The Saginaw Bay Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) in Michigan is an innovative conservation effort organized to address water quality impairments involving a unique collaboration between conservation organizations, agronomists, universities, commodity groups, and agribusinesses. We track the evolution and adaptation of the Saginaw Bay RCPP, and the collaboration among the traditional and nontraditional conservation partners. Our reflections are organized around three key lessons: vertical and horizontal communication challenges; contextual and structural constraints; barriers that remain between private and public sector entities for this and alternative conservation-delivery models. Lessons from this evaluation will inform the design of future collaborative/multi-stakeholder watershed management efforts. We also demonstrate that rather than being used as an ad-hoc approach, social science evaluation was integrated into conservation planning and practice, hence increasing the salience and legitimacy of the conservation social science in collaborative watershed management.

Federal agricultural land use policies in the United States aimed at protecting soil health and water quality typically rely on persuading individual farmers to voluntarily adopt conservation practices. An expanding body of literature suggests that private sector intermediaries, such as crop advisers, are increasingly trusted sources of information for farmers about conservation practices and thus may be persuasive actors in the conservation adoption realm. While previous studies have explored farmers' perceptions of crop advisers facilitating conservation practice adoption and participating in conservation programs in agricultural landscapes, little research to date has explored crop advisers' perceptions of this role, and few agricultural land use policies have explicitly included crop advisers as conservation partners. This study fills a critical void in the literature by evaluating the Saginaw Bay Regional Conservation Partnership Program, an innovative agricultural policy that relies on crop advisers to recruit farmers into the program and assist them with the adoption of conservation practices. Through a survey and interviews with crop advisers in the Saginaw Bay watershed in Michigan, USA, we explore crop advisers' perceptions of their role in the program and of delivering conservation information to farmers. We found that crop advisers have positive attitudes towards land/water resources and conservation practices, believe they have an important intermediary role to play in facilitating conservation practice adoption, and believe their supervisors are supportive of them promoting conservation. However, difficulties in collaboration and communication between the private and governmental sectors resulting from perceived differences, operational differences, and territoriality present a key barrier to crop advisers increasing their intermediary role in the promotion and implementation of federal conservation programs. Future research and policy initiatives should explore how to address public-private territoriality and whether crop advisers should be incentivized to deliver information about conservation practices and/or assist in enrolling farmers in federal conservation programs.

Nonpoint source pollution from agricultural land uses continues to pose one of the most significant threats to water quality in the US, with measurable impacts across local, regional, and national scales. The impact and the influence of targeted conservation efforts are directly related to the degree to which farmers are familiar with and trust the entities providing the information and/or outreach. Recent research suggests that farmers consistently rank independent and retail-affiliated crop advisers as among the most trusted and influential sources for agronomic information, but little is understood about whether farmers are willing to receive advice from crop advisers on the use of practices that conserve soil and water, and, if so, whether crop advisers will be perceived as influential. We present survey data from farmers ( n = 1461) in Michigan’s Saginaw Bay (Lake Huron) watershed to explore these questions. Results suggest that farmers view crop advisers as trustworthy sources of information about conservation, and influential on management practices that have large conservation implications. We discuss these results, along with perceived barriers and opportunities to crop advisers partnering with traditional conservation agencies to enhance the impact of voluntary conservation programs.

There is growing evidence that addressing nonpoint source pollution within intensely agricultural regions of the Great Lakes will require innovative solutions to achieve meaningful ecological outcomes. Recognizing this, a broad coalition of partners is collaborating across Michigan's Saginaw Bay watershed to develop and test innovative approaches to achieve the vision of Strategic Agricultural Conservation. The strategy focuses on using science, technology, and new ways of incentivizing practices and delivering services to producers to address challenges and barriers to Strategic Agricultural Conservation. It uses science to model relations between conservation actions, water quality and fish community health, allowing the coalition to establish realistic ecological outcomes and both short and long-term implementation goals at a variety of scales. It uses a decision tool and pay-for-performance methods to strategically target conservation practices and increase their efficiency. It uses nontraditional partners to help increase the ability to engage landowners and streamlined the application process to help increase landowner participation. Finally, it uses secure, privacy respecting, methods to track practices and progress towards short and long-term goals. Herein we present three case studies that demonstrate the practical application of this strategy including developing and testing new innovative conservation programs across the Saginaw Bay watershed. The success of this work will ultimately be determined by a variety of factors that affect conservation at landscape scales. However, what is clear is that without the science and complementary decision tool, this collaborative adaptive management approach would be impossible to implement across such a large geography. (C) 2016 International Association for Great Lakes Research. Published by Elsevier B.V.