Local stewardship teams should be expanded to all water quality and non-point source pollution concerns. Funding via collecting pesticide and fertilizer registration fees should be continued. It effectively provides producers with technical and financial assistance, as well as pollution prevention education programs. The task force recognized it as a potentially important tool for future non-point source prevention efforts because it links environmental indicators with economic and production data. The concept can be found embedded in recommendations to producers by commodity groups such as those recommended nationally by the pork industry.
Efforts are currently underway to expand it from a farmstead to whole-farm basis.
It is critical that both state and federal programs encourage farm level decision making that links economic, resource, and environmental needs. For example., federal farm programs should allow producers to make sound environmental decisions without jeopardizing eligibility for farm program benefits or minimizing pollution prevention strategies. Soil Conservation Districts presently offer voluntary programs focusing on such topics as erosion control and prevention, pesticide and fertilizer management, irrigation management, energy conservation and others. Soil Conservation Districts currently provide leadership in more than half of Clean Water Act Section 319 watershed projects and in a majority of the Michigan Groundwater and Freshwater Protection programs. Conservation districts have worked together in partnership with the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Michigan Department of Agriculture.