The Conservation Infrastructure Initiative

The 11 Cover Crop recommendations focused on creating more customer demand for cover crops, changing the perception of cover crops, increasing farmer and professional expertise, and promoting the economic benefits of cover crops.

1. Cover Crop Champion Boot Camp (Engagement): Identify and assemble training for Cover Crop Champions, co-led by farmer organizations and cover crop industry leaders to engage 500+ farmers to hone their knowledge of the science and practice of cropping systems that include cover crops and share their story to other farmers. Following training, farmers would be compensated for recruiting other farmers to plant cover crops, providing mentoring assistance, and sharing knowledge and research at meetings/workshops.
2.  Ag Retailer and Ag Professionals Cover Crop Program (Engagement): Provide ag retail field staff with access to credible, third party, neutral cover crop information to enable them to increase customers’ agronomic and economic success in implementing cropping systems that include cover crops. Develop, coordinate, and better communicate cover crop recommendations for Iowa among ag retailers, state and federal conservation agencies, and academic and extension partners. Ag retail owners and executives increase conservation promotion and incentivize field staff to deliver cover crop and cash crop support succinctly to farmers and landowners.
3. Unified Cover Crop Messaging (Engagement): Develop and promote a unified message around agronomics and conservation benefits of cover crops/soil health. IDALS and leading cover crop stakeholders coordinate key cover crop messaging and commit to those messages by all stakeholders involved in innovation, partnerships, implementation, outreach, and funding as part of the Iowa NRS. Celebrate and promote cover crop success stories.
4. Cover Crop ROI Calculator (Economics): Create a common cover crop ROI calculator. Publish complete information and simplified messaging that informs farmers and landowners of existing ROI information and how to calculate it for their farm. Engage with the ag retail sector to create a set of business case scenarios that show the benefits when they add cover crops to their portfolio and update the scenarios frequently.
5. Cover Crop Incentives for Landowners (Economics): Create economic incentives targeted to landowners. Build and target economic incentive programs for landowners and land management companies for using cover crops practices.
6. Third Party Cover Crop Business Program (Engagement): Develop a ‘Third Party Cover Crop Business Program’ to increase capacity to seed 13+ million acres* and target beginning/young farmers for start-ups. Inventory gaps in the current infrastructure and account for the human labor needed to properly seed and manage 13+ million acres of cover crops. Promote beginning/young farmer entrepreneurs servicing cover crops and connect them with Ag retailers who are short on human capacity. Incentivize retailers who provide acres to custom-applicators who can provide planting and termination services to increase capacity. * acreage figure represents only one of multiple possible scenarios for cover crops along with a mix of other practices to achieve NRS goals.
7. Public-Private Cover Crop Cost Share (Engagement): Conduct two or three pilot studies to evaluate and  identify which cost share models support greatest  cover crop adoption and retention. Increase available  cost-share funding for cover crops while leveraging  existing public cost share with private investments.
8. Ag Retailer Cover Crop Business (Economics): Generate income streams and customers for ag retailers/ag businesses. 
9. Cover Crop Science and Education Portal (Engagement): Create a Cover Crop Science and Education Portal. Connect stakeholders with current peer-reviewed and anecdotal farmer and ag-retailer staff testimonies about cropping systems that include cover crops in Iowa.
10. Agronomic and Economic Research on Cover Crops (Research): Fund, conduct, publish, and promote more Iowa cover crop-inclusive cropping system research focused on the intersection of agronomics and economics. Facilitate development of cover crop focused research projects throughout 2018, 2019, and beyond.
11. Align Precision Ag Platforms and Digital Farm Record Keeping Systems Cover Crop Impacts on Water and Temperature (Research): Align precision ag platform tools with cover crop-inclusive cropping system recommendations. Leverage the growing popularity of ag platform programs to scope and conduct a pilot project that will identify the best way to incorporate cover crops’ effects on water and temperature into two existing tools and models and evaluate changes in recommendations. Use the pilot project results to determine the best approach to incorporating cover crop effects into additional tools in 2019.

The 17 Conservation Drainage recommendations aimed to build support for planning, designing, financing, installing, and maintaining structural conservation practices statewide.

