Recipient Organization
BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY
1910 UNIVERSITY DRIVE
BOISE,ID 83725
Performing Department
College of Innovation & Design
Non Technical Summary
The U.S. is losing 2,000 acres/day of croplands to development, and 40% of the loss occurs on the nation's most productive, versatile, and climate resilient agricultural lands. It is not possible to protect all farmland from development, but there is broad consensus that we should try to protect high-priority agricultural lands. This project develops a systematic, data-driven approach for prioritizing where and how to protect farmland in regions facing increasing development pressures. Our study area is the Snake River Plain of Idaho, which produces >80 different agricultural products, and has global importance in the production of various specialty products, including seed, dairy, hops, wine, sugar beets, barley, pulses and potatoes. The region is also a hotspot of human population growth, and the rapid development has stimulated a nascent but highly-motivated policy and practitioner community focused on farmland protection. In this project, we will develop a Farmland Protection Planning (FPP) framework where we a) map ecosystem services using spatial modeling approaches, b) identify priority areas for protection based on ecosystem services, productivity and climate resilience using optimization algorithms, c) measure social factors influencing farmland protection using qualitative social science methods, and d) create a "Farmland Protection Planning Handbook" for practitioners that integrates the spatial maps of prioritized farmland with insights gained from the social science component. The FPP Handbook will enable our stakeholder partners to more effectively prioritize farmland protection, and the FPP framework that we develop will be directly applicable to other regions of the country experiencing agricultural land loss.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Problem: America continues to lose its highest quality farmland at an alarming rate. Of the 10.9 million acres of farmland lost to development from 2001 to 2016, 4.4 million acres, or 40%, were "Nationally Significant" because of their high productivity, versatility, and resiliency to climatic changes (Freedgood et al., 2020). High quality agricultural land is one of the nation's most important natural resources. Its conversion to development represents an irreversible loss of our nation's capacity to grow food and other ecosystem services associated with agricultural land, as well as attendant economic and rural community effects. It is not possible to protect all farmland from development, but this proposal proceeds from the assumption that we should try to protect the highest priority farmland.Knowledge Gap: Currently, decisions about where to protect farmland typically are made opportunistically (e.g. siting an easement where there is a willing farmer), or according to socio-political boundaries (e.g. zoning according to a city-limit). A more systematic approach to protecting high-priority farmland is needed. The first step is to develop a standard definition of how to measure "value" in terms of agricultural land. An "ecosystem services'' (ES) approach provides a framework for measuring multiple benefits that society receives from viable agricultural landscapes (Freedgood et al., 2020; Qiu & Turner, 2013). For example, crop productivity is important, but so are factors such as climate resilience, specialty crop production, or important non-food benefits that agricultural lands provide, such as cultural heritage, rural community well-being or species habitat (Narducci et al., 2019; Slemp et al., 2012; Quintas-Soriano et al., 2020).Additional social and economic concerns must also be considered when prioritizing farmland protection (Bunce, 1998). For instance, individuals and communities are not equally accepting of land use policies or interventions, and people at multiple levels (e.g., individual farmers, county planners, state legislators) must support farmland protection strategies for them to be effective. In addition, development pressure is an important consideration when investing in agricultural protection. For example, there is likely not a need to place an easement on farmland in areas where development is not a threat. Understanding the range of social and economic factors influencing farmland protection is essential for effective prioritization strategies.Project Objectives: We propose to develop a systematic and data-driven approach to prioritizing where and how to protect farmland (Fig. 1). Our study area is the Snake River Plain agricultural region of Idaho, which is both a nationally and internationally important agricultural production region, and a hotspot of human population growth. Our specific objectives are:1. Map a suite of ES across the entire Snake River Plain under current and projected land use scenarios, and measure the trade-offs and synergies among ES associated with farmland loss.2. Develop a Farmland Protection Planning (FPP) approach that uses optimization algorithms to identify priority areas for protection based on ES, land productivity, climate resiliency, and development pressures.3. Examine social factors influencing farmland protection using qualitative social science research methods.4. Create a "Farmland Protection Planning Handbook" for practitioners that integrates the spatial maps of prioritized farmland with insights gained from the social science.
