July 2023 – YLT received a $10,000 grant from American Farmland Trust (AFT) to participate in AFT’S Soil Health Stewards Program. YLT was selected along with twenty-four other entities to receive funding to enable two staff to attend a three-day in-person training and to develop programming to engage landowners and producers around soil health.
AFT is a national organization with three priorities: protecting agricultural land, promoting environmentally sound farming practices, and keeping farmers on the land. AFT’s Soil Health Stewards Program is an ambitious national effort to engage and support agricultural land protection practitioners in promoting soil health practices with the farmers, ranchers, and others who own and manage permanently protected agricultural land—and on the agricultural land their agency or organization itself owns.
Healthy soils are the foundation of productive farmland and farm viability. Healthy soils can improve both on-farm productivity and environmental health by preventing the loss of soil and nutrients to our waterways, protecting water quality and water quantity, and restoring soil biology and function. Liz Heckles, Stewardship Director for YLT, states that “participating in the Soil Health program allows YLT to raise awareness and increase soil health practices on our conservation lands in an effort to achieve greenhouse gas reduction and more sustainable healthy soils for long term agriculture.”
Participants in AFT’s Soil Health Stewards in-person training will learn about the economic and environmental benefits of soil health practices and the science behind them while building skills to support farmers, ranchers, and landowners in adopting these practices.
John Currey, Executive Director, and Liz Heckles, Stewardship Director, participated in the three-day training in April 2023. Using what they learned from the training, they compiled a Soil Health Stewards Action Plan that identifies six conservation easements to collaborate with and actions YLT will take to promote soil health with those six landowners.
John Currey, Executive Director for YLT, shares the benefit he anticipates the organization gaining from participating in the Soil Health Stewards Program. “The use of cover crops within the Sacramento Valley has increased over the last decade which has increased groundwater recharge and reduced runoff to improve water quality.” Currey adds, ”I look forward to working with our local producers to share information and identify opportunities to install soil health practices.”
Learn more about AFT’s Soil Health Program. Funding for this program was generously provided by USDA-NRCS.
