Breaking Through Adoption Barriers: Market-Based Conservation Approaches to Drive the Adoption of Conservation Practices

The California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance (CSWA), Sure Harvest, the California Association of Wine Grape Growers (CAWG), and Wine Institute will work together to design, develop, test, implement, and evaluate a grower education, training and outreach program and associated software to help growers learn about, gain access to, and benefit from market-based conservation opportunities for resources of concern including air and atmospheric resources, water resources, soil resources, and Energy resources.

The project will build upon the Sustainable Winegrowing Program’s (SWP) award-winning track record in sustainable practices education and outreach to help growers understand and use environmental services accounting tools that document conservation outcomes for use in market-based conservation approaches.

SWP’s online software system for growers and processors will be enhanced to aggregate the results from environmental services accounting tools so growers can more easily manage information on water, air, soil, and Energy resource conservation practices to participate in greenhouse gas and water quality trading opportunities, Energy and water use reduction incentive programs, and alternative compliance with new regulatory programs addressing air and water quality.

The SWP is collaboration among CSWA, CAWG, and Wine Institute. Sure Harvest serves as a strategic advisor, professional services provider, and software developer for the SWP. Combining the SWP’s core strength in grower education and outreach with a user-friendly “one-stop” online information management system for resource conservation measurements—the underpinning for market-based conservation approaches—is what makes this project truly innovative.

This project has a high likelihood for success because it simultaneously addresses training and outreach needs with technology needs in partnership with growers throughout the design, development, testing, refinement, and implementation phases. Project benefits will be significant, measurable, documented, and publicly reported (see e. Project Deliverables above). These benefits will extend to participating growers, other agricultural producers, their neighbors and communities.

The project has a high probability to transfer the grower education and outreach approach as well as the “one-stop” online software, particularly to other fruit, vegetable and nut and vine crop growers throughout the U.S. The majority of challenges to successfully execute the grower education and training program and deploy the software will be overcome during the implementation of this project making it much more efficient for other producers in other geographic regions to adopt the approach and technologies.