Healthy Soils Partnership Framework
Why promote soil health?
Healthy soils provide key ecosystem benefits to California’s agricultural land as well as our communities at large. These ecosystem benefits include improved crop yield, improved water retention and quality, carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
CDFA’s Healthy Soils Program provides financial incentives to Californian farmers and ranchers to implement healthy soil and conservation practices. In addition, there are many private programs being developed and implemented in California to incentivize soil management practice on agricultural land and help achieve our state goals to mitigate climate change.
What is the Healthy Soils Partnership Framework?
The Healthy Soils Partnership Framework describes how the state will support private sector programs that incentivize implementation of healthy soil management practices on agricultural land and the process for obtaining this support. The framework was developed by CDFA and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) with technical consultation from the USDA National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and input from stakeholders through three workshops.
This framework has three essential pieces:
- Transparency Expectations: Minimum expectations intended to ensure that partner programs incentivize the implementation of healthy soil management practices and that the program requirements are clearly communicated to producers.
- Partnership Process: There is a simple, three-step process for initial and ongoing state review to ensure that private-partner programs meet minimum transparency expectations.
- State Support: Upon review, the state plans to support partner programs in a number of ways including assistance with outreach to producers via letter of support and a site featuring all public and private funding sources for healthy soils incentives.
Join the healthy soils movement
If you would like to become a private-sector partner and have already developed your healthy soils incentives program, please review the full details of the framework and submit your program for review:
- Healthy Soils Partnership Framework (Coming soon)
- Submission form for state review of Partner Programs (Coming soon)
If you are interested in developing a healthy soils incentives program, the following resources may be used as program models in developing your program:
- CDFA Healthy Soils Program
- Technical standards for practice implementation
Please email cdfa.oefi@cdfa.ca.gov if you have any questions and check back in regularly for updates.
"There is tremendous interest in supporting farmers who are implementing practices to build soil organic matter to sequester carbon and improve drought and climate resiliency. This is a perfect time to explore how we develop a framework to coordinate private sector efforts that align with the CDFA and NRCS cost-share programs to greatly expand the number of acres participating in incentive programs."