States can fund immigrant farmers.

As of September 2021, a sample of 1,305 programs was identified for their objectives to incentivize ecosystem service provisioning and practices on farms and working lands in the U.S. Northeast. Overall, these programs target four primary working landscapes: (1) farming, food, and agriculture (n = 590); (2) working forests and woodlands (n = 123); (3) fisheries, aquaculture, and shellfish (n = 84); and (4) nonindustrial supporting landscapes and systems Footnote1 (n = 493) (Figure 3). A small series of programs were available to multiple types of working landscapes (n = 15). Overall, the availability of indirect incentive programs (n = 781) exceeded the availability of direct incentive programs (n = 524) across landscapes and eligible actors. Incentive programs and mechanisms across the U.S. Northeast are available across geographic scales and are funded through the private, public, and public–private partnership sectors (Figure 4). The greatest number of programs available to eligible producers across the United States (“Federal/National”) come from the federal government (“Public”), particularly for food, farming, and agriculture from the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (n = 35) and Farm Service Agency (n = 19). At the regional scale, incentive programs and mechanisms from the private and nongovernmental sectors were most abundant (n = 67) (e.g., Open Space Institute, Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group) followed by public–private partnerships (“PPP”) (n = 55). From this sample, most programs are for producers and provided by state agencies or departments (n = 608); however, this attention may be due to the systematic attention to state websites and department directories during data collection. Nonetheless, the availability of incentive programs and mechanisms available for producers of individual states was notably high for producers of food, farming, and agriculture (n = 234) (e.g., NY DEP’s Land Acquisition Program) and working forests and woodlands (n = 62) (e.g., American Forest’s VT Woods, Wildlife and Warblers Program). Additionally, several outliers of the sample deserve attention. Public–private partnerships across the region (as a whole or involving multiple states) were noteworthy, particularly for producers of food, farming, and agriculture (n = 11) and fisheries, aquaculture, and shellfish operations (n = 11) (e.g., the Mussels for Clean Water Initiative coordinated by the U.S. EPA and the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary). Also, programs for supporting landscapes and systems have the widest availability to producers of individual states (n = 282). For producers of food, farming, and agricultural landscapes, the most prevalent indirect incentives were technical assistance (n = 145), certificates of compliance (n = 89), and technical education (n = 74), followed by direct incentives like financial loans or cost-share/agreements (n = 28) (Figure 5A). The available technical assistance and education programs often focus on the professional development of a farmer across the span of a career. For example, New Farmer Training programs (n = 9) are operated by state-level Northeast Organic Farmer Associations (NOFAs) as well as by the Cooperative Extension programs in each state. Some NOFAs, such as in Rhode Island, offer an Advanced Grower Series, which offers technical education courses to long-term farmers. NOFAs in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts also provide cost of production fact sheets, which contain “crop profitability comparisons, whole farm financial metrics, and tips for success when undertaking cost of production analysis.” Other programs are intended to help the farmer’s business as a whole, namely through implementation grants (n = 17) like Made in DC Market Access that facilitates DC-based businesses to access market opportunities. Programs to certify organic practices, led by the USDA or the private sector, constitute the largest portion of certification programs (n = 29) and can be offset by related programs like the USDA Organic Cost Share which reimburse certified organic farmers and food processors for the total cost of certification. Other notable programs cover the material expenses for infrastructure or management practices, such as those to protect soils (n = 51, e.g., the Maryland Cover Crop Program) and to lesser extents, to manage water quantity for irrigation (n = 2, e.g., New York High-efficiency Agricultural Irrigation Water Management Systems) and to build the capacity of new and existing urban farms through infrastructure investments (n = 15, e.g., Urban Agriculture Infrastructure Grant in Washington D.C.). The ecosystem services most incentivized to Northeast farmers (Figure 5B) are the production of food and feed (n = 383), followed by mechanisms that regulate detrimental organisms (n = 45). For producers, food production programs encourage specialty crops (e.g., USDA’s Specialty Crop Block Grant Program and Specialty Crop