Check Out These New Conservation Planning Tools for Farmers
September 26, 2018 
The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is rolling out a new, voluntary, and free Resource Stewardship Evaluation (RSE) service and tool to strengthen and modernize the traditional conservation planning process and to help farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners better identify and improve their conservation and stewardship goals and outcomes.
The Resource Stewardship Evaluation Tool (RSET) guides you through a web-based assessment and benchmarking of your operation’s current management and conservation activities. It compares those activities against science-based and established stewardship thresholds for five high-resource concerns:
- Soil Management looks at the health of cropland soil and grazing land resources, which includes reducing erosion, increasing soil organic matter, and improving plant health.
- Water Quality focuses on decreasing nutrient and sediment run-off and reducing pesticide migration.
- Water Quantity evaluates irrigation and water management.
- Air Quality emphasizes reducing on-farm greenhouse gas emissions.
- Habitat Health focuses on improving both land and aquatic habitats for wildlife.
Stewardship thresholds are intended to strike a balance between productive agriculture and healthy, sustainable natural resources. Good resource stewardship includes meeting or exceeding these thresholds for multiple resource concerns.
RSET and the Planning Process
RSET can help you better understand and document how your operations perform overall and how you compare with other similar operations. It also can help determine the value of current conservation efforts and offer areas for improvements.
Evaluation results can guide individualized conservation plans. It can also help select possible technical and financial assistance options to help farmers meet or exceed stewardship thresholds.
RSET supports the initial phases of the traditional NRCS nine-step planning process by integrating many of NRCS’ planning tools into a single package and looking holistically at the operation’s current management and conservation activities.
It then compares the results with established stewardship benchmarks for the five natural resource concerns. You are then better able answer questions like:
- How is the operation doing reducing erosion and improving soil organic matter?
- How is the operation doing with water management and nutrient runoff or leaching?
- Are net greenhouse gas emissions minimized?
- Is the farm taking advantage of opportunities for improving habitat for wildlife?
As RSET is run for each resource area, easy-to-read graphs show how your management decisions are impacting the natural resources. When benchmark assessments fall short of target stewardship thresholds, or when you want to move well beyond stewardship levels, RSET can help guide you toward areas for improvement through development of individualized conservation plans and implementation of best management practices with the possibility of technical and financial assistance.
RSET also helps generate sustainability metrics that countries and corporations are increasingly requiring of suppliers. RSET graphics and reports can be used to quantify, verify, document, and communicate conservation achievements to business partners, government agencies, regulators, marketing organizations, and the general public. Still, the information is considered private and only shareable directly by you or at your request.
The transparent and verifiable RSET evaluations become an important decision support tool to assist with the conservation planning process for professional planners, landowners, and managers.
NRCS is partnering with the National Association of Conservation Districts to provide joint recognition to farmers and ranchers who are using RSE to improve their operations and to acknowledge those who have achieved the stewardship thresholds.
How to get an Evaluation
The new tool is just beginning to come online nationwide.
Not all NRCS staff have been trained on the tool’s use and delivery, but it is designed to be user-friendly for both producers and professional planners. Currently, the nationwide tool supports cropland and grazed land (pasture and range) evaluations. Future updates will incorporate assessments for forestry, farmstead, and whole-farm management evaluations.
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