Pennsylvania Conservation Planning

NRCS’ role is to provide technical and financial assistance to help our customers care for the land. As a result of our assistance, land managers and communities take a comprehensive approach to the use and protection of soil, water, and related resources in rural, suburban, urban, and developing areas.

Working one-on-one with landowners and other land managers, field office employees provide the technical expertise for conservation planning and design that enables land managers to balance their economic goals with the needs of the natural environment, creating sustainable systems that not only produce abundant crops and livestock, but also a quality environment.

Conservation Plans reflect a customer’s decisions about the management of natural resources for a specific area, this may be a farm or ranch operating unit, a group of units, a community, or a landscape feature such as a watershed.

A Conservation Plan includes:

• Producer/landowner determined objectives and goals

• Aerial photographs or diagrams of your farms and fields
 
• Soils maps and soils descriptions
 
• Resource inventory data which can include forage or crop production potential, or potential livestock carrying capacity
 
• List of your treatment decisions
 
• Location and schedule for applying conservation practices
 
• Plan of operation and maintenance of your conservation practices and systems

Technical consultations and planning assistance provide professional advice that helps customers make decisions about natural resource management.

With our help, people are better able to conserve, maintain, or improve their natural resources. This good stewardship involves actions to:

• Help protect, conserve, and enhance natural resources.
 
• Design alternatives that meet local resource quality criteria for identified resource issues.
 
• Include the consideration of human concerns toward achieving sustainable agriculture
 
• Consider the effects of planned actions on interrelated geographical areas (i.e. within a watershed, within an aquifer, etc.)
 
• Consider and explain the interaction between biological communities and society.
 
• Focus on ecological principles.
 
• Assist with development of plans, regardless of scale, which will help achieve the client's and society's objectives.
 
• Identify where knowledge, science, and technology need to be advanced.