Success Stories

A USDA Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) project is trying to reimagine how carbon markets can work with and for small landholders. The Family Forest Carbon Program (FFCP), led by the American Forest Foundation (AFF) and The Nature Conservancy, bases carbon payments on specific forest management practices that have been scientifically shown to increase the amount of carbon that gets removed from the atmosphere and stored in the trees and soil. The project’s goal is to facilitate the participation of nearly 300 million acres of family-owned American forests in carbon markets.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) launched a new initiative to fund promising conservation finance projects through its Conservation Innovation Grants (CIG) program. This innovative effort was spurred by the belief that attracting additional private sector funding to private and working lands conservation could increase the pace and scale of conservation adoption by farmers, ranchers and private forest landowners.

The Winneshiek Energy District (WED) in northeast Iowa received a Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) in 2014 to build out a program aimed at helping farmers reduce their on-farm energy use. Now, eight years later, the project has received a leadership award from the Midwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (MEEA) for its ongoing energy planning work.

NRCS established an intentional conservation finance funding source through CIG, which aims to stimulate development and adoption of innovative conservation technologies and approaches and has funded projects led by over 35 conservation finance entities. CIG’s conservation finance projects have invested approximately $25 million into market-based projects, from pay-for-success programs that aim to reduce water usage or nutrient pollution, to crafting new loan mechanisms that support farmers as they transition to organic agriculture systems.

In 2017, Sustainable Conservation was awarded a national Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) to deliver liquid manure-an abundant fertilizer source found on dairies- in a more efficient and effective way. The project involved an innovative method of delivering manure nutrients through subsurface drip irrigation (SDI).