Evaluating conservation incentive programs: Piloting a novel approach to enabling farmer behavior change

Advancing conservation policy and other mechanisms to promote behavior change depends, in part, on increased focus on developing, deploying, and empirically evaluating innovative, voluntary, conservation incentive programs. Agricultural systems are an ideal context for such work. Agriculture contributes significantly to environmental issues. There is also considerable documentation of the barriers preventing farmers from adopting conservation practices that could mitigate these impacts. Yet very few studies have empirically evaluated the impact of incentive programs and how farmers use them in real-world settings. Toward addressing these needs, this paper examines a pilot incentive program, called the voucher program, delivered to 30 row-crop farmers in the United States’ Chesapeake Bay watershed. Drawing on interviews with eight of the 30 participants, our work identifies key aspects of the voucher program that promoted voluntary behavior change. These include a partnership model, where private sector agribusiness delivered the program to existing clients; the role of a 1000 voucher incentive payment in mitigating economic and social risks of trying a new conservation practice; as well as a flexible structure that allowed producers and advisors to select the precision nutrient management service or practice they wanted to trial. As notable, many program participants who were only incentivized for planning services went on to change their behavior without additional funding. Future work can continue to develop and refine new approaches to enabling conservation behaviors in agricultural system, in part through more widely leveraging an implementation science framework to evaluate real-world programs. • Evaluation of real-world incentive programs is needed to advance conservation policy. • We draw on interviews with farmers participating in an innovative pilot program. • Private agribusiness were important conduits for engagement and implementation. • Ease of enrollment is a widely praised element of the voucher program. • A flexible structure supported practice trials and persistence post-incentives.