Multi-State Program) and local food systems (e.g., Maryland Certified Local Farm Enterprise Program). Other food production programs are also available to supporting institutions, such as schools, to fund either school gardens or farm-to-school programs. Programs that regulate detrimental organisms include foodborne pest and disease management as well as the management of invasive and nonnative species (e.g., Northeast Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Center grants). Another, like the USDA AMS Equipment Review (Dairy & Meat & Poultry), is a voluntary, fee-based program that provides an AMS certification to businesses in the food processing industry as a means of regulating contamination and disease issues. Fisheries, aquaculture, and shellfish operations constitute the smallest portion of this sample but still have several notable technical assistance programs (n = 11) (Figure 6A). At the federal level, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration offers the Seafood Hazardous Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) program, which provides guidance and certification for the aquaculture industry to ensure food safety on the part of producers. State-level resources include programs such as the Rhode Island Shellfish Harvester Education program, an effort of the Rhode Island Department of Health with support from the National Shellfish Sanitation program. This program provides training and certification to shellfish harvesters in the state with the goal of improving the delivery of safe products to consumers in Rhode Island. The greatest number of programs, primarily from coastal states, incentivize the management of aquatic food and feed (n = 35) and support aquatic habitat conditions (n = 25) (Figure 6B). Of these programs, land leases appear to be an important component of planting, cultivating, and harvesting shellfish crops. The Connecticut Department of Agriculture, for example, offers the Shellfish Ground Leasing Procedure and Lease Opportunities program. This program permits shellfish farmers to obtain underwater lands in Long Island Sound for planting, cultivating, and harvesting shellfish crops. The Long Island Sound area includes some 70,000 acres that is currently farmed – about 12,000 acres of this area is leased by the local shellfish commission. They offer additional leases to shellfish operations based on a competitive bid process. The Rhode Island Division of Fish and Wildlife also leases acreage to shellfish producers in the Inland Bay area. These leases are available for lands within defined Shellfish Aquaculture Development Areas (SADA), which offer expedited state- and federal-permitting processes, as well as for lands outside of those areas. For producers of working forests and woodlands, technical assistance (n = 22) and certificates of compliance (n = 15) are most abundant (Figure 7A). The USDA Forest Service Forest Stewardship Program is a prominent technical assistance and cost-share program that works in partnership with state forestry agencies, Cooperative Extension, and conservation districts to connect private landowners with the information and tools they need to manage their forests and woodlands. Certificates of compliance are available for harvesting wood for production; for example, the Forest Stewardship Council has a number of compliance-based programs, including the Group Certification, Family Forest Program, Forest Management Standards, and the Controlled Wood Standard, which certify sustainable forest stewardship and harvest practices in the Northeast. Other programs also target family forests, or smaller-scale forestry operations, specifically (n = 10). For example, the American Tree Farm System (ATFS) also provides third-party certification of small family-owned forestland through an internationally recognized process that is endorsed by the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). To be certified, family forest owners must meet the ATFS Standards of Sustainability, which ensure that landowners are protecting and improving clean water, wildlife habitat, and more. A smaller subset of programs focus on trees as a form of green infrastructure (GI) and exclusively support urban forestry (n = 11) or tree planting across landscape types (n = 9). For example, the Chesapeake Bay Trust and Maryland Department of Natural Resources offer the Green Streets, Green Jobs, Green Towns (G3) program that supports design projects, financing strategies, and/or implementation of GI-based street projects. The largest ecosystem services incentivized to Northeast working forests and woodlands are habitat creation and maintenance (n = 70) and the production of forest and wood materials (n = 16) (Figure 7B). Large-scale reforestation efforts alongside resident-led, community tree planting are available to ensure widespread species diversity (e.g., Delaware’s Seed Tree Law program was passed due to the long-term decrease in pine and yellow-poplar forests and requires that landowners reforest all harvested sites of 