PCM partners farmers, specialists

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Participation in the Precision Conservation Management program continues to grow and farmers can still sign up for the 2024 crop year, as well as 2025.

PCM is a conservation program of the Illinois Corn Growers Association and its partners, applying financial analysis to in-field conservation practices to help farmers adopt practices that impact environmental goals without risking their bottom line, as well as providing financial incentives.

The program includes conservation specialists across a large part of Illinois who provide one-on-one technical support to farmers in their region. PCM is also available in parts of Nebraska and Kentucky.

“We like to think about it as why would you not sign up. Not only is it free, but we actually compensate farmers to take the time to sit down with us and share their information since we are using it in that greater capacity. We understand people’s time is valuable and that’s how we came up with payment rates,” Greg Goodwin, PCM director, said.

Farmers who sign up to PCM receive $750 — $500 to start and an additional $250 after 12 months — in compensation for their time.

The are additional financial incentives through PepsiCo for cover crops, nitrogen reduction and reduced tillage; Farmers for Soil Health’s pay-for-practice cover crop program; and in Illinois counties eligible for the Regional Conservation Partnership Program.

“One thing I think gets lost sometimes is there is no commitment to a practice change when you sign up. You can do everything the exact same way you’ve been doing it and just input your data to see how your approach stacks up. That gives us the ability to leverage to help farmers as a whole going forward. I think there’s a reason for every farmer to participate and we would love to see more do that,” Goodwin said.

He estimates the program will have between 550 and 575 farmers participating, representing over 575,000 acres by 2025. He projects Illinois will have about 400,000 acres represented.

“We have cost-share opportunities that are still open to get farmers compensated for cover crops, for reduced tillage to no-till and strip-till for the 2024 cropping season. The deadline for the 2024 program is Dec. 1,” Goodwin said.

“It’s a slightly different pay rate, but we would offer payment if those conservation practices were new this year or if they were existing. They have a little bit of a different price point, but we will accept acres of both in the incentive program.

“We also are looking for more enrollment generally into PCM to help round out our benchmarking opportunities related to the economics benchmarking, and we’re looking for more acres of conventional practices.

“As we have rolled out our program with PepsiCo and try to incentivize conservation practices overall, data set has become a little heavier representing those practices. Being able to gain more conventional acres would absolutely no hurt anything. So, we are out to recruit more conventional acres.”

Anonymous

All of the data documented from individual farms is anonymous. When signing up for the program, the farmer agrees the farm data can be used for benchmarking anonymized aggregate data. The farmer will be the only one to ever see their own data.

“That data is used to create summaries that then allow you to see on average farmers that utilize no-till, the returns that they see are this much compared to farmers that do one light tillage pass or two light tillage passes, etcetera,” Goodwin said.

“That’s how the data is used in an anonymized aggregated way and that allows us to produced regional and statewide summaries by commodity and by tillage type.

“For nitrogen, we can bracket different rates of nitrogen that farmers utilize and demonstrating the profitability associated with those different ranges of rates. The same with nitrogen timing, whether they apply all of their nitrogen in the fall or if the split apply or put it all on in the spring we can demonstrate the average profitability of the different timing methods.

“The same can be done for cover crops, whether they do or don’t use one, whether it’s over-wintering or winter-terminate. That’s done by crop, as well.”

PCM Specialists

Eight PCM specialists across as many Illinois regions will partner with farmers as a boots-on-the-ground resource. Each region includes five to seven counties and are featured on the PCM website.

“Those regions are distributed through the state so that we feel like we’re capturing the vast majority of soil types and weather that is experienced throughout Illinois. So, we feel like most farmers within the state should be pretty well represented by the data that’s collected in those eight regions in Illinois,” Goodwin said.

“We’re working on some partnership deals that maybe we can eventually get a few more regions for Illinois and some for other states, as well.”

The conservation specialists work directly with farmers to help navigate all of the data requirements for the program.

“A lot of our staff is knowledgeable on the agronomy side to be able to offer some good advice when it comes to cover crop termination timing, cover crop species and a lot of that,” Goodwin noted.

“We also try to be a hub of knowledge for connecting you to other people, too, where if there’s something we don’t know we’d be happy to try to find you an expert that can help answer that question for you. Also, to connect you to the right conservation cost-share incentive programs in your area that would be willing to help cover some of the cost of what you might be interested in trying.

“The requirements of different cost-share incentive programs vary widely. We try to help farmers understand, for example, this one might be paying you more, but it also has a higher bar that you’re going to have to meet, or you’re going to have to do all the work yourself to put in the data and verification, etcetera.

“We try to keep a good knowledge set around the different incentive programs available to you.”