort model.
- Cohort style learning: Small group, design charrette workshop, with technical expert support on design questions. Each team (10 total) will have up to 8 hours of 1:1 consulting with technical staff (Propagate Ventures & Landscape Interactions). Our virtual and in-person educational cohort encourages members to solicit peer and expert feedback through the design process.
- In-person and in-situ education: on-farm workshop series with guest speakers; we will host four 3-hour in-person events (two per year) at local demonstration sites practicing commercial and/or pollinator-focused riparian buffers. We will invite members of government funding agencies (i.e. NRCS and others) to attend these events to provide their insights and network with program participants; farmers will also be invited to attend these in-person events.
- Virtual education: we will host one winter webinar series (early January ‘23) (three days; 3-hour morning meetings) with guest speakers & ample time for group discussion - these will be focused on design & funding opportunities. We will also host an email listserv for group discussion and sharing of opportunities.
- Open-source educational materials: We will be making evergreen educational material to share with program participants and to share widely publicly (including beyond the geographic scope of this project). These materials include multiple PDFs explaining design processes for multifunctional buffers and educational videos to help visualize the process and share the stories of farmers/landowners who have adopted these practices. We will record our virtual events and will publicly house the recordings on BAV’s website for the next five years.
Evaluation
Our project will use a pre-project online survey of participating service providers to first establish baseline knowledge, skills, and awareness of multifunctional riparian buffer planning, design, and implementation. The pre-project survey will take place in June 2022 after cohort members have been selected. Three, brief online surveys will be conducted after in-person education events in Summer and Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 (participants will have an opportunity to share feedback on the Fall 2023 field day in the final survey). A brief survey will also be shared after the virtual education program in winter 2022/2023. With a subgroup of 5 participants, we will perform a qualitative interview by phone mid-project and exit interviews post projects. A final and more extensive post-project survey, using the same questions as the pre-project survey, will also be conducted in March to collect accurate pre-and post-project evaluation data. Key personnel will be primarily responsible for survey development, with support from advisory committee members as necessary. Data from these evaluations will also support the verification tool submitted with this proposal and will be organized into one google spreadsheet and shared with SARE upon completion of the project in March 2023.
Milestones
- Engagement: Outreach to 50+ service providers in grant area. 30 service providers apply and commit to the 2 year training program and follow up reporting in 2025. Outreach will occur in March through May of 2022. Outreach and registration will be led by Ben Crockett with outreach support from Dan Carr and other BAV staff, Propagate Ventures, Landscape Interactions and the Advisory Committee.
- Status:
- Accomplishments:
- Engagement: 30 service providers will be organized into 10 groups of 3, and each team will decide on one riparian buffer site (average 3 acres per site) to serve as their case study project through the training program. This will occur in May and June of 2022. Ben Crockett will lead with support from Dan Carr and Mark Phillips.
- Status:
- Accomplishments:
- Learning: 30 service providers participate in three, 3-hour in-person events. These will take place in Summer of 2022 and Spring and Summer of 2023. Coordination of events by Ben Crockett with multiple presenters including project partners and host site personnel.
- Status:
- Accomplishments:
- Learning: 30 service providers participate in 4, half-day virtual training sessions. This will occur Winter of 2022/23. Led by M. Phillips and E. Abramson. Dan Carr and Ben Crockett will support.
- Status:
- Accomplishments:
- Learning: 2, 2-3 minute videos are created and shared with the cohort. These will be completed by January 2025. Ben Crockett will coordinate with Forge Media who will film, edit, and publish these videos.
- Status:
- Accomplishments:
- Learning: 4 shareable PDFs are created and shared with the cohort and publicly through social media and other listservs during the Winter of 2022/23. Evan Abramson will produce 2 PDFs focused on pollinator habitat education. Mark Phillips and Audrey Epp Schmidt will produce 2 PDFs with education on permanent crops and economic considerations of riparian buffers.
- Status:
- Accomplishments:
- Learning: 20 service providers participate in a minimum of 1-hour virtual consultations (phone or video) with Landscape Interactions or Propagate Ventures by December 2024 (maxed at 4 hours per participant).
- Status:
- Accomplishments:
- Learning: By last field day in Summer 2023 cohort teams finalize their site designs. Plans reviewed by Evan Abramson, Mark Phillips Dan Carr, and Ben Crockett by September 1st, 2023
- Status:
- Accomplishments:
- Evaluation: 5 different surveys are sent out across the grant period, with 90% participation by SP program participants (led by Ben Crockett with input from Mark Phillips and Dan Carr). Surveys will evaluate SP knowledge around riparian buffers before training, during, and after training is complete, as well as a year after training ends to report on how SPs have integrated riparian buffer plans into their client recommendations. Participants will also be surveyed at the end of training on quality of training, overall program offerings, and possible future needs. An optional survey will be sent to SPs that can report back on implementation of buffers on client sites late in 2024.
- Status:
- Accomplishments:
- Evaluation: The advisory committee will be convening on a bi-annual basis to review surveys and to inform any adjustments to the curriculum that come from that participant feedback, allowing an opportunity to adaptively manage the project. (organized by Ben Crockett).
- Status:
- Accomplishments:
- Evaluation: All participants partake in an exit interview with key personnel, Ben Crockett.
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- Accomplishments:
Milestone Activities and Participation Summary
Educational activities and events conducted by the project team:
Participants in the project’s educational activities:
Learning Outcomes
Performance Target Outcomes
Performance Target Outcomes - Service Providers
Target #1
12
Provide recommendations on site evaluation, integration of holistic farm goals, plant species selection, and other factors for farmers to successfully implement multi-functional riparian buffers.
