Welcome to the 79th Annual Meeting of the National Association of Conservation Districts!
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Homer SWCD has become a cornerstone for community knowledge sharing, and the NACD TA Grant has been a pivotal funding source for the expansion of activities by our local agriculture program. Come learn about ways we're sharing vetted, locally curated Alaskan agricultural and local habitat knowledge through our KNOW YOUR LAND series of talks, the Homer Grown public radio show, local soil testing initiatives, and our multitracked strategy to get this knowledge out to the people and rural villages
Hear two exciting presentations during this session!
Enabling Farmer Choice to Advance Precision Management of Pesticides to Scale Outcomes for Pollinators - Targeted use of inputs is prevalent in farming. Farmer access and choice for precision management of inputs is key. Selective use of high impact pesticides like neonics should be no different, but today neonics are routinely applied as coatings to most commodity crop seeds. This session will discuss the need for supporting farmer choice about the need for agronomic justification of use.
Ugly to Beautiful: Changing the Visual Acceptability of Cover Crops - Cover crops and no till can make a field look "messy" which can discourage farmers to use these practices. National Wildlife Federation and the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition completed a 16 month communications campaign to better understand this social barrier and test messaging to try and shift the visual acceptability of conservation practices from "ugly" to "beautiful". We will discuss our messaging campaign and the results that will better inform outreach messaging across the country.
Hear three exciting presentations during this session!
Conservation Planning Training: Access to Certification - Join us for a panel discussion with staff and supervisors around the benefits and challenges on the path to becoming a certified planner. Through the discussion, we'll share key updates on several programs and initiatives designed to support conservation planners in their training and certification, as well as new resources on how to navigate from access to certification.
Navigating NRCS Policy for Certified Conservation Planners - In August 2024, NRCs updated Conservation Planning Policy (Title 180, General Manual, Part 409) to clarify and streamline the planner designation levels and requirements. During this session, representatives from the NRCS Conservation Planning Branch will provide an overview of the conservation certification requirements and changes from the recent policy updates.
Unlock the Future of Integrated Conservation Tools with AI-Powered Applications - In this session you will learn about the current state of NRCS's primary planning tool: Conservation Desktop (CD) /Conservation Assessment and Ranking Tool (CART), how NRCS is overcoming obstacles of slow bandwidth and internet speeds and share the vision of future workflows and AI tools usage to benefit all NRCS and partners working directly with producers.
