Producing Ecosystem Services On Agricultural Land: From Concept to Commodity.

There is a growing interest in implementing market-like programs that would pay farmers and ranchers for producing environmental services beyond food and fiber production from agricultural lands.  However, it is a long way from concept to reality and there are few examples of programs where producers receive payments for quantified services.  One reason for this is the difficulty in measuring ecosystem services and another is the lack of mechanisms to support payments.  Since 2005, a coalition of non-governmental environmental organizations, state and federal agencies, ranchers and researchers has been developing a Pay-for-Environmental Services (PES) program that would pay cattle ranchers in Florida’s Northern Everglades region for providing water storage and nutrient retention on private lands.  As of 2009, eight ranchers in the Lake Okeechobee watershed of south-central Florida have implemented different water management alternative (WMAs) on their land to provide these water-related ecosystem services.  Projects include wetland rehydration, pasture water management and nutrient removal from regional water pumped through private marshlands.  In this presentation we will:  1) provide a brief overview of the FRESP projects, 2) describe the types of approaches being used to document and estimate the services provided 3) present examples of the types of results being generated for the different water management alternatives and 4)  discuss the challenge of incorporating credible, transparent documentation approaches into program design.