Water Quality and the 2018 Farm Bill: The Regional Conservation Partnership Program

Fellow Jamie Konopacky identifies projects that have been successfully created at the state and local levels to address negative impacts from nutrient pollution and suggests scaling them up by implementing a critical mass of these projects across multiple states and regional watershed areas. Scaling up local watershed projects to a level sufficient to address the nutrient pollution problem will require that policymakers coordinate relevant state and federal water and agriculture policies and focus them on systematically replicating model local watershed projects. This will require a sound policy framework that includes a local watershed planning and implementation approach and provides adequate funding, data, expert staff, public technology and training to support needed local watershed projects. Click here to read or download.