10 acres or more that contain at least 25% pine and/or yellow-poplar forests to ensure long-term forest health. At a smaller scale, programs like the Lawn to Woodland program (Maryland) or Project CommuniTree (West Virginia) convert unused lawn to forest cover by providing technical assistance, trees, and planting supplies. In terms of incentivizing material goods from working forests and woodlands, programs improve the delivery of wood products for energy through direct benefits, as in the U.S. Forest Service’s Community Wood Grant program, which provides money to install thermally led community wood energy systems or to build innovative wood product manufacturing facilities. Other programs provide in-kind benefits to owners of working forests, such as the Delaware Wood Directory, which is a list of primary (sawmills, loggers, etc.) and secondary (furniture makers, pallet manufacturers, etc.) wood processors that is distributed to improve the production of wood and lumber products. Of the landscape types, programs for nonindustrial working landscapes are most often available as implementation grants (n = 76) and land acquisition/easement programs (n = 24) (Figure 8A). Other available grants include those for wildlife habitat (e.g., New Hampshire’s Dam Removal and River Restoration program), outdoor recreation (e.g., parks and trails), or community resilience (the Trust for Public Land’s Climate-Smart Cities program). The land acquisition and protection options for nonindustrial landscape owners are advertised to function to directly limit development pressures. Many states have some if not several land acquisition programs that expand existing state and wildlife management areas through land acquisitions. These programs can be narrowly focused on particular areas and habitats or can be more broadly focused, taking into consideration different parts of a landscape. Programs like the USDA NRCS Wetland Reserve Easement program uses either 30-year or permanent easements to restrict development in critical wetland areas. Another example is the USFWS Migratory Bird Conservation Commission (MBCC), whose funds allow for the purchase, lease, or easement of valuable habitat for migratory birds. Other programs like Delaware’s Open Space Program, on the other hand, coordinate the acquisitions of various parts of the landscape by expanding state parks and preserves, fish and wildlife areas, state forests, and cultural resource sites. The ecosystem services reported most frequently for nonindustrial working landscapes are programs that address water quality/quantity (n = 82) and natural hazards and extreme events (n = 43) (Figure 8B). The water quantity and quality programs aim to mitigate nonpoint-source pollution through mechanisms like mitigation banks and PES schemes. Nutrient trading, for example, is a promising strategy for introducing cost-effectiveness and market-driven efficiency into the realization of reducing nutrient runoff from a number of industries, including agriculture. The Maryland Departments of Agriculture (MDA) and Department of the Environment (MDE) have been working collaboratively to establish one such voluntary, market-based program to promote the use of trading as a viable option for achieving the state’s nutrient reduction goals. Maryland Nutrient Trading Program is a program that envisions trading not only between sectors (cross-sector trading) within Maryland but also ultimately between Maryland and the other Bay states (interstate trading). Other programs address water quality issues through efforts to control point-source pollution and reduce impervious surface covers. This is of particular importance in urban areas, where runoff and stormwater can cause significant economic and ecological damage. Washington D.C. RiverSmart programs – in particular the Clean Rivers and Impervious Area Charge (CRIAC) incentive – are examples of other efforts to reduce impervious areas in urban centers. The RiverSmart program offers discounts to residents on their water bill and discounts of up to 55% off the District Department of Energy and Environment’s (DOEE’s) Stormwater Fee when they reduce stormwater runoff by installing GI. For the purposes of this program, GI includes things like green roofs, bioretention, permeable pavement, and rainwater harvesting systems. The use of GI helps to protect the Anacostia and Potomac rivers and Rock Creek, which are the main waterways in the city. In addition, the Northeast has a number of loan and grant programs to regulate present, recurring, and future hazards. For example, the Delaware Hazardous Substance Site Cleanup Loan Program (HSSCLP), which provides loans to nonprofit organizations and businesses that are potentially responsible for site rehabilitation or brownfield developers with an executed agreement for investigating and remediating a hazardous substance release at a site. Other programs that address hazards preparedness/maintenance from the national and state levels. The FEMA Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program, for