1. Saturated Buffer Criteria (Technical Assistance): Evaluate the practical application of revised NRCS saturated buffer criteria.
2. Integrate Conservation Drainage into Conservation Planning (Technical Assistance): Develop a decision support tool (e.g., checklist or decision tree) for use by conservation planners, watershed coordinators, and other public and private sector interests to identify conservation drainage practice opportunities. Evaluate establishing CAP payments for conservation planning, bioreactors, and saturated buffers to facilitate private sector engagement in conservation drainage practice planning.
3. Conservation Drainage Education and Training Needs Assessment (Research): Conduct a needs assessment that identifies audiences and evaluates their needs for education and training on conservation drainage practices so that coordinated and comprehensive education and training programs can be developed.
4. Conservation Client Gateway Integration (Technical Assistance): Integrate the (NRCS) Conservation Client Gateway tool with state-level tools so that program requirements and expectations are quickly accessible and clarified for farmers and landowners.
5. Private Sector Outsourcing for Technical Assistance (Technical Assistance): Collaborate with NRCS to develop a pilot project that enables private sector TSPs to fulfill the existing technical assistance needs on projects that could be designed and constructed in “bulk” allowing TSPs to participate to provide economies of scale.
6. Conservation Drainage Education & Training (Technical Assistance): Develop a coordinated and comprehensive program of education and training on conservation drainage practices that is tailored to specific audience needs and engages public and private sector stakeholders in the design and delivery of the programs.
7. Conservation Prospectus (Technical Assistance): Provide incentives to TSPs to develop a conservation prospectus that outlines the linkages between each step in the plan. This would become an avenue for piloting tools and sharing case studies that show best practices and key lessons learned.
8. Leverage Watershed Planning (Planning): Use watershed planning as a tool to identify the most efficient potential sites for conservation drainage practices in terms of performance and cost.
9. Assessment of Engineering Needs (Technical Assistance): Map the processes that require a licensed PE to be involved. Assess potential opportunities for revised involvement to improve efficiency without jeopardizing safety and effectiveness.
10. Income Foregone (Economics): Place emphasis on federal and state incentives to alleviate constraints on construction during the growing season by incentivizing farmers to participate in an “income foregone” program that opens field access in the summer for more cost-effective construction of EOF practices
11. Leverage Tools (Technical Assistance): Combine, leverage, and enhance existing tools at multiple scales (sub-field to watershed) to better and more easily identify cost effective sites for conservation drainage practices.
12. Conservation Concierge (Technical Assistance): Develop a cloud-based service to connect farmers and landowners with conservation practice service providers to achieve their farm and field conservation goals. The service would provide the following: a. qualifications for eligibility for private, local, state, and federal technical and financial assistance and programs b. recommendations for most appropriate conservation practices by farm and field c. list of potential, qualified TSPs to help with planning, siting, and implementation of these conservation practices Conduct a pilot project with IDALS and NRCS.
13. Restructure Cost Share Programs (Economics): Restructure programs according to the benefits of the practices and ecosystem services. Potential restructuring could include: a. Cost per pound (N and P) reduced. b. Weighted to public/private benefit. If the benefit is largely public, the cost should be largely covered by the public sector. If the benefit is largely private, the cost should be largely covered by the private sector (farmer).
14. Fully Leverage LiDAR and GIS (Technical Assistance): Create a state-based data layer looking at flow ways, hydro-conditioning, and digital elevation modeling to make it cheaper, better, and faster to develop watershed plans and site and design conservation drainage practices in collaboration with on-the-ground experts and watershed coordinators.
15. Smart Drainage (Technical Assistance): Link technology providers to conservation data and management tools. Enable IEDA to support system integrators to conduct a pilot in a county that has flooding issues.
16. Appropriate Level of Technical Assistance (Research): Evaluate technical assistance and administrative needs relative to financial assistance to support implementation and administration of conservation drainage practices to make recommendations on concomitant increases in technical assistance with increases in financial assistance for practices.
17. Evaluate Financing Mechanisms (Research): Evaluate the potential for different, new, or innovative financing mechanisms to incentivize structural practices that have greater up-front costs and evaluate potential roles that drainage districts could play.