With today being Earth Day, it’s important to be mindful of your impact on the environment. Taking care of your local environment and promoting strong habitat growth can circle back and provide many benefits for your farm. Practical Farmers of Iowa offers a habitat incentives program that provides technical and financial support for several conservation practices that can provide critical native habitats for local wildlife. Grace Yi, PFI’s senior habitat viability coordinator, said they’ll help farmers find practices that best fit their operations.
One of the practices supported by this program should be very familiar to farmers: prairie strips. Yi said the incentive payment can even be stacked with the Conservation Reserve Program.
Farmers in northeast Iowa can also receive funding for creating or enhancing pollinator habitat, which is even more important now with the decline in native pollinators.
The third and final practice is a precision conservation analysis, which Yi said is done through their partnership with Pheasants Forever.
Yi added that the three options have varying ranges- pollinator habitats are for farmers in northeast Iowa, while the prairie strips and the precision conservation analysis have broader ranges.
Applications for PFI’s habitat incentives program are open and received on a rolling basis. For more information, visit practicalfarmers.org.
