Dreaming Bigger Dreams:
The Future of RC&D

Remarks by Bruce I. Knight, Chief, Natural Resources Conservation Service, at National Association of RC&D Councils Conference
Savannah, GA
June 20, 2006

Thank you, Sharon (Ruggi). I see that Teddy Roosevelt will be following me, so I can’t resist stealing a few of his lines…before he has a chance to deliver them.

Roosevelt, of course, was a great outdoorsman and ahead of his time in recognizing the value of land stewardship. He believed in carrying a big stick and dreaming big dreams—for himself, for this country and for our natural resources.

He said, “The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired in value.”

In NRCS, our mission is helping people help the land, and our dream, our vision, is productive lands and a healthy environment—just as Roosevelt dreamed. We all want to help farmers and ranchers restore and improve working agricultural lands and at the same time provide environmental benefits to the public: clean water, clear air and expanded habitat for fish and wildlife.

That’s a big dream, and RC&D Councils have expertise and the delivery system that is critical to achieving it. In fact, I want to suggest today that our dreams for RC&D have been too small, and what we really need to do is dream bigger dreams.

It’s been said that we shouldn’t be pushed by our problems. Instead we should be led by our dreams. To me that means being realistic about challenges, but focusing most of our energy on where we want to be.

My dream is that RC&D will be even more important to conservation in the future than it has been in the past—that your innovation and creativity will put you and NRCS on the leading edge of conservation on working agricultural lands and among communities across this great nation.

RC&D’s Role

RC&D Councils are innovators and facilitators—and that positions you well in the NRCS conservation portfolio. You’ve spent many years developing the public-private partnerships that have served rural communities effectively and are going to be vital to us in the future.

RC&D represents cooperative conservation in very tangible terms. Non-profit RC&D councils, working with NRCS technical assistance and other partners, help deliver services in niche areas where no other services are available.

You have a distinct and unique role, focusing on both conservation and development. Secretary Johanns often says that economic growth and environmental progress are complementary, not mutually exclusive—and your work demonstrates it!

An important part of your conference this week is the series of workshops yesterday and today. I sat in on sever this morning, focusing on building for the future. I would encourage you all to visit the Katrina relief effort booth showing help on the recovery and health on the clean-up. If you have questions, talk to Martha Watts.

Part of dreaming bigger dreams is taking advantage of opportunities beyond the traditional appropriations funding, which is not enough to support the present program. We want to help you with that.

NRCS Strategic Plan

Speaking of the future, I want to talk with you today about the new NRCS Strategic Plan and where I see RC&D fitting into it. Then, tomorrow, I’ll be part of a dialogue with our RC&D coordinators and state program managers. And I’m sure we’ll identify even more dreams and possibilities as we move forward.

The NRCS Strategic Plan is a bottom-up, locally-led plan that’s been developed with the involvement of customers and partners as well as NRCS employees. The plan sets forth the NRCS mission and vision I mentioned earlier: helping people help the land to achieve productive lands and a healthy environment.

We will be looking to RC&D for leadership in helping us accomplish these goals.
We have identified six goals—for NRCS as an agency—three foundation goals and three venture goals. And these goals mesh well with the RC&D program elements.

Foundation Goals

Our first foundation goal is high quality, productive soils. Specifically, by 2010, we want farmers to manage 70 percent of cropland under systems that maintain or improve soil condition and increase soil carbon. This goal dovetails with RC&D’s work with land conservation.

Second, we want to have clean and abundant water. To maintain and improve water quality, we have three objectives to achieve from 2006 to 2010:

• Reduce potential sediment delivery from agricultural operations by 70 million tons
• Cut potential delivery of nitrogen from agricultural operations by 375,000 tons, and

• Decrease potential delivery of phosphorous from agricultural operations by 70,000 tons.

We also need to effectively manage the water we have to ensure an abundant and reliable supply for the Nation. Toward that end, we want to conserve 8 million acre-feet of water by 2010. This goal ties directly to RC&D project benefits under water management.

To achieve our third goal, to promote healthy plant and animal communities, we need to improve the health of range and forest ecosystems by helping ranchers maintain or improve 121 million acres of rangeland by 2010. To provide habitat for diverse and healthy wildlife, aquatic species and plant communities, our objective is to improve an additional 9 million acres of habitat by 2010.

In addition, by 2010, we hope to encourage resource managers to create, restore or enhance 1.5 million acres of wetlands to protect water quality, reduce flood damage and provide habitat. RC&D’s land management element addresses these resource concerns, and in 2005, RC&D’s helped us provide 454,000 acres of habitat. We’d like your help in achieving more.