20
unknown at this time
2
2
unknown
- 1 Curricula, factsheets and other educational tools
- 4 Consultations
Jan 2024: At least one farm has been supported by a participating service provider to design and implement a cost-effect multi-functional riparian buffer. This project integrated willows and other plantings in a buffer around a small stream dividing two active pastures, including temporary exclusion to allow new plant materials to establish. At maturity planting will provide improved riparian area health and provide fodder/forage for grazing animals on the farm. Added benefit of engaging with farmer to temporarily exclude during establishment, and permanently limit beef herd access to stream to reduce erosion and pollution due to cattle being in the stream to drink. Other projects are in the works for 2024, and hope to have more to report back on related to on-farm projects and service provider outcomes after completing "exit interviews" with program participants during Summer '24.
Jan 2023: This program and the service providers participating are still in the early learning stages, and data to capture how education and resources are distributed by service providers based on this program have not yet been collected.
Performance Target Outcomes - Farmers
Target #1
10
Develop, design, and implement multi-functional riparian buffers on managed farms
unknown
1
~120 acres
Additional Project Outcomes
Jan 2024: A few notable outcomes as the training portion is complete heading into 2024. Participants who were able to participate in all 3 on-line sessions during February, and completed their own multi-fucntional riparian buffer design, reported be much more comfortable discussing MFRB design with farm clients. At least one design completed during February sessions was implemented during the 2023 season - there is also on-going design work (with service provider TA provided by project partners) for another farm hoping to implement a buffer in 2024. One participant is utilizing their allotted TA hours for support creating public resource "Native Pollinator Plants for Vermont Farms" for 2024.
Jan 2023: Due to the early stages of this project it has not been utilized to access external grant funding. One on-going collaborator that this project connected with is the Hudson Valley Climate Action Network (HVCAN) via our field day at Bard College.
Jan 2024: It was exciting to see one participant, even though they joined the cohort late, go from design to implementation. This participant used an existing relationship with a local beef operation to discuss, design, and install a low-cost multi-functional riparian buffer within a matter of months. It will be interesting to see how successful the planting has been after one year! I know there are at least a handful of other participants that are in active conversations with farm clients going into the 2024 growing season, and hope to report back more success stories in our final report next year.
We also had two great field days in August and October which were an enjoyable way for the group together and explore existing MFRB-related projects in our region. Despite there being a limited number of farms actively utilizing MFRBs, the collection of sites participants were able to explore generated a lot of discussion, deeper understanding of riparian buffer plant species, and new networks between farmers and service providers.
Jan 2023: After the 2022 field day, participants were asked, "What is the best, or most valuable, part of the MFRB training so far?"
A sampling of responses:
- "Seeing example plantings and plans first hand."
- "Collective shared resources"
- "Connecting with other participants and with speakers"
- "Being able to focus more deeply on a specific adaptation practice and see first hand the challenges in the field (literallly!)
Jan 2024: A pattern that has started to emerge in this and other programs is a need for earlier in-person gatherings. If folks are meeting eachother for the first time online, it is harder to develop a trusting community of practice that will fully utilize on-line workshops that include peer-2-peer feedback. Although everyone in the group was respectful and supportive, the real energy of this learning cohort didn't emerge clearly until our 2nd field day. Online working can still work with out in-person connections to start, but in-person connections prior to online learning seem to encourage more productive online sessions.
This project has also brought about the questions of "who is a service provider?" - at least two participants identified primarily as farmers even though they have a history of providing their agricultural services to off-farm clients. Though they don't have a formal title or academic background that often denote who is considered an agricultural service provider, but they are just as valuable for broadening adoption of sustainable farming practices in their communities, and might even have an advantage over 'traditional' service providers since there is a lower barrier to establish trust with a peer farm manager.
It required a bit of creativity to provide valuable field day experiences that were accessible to a majority of the participants. There are a limited number of MFRB examples in the target region for this grant, and funding was not requested to transport participants further outside the region. To meet this challenge field-days instead comprised visits to 3 sites each day (total of 6 in 2023) to see a variety of scenarios and practices on farms throughout the Berkshire-Taconic region. Each site emphasized a component of a MFRB as discussed during the Winter '22/'23 sessions, even though all but one site had an existing MFRB. Given the amount of coordination required for each field day, especially given that one had to be completely rescheduled due to flooding in July 2023, it would have been better to at least have a list of appropriate size prepared when applying for the grant.
A remaining component that has had multiple false-starts is completing the two videos. Given that the grant extends through 2024 this part of our project can still be completed, but we were derailed a few times as the focus of the video changed based on participant feed back, and job changes for a project partner that was helping coordinate filming. With support from SARE staff and other regional partners we are on track to complete the videos by Jan 2025, and thankful for Forge Media's patience as the project has shifted.
Jan 2023: At this stage of the project we've had the opportunity to test out a hybrid delivery method. Our first online session was helpful in getting us started, increasing accessibility to our community of service providers covering a large multi-state area, and easily being able to resources. As many have noted since the changes to meetings and delivery methods since COVID-19, despite the ease to engage digitally, a strong demand for engaging in person was shared by participants and project partners alike. Our first in-person field day offered that opportunity, but also introduced other challenges - namely demands on participant's time to travel to multiple sites, and physical accessibility for some participants during certain parts of the field day. For the remainder of this project the grant lead will make additional efforts to "dry-run" field days and understand site access. For future project budgets it will be important to account for compensation of participant mileage when the project involves site visits. Additionally, despite the demand and interest in more field days and site visits by participants, it has been difficult to identify appropriate mature sites with multifunctional riparian buffer plantings to share with participants due to the relative novelty of MFRBs on farms in the project area.
Information Products
- Water Quality and Agroforestry: Intro to multifunctional, for-profit riparian buffers (Conference/Presentation Material)
- Designing Landscapes and Corridors to Support Regional Biodiversity (Conference/Presentation Material)