Introduction
The Regional Conservation Partnership Program (“RCPP”) is a locally-led program that relies on strong partnerships between community organizations and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS).
This RCPP project (ID# 2794), Financing Soil Organic Carbon Storage Performance in Ohio’s Miami Valley, is coordinated by the one.two.five Benefit Corporation and a team of farms and organizations local to southwest Ohio. It utilizes federal Farm Bill dollars and private matching funding to assist producers and technical assistance providers in the enhancement and restoration of soil quality in Ohio’s Miami Valley defined in this project by the counties of Miami, Montgomery, Champaign, Clark, Greene, and Clinton.
The full project description can be found here.
Sustainable Economies Consulting was contracted to support economic analysis of this 5-year project. Our role is to provide research design and data collection methodology and expertise in the evaluation of economic outcomes. Economic analysis will be at regional scales for the RCPP geographic area.
How we did the work
Multiple Historically Underserved farmers and producers who have participated in soil health educational training programs within the six-county project region that are associated with the Regenerative Farmer Fellowship program, the BIPOC Farming Network, and other programs hosted by Agraria in partnership with The Nature Conservancy and Central State University enrolled in the project.
Farms utilizing ruminant livestock grazing within the project area will also be prioritized in the application process. Up to 20 producers are eligible for up to approximately $20,000 in financial assistance in each project year.
To date, 17 farmers have been enrolled in the project and are included in the economic analysis. The photo above shows Joe Campbell, project co-lead, collecting data from farmers through interviews.
Our primary emphasis has been on categorizing producer’s production system (cropping, livestock management, farm size) and geography (urban or rural location, regional production distribution/supply chain networks). We are exploring different ways to stratify the participating farmers based upon economic influences. Stratification will allow researchers to cluster groupings of farms together into categories that behave similarly with the way they approach economic decisions. Then, we can apply future economic questions to the categories, rather than to the individual farms.