Venture Goals

NRCS’ three venture goals focus on emerging resource concerns related to current economic and demographic trends. NRCS has had a relatively minor role in addressing these issues in the past. But we foresee increased responsibility and opportunity in the future. All of these venture goals tie in well with the RC&D elements of land management and community development.

First, we want to see agriculture make a positive contribution to local air quality and the Nation’s efforts to sequester carbon. We’ll measure success by the tons of carbon sequestered. Several RC&D councils have experimented with carbon sequestration trading, and we would expect you to continue to provide leadership in this area.

Second, to ensure an adequate energy supply, we want to promote agricultural activities that conserve energy and encourage the use of agricultural lands to provide environmentally sustainable biofuels. We’ll count BTU’s conserved as an indicator of accomplishment. For a number of years, RC&D councils have been on the cutting edge for increasing the use of biofuels. We see your role continuing and expanding as legislative authorities expand.

Third, NRCS wants to help ensure the viability of working farm and ranch lands. Our goal is to develop resource information and comprehensive land use planning tools and to actively manage conservation easements to maintain agricultural viability and protect natural resources. You know a lot about these areas, and we see you helping us achieve these goals.

Overarching Strategies

The NRCS Strategic Plan also identifies three overarching strategies we will use to accomplish our goals:

• cooperative conservation,
• a watershed approach and
• a market-based approach.

Again, each of these is familiar to RC&D Councils. And it’s here that the new NRCS Strategic Plan gets exciting about the intersection with RC&D.

Cooperative conservation is clearly one of your strengths. Last year at the President’s Conference on Cooperative Conservation, 6 of 30 projects highlighted involved RC&Ds.

The watershed approach—that’s nothing new to you—many of your councils were built along watershed lines. You are used to dealing with issues on a watershed basis— across county lines, following Nature’s boundaries.

A number of you are leading the way in Rapid Watershed Assessments. In fact, 6 RC&Ds from Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi and New York received grants recently under our Cooperative Conservation Partnership Initiative to conduct RWAs.

But the area where I see a huge potential for the expertise and partnerships that RC&Ds bring to the table is the market-based approach. Literally, the sky’s the limit on this.

We just awarded Conservation Innovation Grants to three RC&Ds in the 2006 competition—to explore, develop and pass on cutting edge conservation technology. The new awardees will join the three RC&D’s that received Conservation Innovation Grants totaling $1.1 million in 2005.

Again, you’re out front, leading the way toward the conservation practices and programs of tomorrow. For FY 2006, after the Grazing Land Conservation Initiative Grants are announced later this month, this means that RC&D councils have a sizeable percentage of the $20 million NRCS has set aside for innovative partnerships in conservation.

But there’s more for the future. There’s a whole market emerging in ecosystem goods and services, and it brings many opportunities. Two weeks ago, NARC&DC officers Robert Jones and Joan Smith joined me and other NRCS staff and partners in Portland, Oregon, to learn more about ecosystem markets.

Landowners will need to understand how they can be part of new markets for environmental goods and services. They’ll need to hear from local groups that they and their communities know and trust—like RC&Ds.

Making environmental credit trading a reality will require organizations to aggregate credits from farmers to sell to buyers. And someone will need to verify that conservation practices have been installed and maintained to confirm that environmental credits are valid. These are all roles that RC&Ds could play.

The high cost of energy and the need for conservation is a hot issue among farmers, ranchers and communities across the nation today. Energy audits could help farmers and ranchers find ways to reduce fuel—and there are provisions for those in the 2002 Farm Bill.

We need folks with expertise to conduct those audits. Is that something that RC&D’s would like to take on? Give it some thought.

And if you’d like more information on the NRCS strategic plan or what we’re doing to make technical tools available to our customers, please stop by the NRCS technology showcase here at the conference. It’s next to the Katrina booth.

Looking ahead, I see many opportunities for RC&D’s to play a leadership role in conservation both today under the 2002 farm bill and down the road under the next farm bill. Speaking of the next farm bill, two weeks ago, Secretary Johanns released a theme paper on conservation issues and alternatives for the next farm bill. The paper presents options, not specific policies, but you might want to take a look at it—it’s available on the USDA website at www.usda.gov. Next to be released will be the one on rural development.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I like what one wise person—must have been a farmer—said: “Dream big dreams, then put on your overalls and go out and make the dreams come true.”

Let’s work together to identify those big dreams for RC&D. Let’s use the farm bill dream process to enlarge those dreams. And then let’s join forces to make them come true—for the benefit of farmers and ranchers, rural communities and the environment.