Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Conservation Meeting Monday

A public meeting will be held Monday, January 27, at 7:00 p.m. by the Nevada County Conservation District. It will be held in the Farm Bureau building in Prescott.

The meeting will be to receive comments on natural resource issues and concerns in the county. Once the comments are received and documented through this locally-led process, they will be used to direct technical assistance and cost-sharing programs to help solve natural resource problems in the county.

This public meeting will incorporate a locally led process which developed from the 1996 farm bill and U.S. Department of Agriculture's effort to start the natural resource conservation process from the grass roots level instead of at the state or national level.

This locally led process is a new procedure that will be used nationwide to indentify natural resource concerns and attempt to target assistance to those areas.

Locally led conservation means local people, through the leadership of conservation districts, assess and prioritize their natural resource conditions and needs. The conservation district will then coordinate a process with USDA agencies in the counties and others to match programs (solutions) to the prioritized needs.

Local people will stay involved as proposals and recommendations are developed to do the work and the work is carried out.

The locally led conservation process is a priority with the 1996 Farm Bill.

With the changes in the way farm bills have been developed in recent years, public involvement has become more and more of a focus. The key is that the public at the local level can best be served through farm programs when it has input by local people who know their natural resource problems and the best approaches to solving those problems.

The conservation district will use all federal, state and local conservation programs -- and private sector programs singly and in combination -- as the tools to solve natural resource concerns. However, it is the public process of analyzing conservation needs that establishes what must be done.