Project Methods
Objective 1: Map a suite of ES across the entire Snake River Plain under current and projected land use scenarios, and measure the trade-offs and synergies among ES associated with farmland loss. First, we will use spatial modeling frameworks to obtain spatially-explicit estimates of the provision of each ES across the entire Snake River Plain. We will then intersect our ES maps with published urban growth projections and calculate aggregate values of each ES in the future. This will allow an estimation of the ES gains and losses associated with farmland loss to development for the entire region, which has been done for midwestern, coastal, and eastern agricultural systems, but not yet in the context of semi-arid, irrigated agricultural landscapes of the West. Second, we will compare trade-offs and synergies among ES for our three different case study sites, allowing hypothesis-driven inquiry as to how social-ecological context influences farmland-ES relationships. Finally, the ES maps created in this objective will form the foundation of the prioritization analysis in Objective 2, whose end goal is to help inform land management.Objective 2: Develop a Farmland Protection Planning (FPP) approach that uses optimization algorithms to identify priority areas for protection based on ES, land productivity, climate resiliency, and development pressures.In this objective, we develop a Farmland Protection Planning (FPP) framework that uses a systematic spatial prioritization approach to identify agricultural lands for protection based on various relevant biophysical and socio-economic inputs, including ES, the productivity, versatility and climate resiliency of the farmland (i.e. PVR, from Freedgood et al., 2020), and development pressure.Objective 3: Examine social factors influencing farmland protection using qualitative social science research methodsObjective 3 addresses the major knowledge gap about the key social and policy factors that influence the implementation and success of farmland protection. In objectives 1 and 2, we develop spatial analytical tools to identify areas on the landscape that might be ideal candidates for preservation. This is especially important in the proposed study sites--the Treasure, Magic, and Teton Valleys--which feature prime agricultural land and face significant and rapid population growth and development pressures. Yet we know that decisions about farmland protection are not made solely on the basis of biophysical or economic factors. Social and political factors are just as important in decision-making about land uses (e.g., Skog, 2018; Tulloch, et al., 2003; Wester-Herber, 2004).The overarching goal of Objective 3 is to understand the values that different stakeholders bring to debates around farmland preservation, and how these values impact decisions made about policy trade-offs in the context of farmland preservation. By pursuing this goal in each of our three study sites, we hope to identify predictors of likely conflict or contestation that can be integrated with biophysical predictors of farmland preservation.Specifically, across the three study sites, we will address the following two specific objectives.Characterize the farmland protection "policy community" at each site (Kingdon, 2010).Identify social and political characteristics that impact farmland preservation efforts at the study sites, focusing in particular on the role of policy trade-offs and spatial factors.Objective 4. Create a "Farmland Protection Planning Handbook" for practitioners that integrates the spatial maps of prioritized farmland with insights gained from the social scienceIn this objective, we bring together the findings from the spatial analyses described in Obj. 1 and 2, with the analysis of nascent policy communities and stakeholder groups engaged in or affected by farmland protection efforts conducted in Obj. 3. Objective 3 articulates how we believe we may glean valuable social scientific information about values, trade-offs, and conflicts when we present groups of stakeholders/members of policy communities with spatially explicit information about farmland loss and associated threats to ecosystem services. Findings from this part of the study will be published in academic journals because the insights will be valuable to scholars focusing on farmland preservation, rural/urban politics and growth, and stakeholder engagement in natural resources management. However, it is equally important that we provide information for practitioners engaged in farmland protection efforts as well (Fry et al., 2018; Hoffman, 2021; Talley et al., 2016). The goal is to both identify sets of values and commitments that might enable or constrain farmland protection policy efforts and to develop analytical tools that might guide similar stakeholder engagement and policymaking in other environments.To this end, we propose creating a handbook for grassroots and non-profit organizers, farmers, policymakers, and other on-the-ground stakeholders who seek to more effectively engage their communities in change. The output maps of spatial prioritization will be integrated with interviews and focus groups to clarify values and conflicts. Then this approach will be described in a suite of products that comprise a "handbook" for farmland preservation practitioners working on this issue in other areas. Our team has experience in translating technical information for diverse audiences, a task several of us took on when we created the Treasure Valley Water Atlas (Benner et al., 2018). The investigators have all had experience creating products for the public based on scientific work (e.g., Schneider 2018, Som Castellano and Hicks, 2015; Curl et al. 2020; Brandt and Bartee 2012; McSherry et al. 2017; Narducci et al., 2017).The research team, including PhD students, will design a draft handbook, drawing from the research efforts described in this proposal. We will vet he draft handbook with smaller groups of stakeholders and decision-makers for accuracy and effectiveness before being distributed to study participants and organizations active in farmland preservation efforts in the Snake River Plain.