example, supports projects in states, local communities, tribes, and territories to reduce risks from disasters and natural hazards. The BRIC program does this through capability- and capacity-building in communities and by encouraging innovation and partnerships that enable large projects, maintain flexibility, and provide consistency. What is unique about the BRIC program is that it categorically shifts federal focus away from reactive disaster spending and toward research-supported, proactive investment in community resilience. In Maryland, the community resilience grant has similar aims. It supports and funds local communities and nonprofits in their efforts to prepare for coastal flooding, storms, and other climate change-related consequences, while enhancing community resilience and sustainability through natural, nature-based, and GI projects. Discussion This assessment collated programs that incentivize the provisioning of ecosystem services available to producers and managers of the U.S. Northeast. From these results, several crucial gaps in current programming were identified which may hinder the uptake, sustainability, and/or effectiveness of these programs to address underlying resource concerns. These trends and areas of concern converge around several themes which are particularly relevant for the U.S. Northeast in the coming decades, namely: 1) working landbase and infrastructure, 2) livelihood provisioning, 3) scale, and 4) resilience. Working landbase and infrastructure In recent history, the U.S. Northeast has struggled with a declining productive landbase (e.g., agriculture and other working lands) and increasing population migrations toward the coastline (U.S. Global Change Research Program 2020). On top of this, the Northeast is the most heavily forested and most densely populated region in the country (U.S. Global Change Research Program 2017) and already faces climate change impacts, including rising sea levels and inconsistent precipitation. Together, these factors create complex challenges to the regional planning of a productive landbase and its affiliated infrastructure. From the assessment, significant gaps in programmatic availability were identified regarding the working landbase, while programmatic availability for infrastructure was more well represented. In regard to the working landbase, there were substantially more programs available to target food systems landscapes than there were for working forests/woodlands. While food system programming is essential for a region with decreasing self-reliance (Griffin et al. Reference Griffin, Conrad, Peters, Ridberg and Tyler2015), the number of available programs is disproportionate to the regional land cover footprint in the Northeast, with significantly more tree canopy cover than agricultural production fields. Since there are critical linkages between forests and agriculture (Krause et al. Reference Krause, Lotze-Campen, Popp, Dietrich and Bonsch2013), between forested landscapes and food systems (Ickowitz et al. Reference Ickowitz, McMullin, Rosenstock, Dawson, Rowland, Powell, Mausch, Djoudi, Sunderland, Nurhasan and Novak2022), the physical adjacencies of these land cover types could become insightful study areas of future research. This assessment also reveals an interesting trend for the availability of infrastructure programs in the region (n = 40). In the U.S. Northeast, ageing infrastructure – including roads, bridges, railroad lines, water and wastewater pipelines, culverts, and electrical power networks – are critical issues (U.S. Global Change Research Program 2017). The region has the oldest industry and building inventory in the United States, much of which was built along coastal and riverine areas that are highly vulnerable to flooding and spillover effects of extreme weather events. Interest and investment in GI is also widely available across the Northeast; for example, attention toward sustainability has, in part, increased desire to generalize tree planting programs as a biotechnological tool (Seamans Reference Seamans2013) or as a nature-based solution (Escobedo et al. Reference Escobedo, Giannico, Jim, Sanesi and Lafortezza2019). A small but emergent portion of our results demonstrates the region’s willingness and interest in community tree planting (n = 9), some aspects of environmental stewardship (n = 61), and land protection (n = 16) as complementary strategies to traditional gray infrastructure. From this assessment, it is also clear there are relatively few programs available to incentivize the preservation and redevelopment of traditional local infrastructure (also called gray infrastructure), including implementation grants for vulnerable roadways in flood zones (n = 3) and loans or tax credits for historically significant buildings and cultural corridors (n = 4). With several exceptions, these programs are mostly directed toward nonindustrial, working landscapes. Together, the availability of both gray and GI programs is essential for a region with such pronounced