Project Overview
Commodities
Practices
- Education and Training: decision support system, technical assistance
- Farm Business Management: whole farm planning
- Natural Resources/Environment: habitat enhancement, riparian buffers
Proposal abstract:
Our project will directly engage agricultural service providers to improve their assistance to coastal farmers who face unique challenges in the Mid-Atlantic, first focusing on Maryland. These service providers include Soil Conservation Districts, Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Soil Conservationists, land trusts, and Extension agents working in Maryland. Service providers in these coastal communities lack the resources to help farmers and landowners whose lands are at risk from saltwater intrusion (SWI), which has caused an estimated $39.4 to $107.5 million of potential economic losses annually on the Delmarva Peninsula alone due to crop yield loss (Mondal et al., 2023). These impacts are predicted to grow as sea levels rise and farmers look for adaptation options. To help farmers find alternative sources of income from their impacted land, service providers struggle to navigate a complex series of conservation programs offered by federal and state governments and nonprofit and private organizations to find those suitable for implementation on coastal lands. A major need was identified for this project to help service providers' provide actionable recommendations for coastal farmers, based on their goals, through a comprehensive understanding of conservation programs combined with a working knowledge of SWI.
The proposed project will synthesize, evaluate, and compare a range of state, federal, and NGO conservation programs based on several business-as-usual farming scenarios relevant to application on SWI-affected lands. Information and resources on these programs are currently fragmented and there is a dearth of consistent guidance for the benefit of service providers and farmers alike. To address this, we will develop the online version of the Options for Adapting to Rising Seas (OARS) tool as an essential one-stop-shop to build service providers' capacity to recommend appropriate planning options to farmers impacted by SWI. The project will analyze conservation programs that could be leveraged by coastal farmers, including assessing their benefits and costs, and users' potential access and adoption barriers for application on SWI-affected lands. Data will be synthesized through qualitative and quantitative analysis and stakeholder engagement activities. We will contract with a web developer to create a public-facing web-based tool that allows service providers to access a tailored menu of options available to farmers/landowners given their specific goals and stages of SWI. The project's educational approach is designed to ensure stakeholder input drives the development, testing, and dissemination of the OARS tool. Guided by stakeholder survey feedback and innovation adoption theory, we will train service providers on using the tool in order to then cascade targeted outreach to farmers and other service providers.
Performance targets from proposal:
- 15 farmers are linked to the OARS tool via at least 10 service
providers (indirect measure from service provider follow-up
survey) - 50 users of the online OARS tool (at least 25% of users are
innovative farmers who volunteer to contribute to piloting or final
stage rollout) - At least 15 service providers share the OARS tool and guidance
via incorporation into their educational programming