Climate smart programs create unique partnerships toward a common goal.

Not long ago environmental organizations and farmer groups were in vehement opposition to each other. Environmental groups saw farmers as polluters. Farmers saw environmental groups as tree huggers destined to put them out of business. And ne’er in the twain did they meet.

Today those stigmas are a thing of the past, and we have sustainability to thank. Environmental groups realized that most farmers were actually good land stewards, and educational programs could help farmers do an even better job. Farmers realized that they shared some of the same values as the environmental groups and agreed to meet on common ground.

There’re opportunities for symbiotic relationships. Farmers need resources to help accomplish sustainability projects, and it can be hard for them to find organizations that can help. Likewise, the organizations with the resources have a hard time finding farmers to partner with.

These unique unions are coming to life in the partnerships formed through the recent Climate-Smart funding. The Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities is a USDA-funded effort to combat climate change using collaborations with public and private partnerships across agriculture, forestry and rural communities.

One of those projects is with Edge Dairy Farmer Cooperative. The project will expand climate-smart markets and establish dairy and sugar as climate-smart commodities by implementing climate-smart production practices, improving business practices and making use of data and information collected to inform future standards. A total of 15 partners are part of the project.

“By expanding our network of partnerships through the Climate Smart funding program we’re going to bring that much more value and resources to farmers to have at their disposal,” says Lauren Brey, managing director of Farmers for Sustainable Food, a sister organization to Edge Dairy Farmer Cooperative and partner in the grant. “Farmers may not consider some of the partners we have involved as opportunities while those same partners are desperate to work with more farmers. So we’re happy to be able to make those connections.”

Two of those partners are The Nature Conservancy and Houston Engineering, Inc.

The Nature Conservancy is a global conservation non-profit organization that helps solve environmental challenges in forests, cities, agriculture and more. The organization is supported through the generosity of citizens. The organization’s emphasis on science is attractive to corporations that realize they have a big role to play in addressing environmental challenges and enhancing the productivity of crop fields and pastures across the world.

The Wisconsin chapter of The Nature Conservancy has been working with Edge Dairy Farmer Cooperative since 2015. “We realize that we need to help farmers become leaders and have a seat at the table when it comes to conservation practices on the farm,” says Steve Richter, director of agriculture strategies with The Nature Conservancy in Wisconsin.

Specifically for this project, Richter and his scientific staff will help with data analysis and estimated impact of environmental practices. Richter says their relationship with corporate partners will be critical to helping shape the impact of project outcomes.

“These sort of partnerships are what is needed to address environmental challenges around a regulatory landscape to help bring solutions to life,” Richter says.

Houston Engineering is a Midwest-based engineering and water resources company. They have worked with Edge and Farmers for Sustainable Food for about four years helping support farmer-led sustainability projects. The company helps farmers understand and measure the impact of on-farm sustainability projects.

“This is a unique partnership because it will be bringing some of the big dairy and sugar processors along with consumer-packaged goods companies to the table,” says Doug Thomas, senior environmental project manager with Houston Engineering. “We’ll be able to talk about and explore not only how we use this farmer-led framework to scale up the adoption of climate-smart practices but, more importantly, at that local level, how to have a processor, group of farmers, a retail company deliver value back to the farmer for the use of climate smart practices.”

One thing the entire USDA Climate Smart project has accomplished early on is the collaboration between many different companies to come together with one general common goal around identifying climate-smart solutions. Thomas says those collaborations are what makes these projects special.

“It would have taken a long time and some very unique situations to drive these kinds of partnerships toward investigating these climate-smart opportunities,” Thomas says.

Like many of the projects funded through the USDA program, project outcomes will have a broad impact.

“At the farm level, it’s really an opportunity to work with farmers to scale up new conservation practices but also help them track metrics and give them credit for those practices,” Thomas says. “That helps at the corporate level because we can validate sustainability practices that could help them gain access to foreign markets.”

As packaged goods companies continue to take direction from consumers requesting more sustainable food production, more regulations get passed down to the producer. The voice of the producer isn’t always taken into consideration in those conversations, and there’s a hope that these partnerships will help bring those topics to the surface.

“Our vision for the project is that we will be working with farmers to identify environmental practices and experiences that are the most meaningful in terms of water quality and climate change,” says Richter. “It’s important to validate these practices and identify metrics so we can help ensure farmers have a voice in what will be done on the farm from a conservation standpoint.”

It’s important to keep in mind that this one project with Edge Dairy Cooperative is just one of many—more than $3.1 billion is being invested in 141 projects. The amount of partnerships being created by organizations that otherwise would not have worked together is a true benefit for all of agriculture.

“This is the future of agriculture, working in a broader network with more partners,” Brey says. “It’s not one group doing this alone and not one group is getting all of the credit. It’s more about discovering the outcomes and finding value for the farmers to help them be successful, and bringing all of the right partners together to help get that done. By expanding that network you find great partners in unlikely places.”

In the end, regardless of the players, these unique partnerships have one common goal in mind, and that is to do what’s best for farmers and their land. This is the common ground that has brought once adversarial organizations together toward accomplishment of this critical objective.