We are always seeking opportunities to co-design agriculture technology tools that can help address bottlenecks within the community. For the past 8 months, we’ve participated in a collaborative effort developing the farmOS: Conservation Planner module to increase the efficiency of the conservation planning process.

What is Conservation Planning?

Conservation planning helps farmers and ranchers secure funding to offset the costs of adopting sustainable land management practices. These funds may come from federal, state or philanthropic programs, but complex application processes often prevent farmers from applying for available funding. Conservation planners, such as those from your local conservation district, provide farmers and ranchers with equitable access to the conservation planning process, enabling them to access funding that would otherwise be out of reach, regardless of farm size or economic status.

While the specifics of the conservation planning process are dependant on the source of funding (federal vs. state vs. philanthropic), there are several a near-universal steps:

1. A producer reaches out asking for assistance.
2. A conservation planner conducts a site assessment to understand the current situation and issues that the land steward would like to address.
3. The conservation planner works with the land steward to identify practices to address  those concerns. There are literally hundreds of practices supported by different organizations. Check out this helpful guide of practices that the NRCS is prioritizing in FY 2026.
4. The conservation planner then develops a conservation plan that can be submitted to the funding agency, where it is rated using that agency’s criteria for funding decisions.

How are conservation plans prepared?

Our Sci partnered with Point Blue Conservation Science to survey dozens of conservation planners from different organizations across the US to understand how they currently prepare conservation plans. In short, most conservation planners use a manual process where:

1. Paper forms are used for site assessments.
2. Google Earth or QGIS are used to develop property and/or field maps.
3. Spreadsheets manage data.
4. Conservation plans are developed using Word documents with the relevant information copied and pasted from steps 1-3 above.

The survey also asked if planners used software tools to simplify the process. It turns out most agricultural software that could be used for conservation planning (ex: FarmRaise or Fulcrum) is too expensive for conservation planners to use. This finding was confirmed by a competitive landscape analysis conducted as part of our collaboration with Point Blue, in which we evaluated 16 software tools against common conservation planning features (table below).

Building the Right Tool

At the same time we were reviewing the current software landscape, farmOS developers, the Initiative for Climate Leadership and Resilience at Cal Poly, and numerous local resource conservation districts in California were co-designing a Conservation Planning module in farmOS. FarmOS is an open-source farm management information system built atop a flexible drupal architecture that makes the platform customizable. FarmOS was a good starting point because it already has a farm-native data model and an active support community. 

The webinar below includes a demo of the farmOS: Conservation Planner and more details about our survey results.

Building a Community of Support

The farmOS: Conservation Planner module is currently being used by numerous resource conservation districts in CA with support from various grants. However, this leaves it susceptible to boom or bust grant funding cycles. We are currently engaged with a coalition of interested partners to explore self-sustaining funding models to ensure long-term support and access to the software. At the same time, we are continuing to seek grant funding to add more features to the conservation planner module.

How to get involved

If you are interested in the conservation planning module and would like to participate or receive occasional updates, please fill out this survey.