Dubuque County, Truterra partner in conservation program

For the last 15 years, Eric Schmechel has been working in the watershed field in Dubuque County, Iowa, and has met challenges with integrating conservation into his work.

“I’ve struggled as a person that’s trying to get more conservation on the ground,” he says.

But he’s found a way to move the needle using an innovative program with Truterra, the sustainability arm of the Land O’Lakes cooperative.

Schmechel says he’s working to lose the gap where farmers are listening to sales agronomists and the information given versus conservationists, and the “gaps between those messages.” But there’s a need to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus coming from farms into the watershed — which heads straight for the Mississippi River — while helping farmers maintain profitability.

In a conversation with Jason Weller, president, Truterra LLC, Schmechel says work began to connect the dots between the need for managing water flows into the watershed, and on farm practices upstream.

Schmechel says that using the Truterra sustainability tool is “a way of trying to showcase the technology of precision agriculture, of improving conservation and profitability at the same time, but also trying to build relationships with other agronomists in our county and with private industry.”

Paying for conservation

Dubuque County, the Dubuque County Soil and Water Conservation District, Truterra and local Truterra ag retailer Innovative Ag Service launched the Land Stewardship Initiative in 2021. In the first year, 26 farmers participated across nearly 2,800 acres in the county to adopt more sustainable farming practices. A focus area was creating a healthier watershed, and with quantifiable and verifiable progress achieved between 2020 and 2021, it’s anticipated participating farmers will be compensated $92,000, or about $33 per acre from the program.

When it comes to promoting more conservation practices — in this case driven by a need to improve water quality downstream — there’s a challenge: What’s in it for the farmer? “If the profitability piece isn’t there, it’s very tough to sell any piece of conservation,” Schmechel says. “Whether you’re talking structural projects or tillage changes or just practice changes in general, profitability has to be part of the conversation.”

The Truterra sustainability tool allows for flexibility in the practices farmers can adopt, yet provides accurate measurement of the benefits and value of each approach. Schmechel notes that some government or private programs can be rigid in their construction, but the approach taken for this project offers farmers choices in how they engage.

“And Truterra offers a great way of just tracking the acres and the reduction, and we’re trying to be more transparent to the public,” he adds.

One approach that sets this program apart from some other practices like cover crops and tillage changes farmers may have heard…