infrastructural challenges. However, regardless of available infrastructure options, community need, or administrative priorities, local-level actors still bear some of the most extensive responsibilities for implementing context-based, community-level solutions to the provisioning of ecosystem services, and cooperation between organizations, governments, and residents. In this regard, programs that incentivize both gray and GI solutions will be increasingly important resources for county and municipal-level organizations as they are forced to adapt to climate change, shifting land uses, and population trends across the region. Livelihood provisioning To better understand how the programs reviewed in this assessment might impact ecosystem service provisioning in the Northeast, it is also important to understand how these programs intersect with the livelihoods of people that own and operate working lands. Indeed, one aspect of the declining regional self-reliance and landbase in the Northeast is the decline in working lands livelihoods (USDA-NASS 2017). For years, the sector has struggled with a declining number of farms, producers, and landowners, as well as with issues of farm succession and farmland preservation; and while this represents an extension of a larger trend across the United States, it is particularly acute in the Northeast due to several unique pressures, including urbanization (Oberstein Reference Oberstein2016). While an abundance of incentive programs, such as those that provide business-related technical assistance (n = 55), loans (n = 19), or implementation grants (n = 23), are important for counteracting these trends, the results indicate that the extent and efficacy of these programs are not sufficient. Rather, the results of this assessment indicate a considerable need to expand programs that directly impact working lands livelihoods in significant material and immaterial ways. In such a context, there is a pressing need to increase the appeal of working lands careers to a wide range of young people. With the additional challenges of a changing climate and an increasingly precarious economic reality (see Kalleberg Reference Kalleberg2018), however, such efforts become even more difficult. Addressing the livelihoods of working lands and related problems in the Northeast will require policy and programmatic solutions that allow producers from any generation or at any level of experience to tread an uncertain career. Put another way, the challenge is not just how to make working lands livelihoods more appealing, it is how to make working lands careers a good livelihood option for young people entering the labor market at a time of unprecedented economic precarity and climatic disruption. The question then becomes how to achieve this through programming and policy. One way to answer this question is by understanding landowner decision making. The reality of landowner risk aversion is principally related to some of the trade-offs that often arise through ecosystem service provisioning programs. Across production scales, but especially for family-operated and/or small-scale producers and working lands managers, the provisioning of ecological services cannot come at the expense of economic profitability. In this sense, working lands producers are inherently risk-averse, meaning they operate according to what James Scott (Reference Scott1977) calls the “safety-first principle,” whereby the livelihood subsistence must first be guaranteed – whether directly, through on-farm production/consumption or indirectly, through income-generating activities – before risk-taking activities, such as changing practices or implementing new technologies, can be justified. It could be beneficial to know more about the motivations and mechanisms that drive the ways in which risk is determined when margins are thin and market conditions often volatile. During the development of new or existing ecosystem service provisioning programs, it will continue to be important to know how risk aversion of regional producers presents itself. We would expect that a risk-averse producer to not be motivated by indirect incentives, even though, based on the results of this assessment, these incentives are most common in the Northeast (n = 781, 59.8%). Instead, programs that provide direct economic compensation to producers may offset the risks of practice adoption, especially for smaller-scale producers. Programmatic design and implementation should consider these dynamics and incorporate efforts in order to offset risk as directly as possible. Creative policy solutions like basic income or cash transfer schemes (Izquierdo-Tort Reference Izquierdo-Tort2020), risk sharing strategies (McDonald and McCormack Reference McDonald and McCormack2022), or programs that provide health care (Becot et al. Reference Becot, Inwood, Bendixsen and Henning-Smith2020) and childcare (Inwood and Stengel Reference Inwood and Stengel2020) can serve to support working lands livelihoods amidst a confluence of intersecting challenges.