Walton Fund Uses Market Incentives to Encourage Better Farming Practices

In a swath of cropland more than twice the size of Connecticut, farmers will change the way they tend to their fields thanks in large part to the Walton Family Foundation.

The effort will bring together farmers, agribusiness, and environmentalists to conserve water and reduce pollution runoff. Participants so far include the Environmental Defense Fund, the Farm Foundation, and the Land Stewardship Project.

It’s part of a broader plan by the Walton foundation to spend $455 million to maintain adequate levels of clean water in the Mississippi and Colorado River basins, prevent overfishing in the oceans, and restore damage done to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Market-based incentives are key to the plan. Walton-funded groups have worked to get agricultural buyers to commit to purchasing crops grown using techniques that minimize nitrogen runoff. These include changing how and when fertilizer is used, planting “cover” crops rather than letting fields lay fallow, and trapping nitrogen runoff at field edges. Such practices can boost crop yields at little expense to farmers, according to the foundation.

Spade work for the strategy began in 2010, when Walton introduced the techniques on 600,000 acres of farmland in the Midwest and began pushing for pro-conservation policies at the state and federal levels. The crop practices proved so successful that the new techniques were expanded to an area nearly twice that size.

Now, the foundation will support projects on a much bigger scale — more than 10 million acres, primarily in Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. As it does so, it will need to prove that protecting the environment won’t strain a farmer’s budget, says S. Robson Walton, the eldest son of Walmart founders Sam and Helen Walton and a foundation board member who has developed a keen interest in the environment.

“To be effective in the farm work, you have to have farmers buy into changing their practices,” he says. “It has to be good for them. Creating those incentives is a really healthy thing.”