conservation

At USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), we subscribe to the “Every day is Earth Day” way of thinking. Celebrating Earth Day provides us with the opportunity to underscore the significance of the work being done every day by our agency, through conservation planning and producer assistance, to benefit the soil, water, air, plants and wildlife for productive lands and healthy ecosystems.

This year, on a glorious spring day, NRCS Florida invited our conservation partners, local school children and the public to join us in celebrating Earth Day. Partner organizations, including the Hernando County Friends of Native Plants Society, NRCS Mobile Irrigation Lab, Audubon Society, the Florida Division of Forestry and many others, set up exhibits with various conservation themes at the NRCS Brooksville Plant Materials Center (PMC). Our soils division was also on hand to demonstrate the NRCS Web Soil Survey.

Mike and Jill Viafore are crafty. This past summer, the couple designed and built a portable demonstration house to educate the public about the benefits of rain barrels and rain gardens at exhibits and fairs.

Just recently, the wildlife conservation organization Ducks Unlimited presented me with their 2011 Wetland Conservation Achievement Award—Special Achievement category for the Migratory Bird Habitat Initiative (MBHI) and our record signup for the Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP).

It was an honor to accept this award on behalf of all Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) employees and numerous partners, including Ducks Unlimited, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, USA Rice Federation, National Cotton Council, National Association of Conservation Districts, The Nature Conservancy, and National Audubon Society .*

But let me back up a bit on MBHI.

Tulakemelwa Ngasala is a Tanzanian civil and water resources engineer currently living in Michigan. While in the United States she is caring for her three young girls while her husband works toward his Ph.D. in geology at Michigan State University.

For more than a century, Floyd Nauls, Jr.’s family has owned and worked land in Madison County, Texas. The fertile land has grown crops and cattle and has sustained multiple generations of the family during good times and bad.

Earth Team volunteer Steve Eckstein’s computer work is helping North Jersey Resource Conservation and Development Council (NJRC&D) improve water quality in a big way. He’s also helping farmers get conservation funding needed to improve their land.

Earth Team is the name given to USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service volunteers. Earth Team volunteers work side by side with Natural Resource Conservation Service employees on conservation projects to improve their local environment.

Earth Team volunteers have helped transform a neglected area at a county fairground into an attraction experts say will help boost tourism and the local economy in Mariposa, Calif.

Earth Team is the name given to USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service volunteers. They work side by side with NRCS employees on conservation projects to improve their local environment.

Producers interested in offering land in an effort to protect millions of acres of topsoil from erosion and improve the nation’s natural resources, have until Friday, April 15, to do so. This is the second consecutive year that USDA has offered a general Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) sign-up.

When landowners have resource problems, they turn to USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and our conservation partners. And when NRCS has challenges, we often turn to our Earth Team volunteers for help. Our more than 30,000 volunteers assist us with conservation planning and technical consultation, outreach and communications, clerical services and hundreds of other tasks.

This is National Volunteer Week and it is the perfect time to recognize our Earth Team volunteers. They do a lot for this agency and our national landscape: They work shoulder-to-shoulder with our conservationists, partners and technicians. They make us a more productive and effective agency and they help create a climate where private lands conservation can continue to succeed.

The near-record snowfall in Massachusetts this winter did not deter farmer Pa Thao. In fact, it strengthened his resolve to make sure that nothing happened to the high tunnel that he put up last fall, so that it would be there when he’s ready to plant mustard greens and pea tendrils in the early spring. Every day Thao, who is from Laos, in tropical Southeast Asia, trudged across the frozen field with a shovel to clear snow away from the structure.