Indiana landowner Mary Huber was an active participant in the February workshop, "Conversations in Conservation" spending the day at Starkey Farms before heading into town to teach 4-H kids. She owns land in Indiana's Putnam County and Hendricks County, where she also lives.
During a Q&A about what it takes to get conservation practices onto landowners’ radars, Huber's personal commitment to getting a farmer going in cover crops was shared.
“I did the research, read up on cover crops and their benefits, as well as how to do them. I talked to the soil and water conservation people to hear what they had to say and did research. And then I talked to my farmer about it and proposed that for the first couple years I would take care of making all the arrangements and paying for it. And after several years, he converted, and now he also does cover crops on other lands that he farms.”
It was not just paying for the change that made the difference, she says, it was also putting in the work. “It's not only the money,” she says of the obstacles, “but also the time and effort and digging into this sort of stuff when it's something that they haven't done before.”
Huber doesn’t recall her farmer being resistant to the idea, she says, but that “I just took it upon myself because I wanted it done. So I put the time and effort into doing it and financed it.”
Her impact went far beyond her fenceposts, too, as this farmer carried his conservation experiences to other farms in the area.
As became evident, the landowners have tremendous power to impact the land – with their tenants, with elected officials and so on. Krista Kirkham, aquatic ecologist of The Nature Conservancy in Illinois, says conservation needn’t be a difficult conversation to have with the tenant. “It starts with empowering landowners with the knowledge and resources should they want to make changes on their land, and then working with the farmers to do it.”
