Farmer to Farmer

What is Farmer Advocates for Conservation? The Farmer Advocates for Conservation is a peer-to-peer mentor program designed to elevate the voices of farmers who are applying regenerative practices on their farms.  The goal of this program is to educate and train early adopter farmers to advance a culture of conservation that influences and supports middle adopter peers as they transition to sustainable practices such as no-till, cover crops, nutrient management, agroforestry, regenerative systems, and edge of field water management.

Selected Farmer Advocates for Conservation complete a paid training program led by The Nature Conservancy and partners to help them create a farm vision statement, a personal case study, a PowerPoint presentation, an elevator pitch, a return-on-investment chart, and an outreach plan.  We design the training to help Advocates understand their target audience and pay them to provide outreach to influence that audience.  Outreach tactics include panel discussions, articles, videos, presentations, one-on-one interactions, small group meetings, podcasts, and field days with the end goal of forming lasting peer networks that support each other to adopt and sustain conservation practices.   

Impact: The Nature Conservancy has tested this model over the last four years in the Maumee River Watershed.  To date, 26 trained Advocates (who manage more than 20,000 acres themselves) have directly reached over 8,000 farmers through workshops, field days, small group meetings and one-on-one interactions totaling 850,000 acres influenced.  Their messages have indirectly reached an additional 800,00 people through articles, social media, and on-line videos.  This work is funded by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative through 2024. 

Our Goal: Our goal is to expand this program across Ohio to train and compensate 1-2 farmers in each county to serve as a mentor to a diversity of farmers and farm types.  We are seeking SWCDs and other local partners to help us identify qualified farmers to become the next Farmer Advocates for Conservation.  Please email stephanie.singer@tnc.org to find a mentor or get involved.