Prescribing an agroecosystem framework for integrating conservation and agricultural production goals: The Healthy Grown Potato Program as a working lands case study

Privately-owned agricultural lands have great potential to be reservoirs of biological diversity and sources of ecosystem services. Unfortunately, they are often also the source of many negative environmental externalities. The challenge for conservationists, and anyone concerned with the health of ecological systems, is to determine how we might best promote the integration of conservation and agricultural production goals in working landscapes. Historically, most attempts to implement a conservation agenda in agricultural systems have had a single-resource emphasis (e.g., soil or water) and have used financial incentive payments to attract participants. In a context of high commodity prices and farmland rental rates, these are relatively weak incentives, and do not address the interconnected economic and environmental challenges that agricultural producers face throughout their operations.;I propose a new approach for integrating agricultural production and conservation goals by managing farms and other agricultural operations as agroecosystems. To explore this idea, I first review the case of the Healthy Grown Potato Program in Wisconsin, USA, and the process used by the program in engaging grower participants. I next summarize research findings from an intensive botanical study of farms enrolled in the Healthy Grown Program, and show that the sampled farms are important reservoirs of existing regional native plant diversity. Finally, I conclude with a policy analysis of top-down and bottom-up approaches that influence agricultural producer behavior at varying spatial scales, and review a number of programs that have been successful in engaging producers in conservation behavior. I then propose a model and a process for creating strategic support networks that can improve the capacity of agricultural producers to manage their farms as agroecosystems.