Focus For This Year’s CIG

Soil health, grazing lands and organic agriculture systems, those are the priority areas for this year's USDA Conservation Innovation Grants.

"What we have are 22 awards across those three topic areas for just over $10 million," NRCS' Kari Cohen.

With those cost-share grants awarded to public and private partners developing and adopting new conservation approaches and technology.

"What we fund, generally, are demonstrations or pilot tests of a purchase or technology that has shown some promise, but maybe have not yet reached a wide scale, or if something is working in one part of the country, and has never been tried in another part, those sorts of things count as well."

2018 Conservation and Innovation Grant projects ranged from remote-sensing and field data to determining grazing impacts and forge availability to study of increased no-till agriculture and organic systems and improvements to soil health.

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