Evaluating conservation incentive programs: Piloting a novel approach to enabling farmer behavior change
Assesses a pilot conservation voucher program delivered to row-crop farmers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Using interviews with participants, the study identifies program features—private-sector delivery, flexible design, and financial incentives—that reduced barriers and encouraged voluntary adoption of conservation practices in real-world agricultural settings.
Subject Tags
- Policy, Finance, and Markets
- Agriculture
Abstract
Advancing conservation policy and other mechanisms to promote behavior change depends, in part, on increased focus on developing, deploying, and empirically evaluating innovative, voluntary, conservation incentive programs. Agricultural systems are an ideal context for such work. Agriculture contributes significantly to environmental issues. There is also considerable documentation of the barriers preventing farmers from adopting conservation practices that could mitigate these impacts. Yet very few studies have empirically evaluated the impact of incentive programs and how farmers use them in real-world settings. Toward addressing these needs, this paper examines a pilot incentive program, called the voucher program, delivered to 30 row-crop farmers in the United States’ Chesapeake Bay watershed. Drawing on interviews with eight of the 30 participants, our work identifies key aspects of the voucher program that promoted voluntary behavior change. These include a partnership model, where private sector agribusiness delivered the program to existing clients; the role of a $1000 voucher incentive payment in mitigating economic and social risks of trying a new conservation practice; as well as a flexible structure that allowed producers and advisors to select the precision nutrient management service or practice they wanted to trial. As notable, many program participants who were only incentivized for planning services went on to change their behavior without additional funding. Future work can continue to develop and refine new approaches to enabling conservation behaviors in agricultural system, in part through more widely leveraging an implementation science framework to evaluate real-world programs.
Citation
Houser, M., Fisher, K. A., Fife, A., Bunn, A., & McHenry, J. (2026). Evaluating conservation incentive programs: Piloting a novel approach to enabling farmer behavior change. Journal of Rural Studies, 124, 104192.
TNC Authors
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Matthew Houser
Senior Social Scientist Maryland and District of Columbia
The Nature Conservancy
Email: matthew.houser@tnc.org -
Kristin Fisher
Science and Strategy Manager - Chesapeake Agriculture. Maryland and District of Columbia
The Nature Conservancy
Email: kristin.fisher@tnc.org -
Amanda Bunn
Applied Agricultural Conservationist. Pennsylvania and Delaware
The Nature Conservancy
Email: amanda.bunn@tnc.org