Getting CLC on the landscape is a multi-faceted endeavor involving research, education, extension, market and supply chain development, policy initiatives, and active collaborations that engage partners across sectors – farmers, landowners, businesses, agencies, nonprofits, policymakers, and so on. This page connects you to a number of resources to use and build upon to make CLC Happen!
Making CLC Happen
Value chains for CLC crops
Technical Assistance for CLC
November 2022 Update: GLBW and the Conservation Professional Training Program (at University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension) are excited to announce the launch of a training development project, Continuous Living Cover 101 – Building a Foundation for Early Career Conservation Professionals. This project is funded by a 2022 North Central SARE Professional Development Grant. Ultimately, the training will empower those working with landowners to increase successful implementation of Continuous Living Cover (CLC) in the Upper Midwest. A self-paced, online training will be created through this grant, delivering accessible introductory Continuous Living Cover (CLC) training materials that meet current professional development needs of early career conservation and technical advisors. It will explain CLC strategies and benefits and how they integrate with soil health principles, giving trainees confidence in communicating CLC practices to farmers and identifying CLC resources. Stay tuned for information on this future training!
For several years, Green Lands Blue Waters and partners have been asking questions like –
How can we help more farmers get the information they need to increase continuous living cover?
Who will be the next generation of technical assistance (TA) providers?
How do we ensure that those providers are adequately trained, and that funding and policy supports increased capacity for these TA providers to reach farmers, leading to the changes we want to see on the landscape?
We’ve been working hard to help answer these questions. In 2022 we created a conversation starter and basic information guide full of ideas and contact information for staff at NRCS and SWCDs who run training programs, and for others who share our goals of increasing CLC training opportunities for conservation professionals. All contact information has been shared with the permission of those listed; please reach out directly if you’d like to work with any of the listed contacts to give or receive CLC-related training information.
We’ve also co-hosted small group conversations with Midwest Row Crop Collaborative and others on working with Certified Crop Advisors/ ag retailers. A summary of that work is below.
Further background. From 2020-2021 we asked CLC leaders in our networks to help us answer these questions through a series of interviews, a 10 question survey, and a virtual post-it-note type exercise. We are using the term “technical assistance providers” intentionally broadly. What we are driving towards is what channels are currently or could in the future be effective in reaching farmers with good resources, information and skill building on CLC crops and cropping systems. You’ll find the synthesis of what we heard below.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021, a talented capstone team of masters students from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs continued this work through background research and a series of interviews with county-level staff, CCAs (Certified Crop Advisors), and soil health consultants and trainers across the Upper Midwest. Their work can be found in the report and the presentation below.