INDIANAPOLIS – Many organizations and institutions have combined efforts to keep conservations practices alive and well in the state of Indiana. You can now add the Indiana Soybean Alliance (ISA) to that list.

The thrust of the Southern Indiana Sentinel Landscape is to help Hoosier landowners apply new conservation practices to their land. The Sentinel Landscape is a new program that connects landowners to financial and technical support for conservation projects.

“We’re very happy to work with the Southern Indiana Sentinel Landscape to offer financial and technical assistance to landowners who want to adopt new conservation practices,” said ISA Chair Jim Douglas, a farmer from Flat Rock, Ind. “Indiana farmers own thousands and thousands of acres across the state, and we are sensitive to protecting that land for future generations. This program will help southern Indiana’s landscape to remain healthy for many years to come.”

In addition to ISA, the Sentinel Landscape also partners with the USDA, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and several non-profit organization partners to assist Hoosiers with these conservation practices.

“There are two things we’re looking at here,” said Mike Spalding, ISA program coordinator.  “One is conservation easements and the other is conservation practices. The easements are permanent commitments and will remain farming forever. I grew up in central Indiana and the warehouses among the farms are cropping up like weeds.

“There are just 10 Sentinel Landscape efforts of this nature in the country. Indiana is one of only two such partnerships in the Midwest, the other being in Minnesota. By acreage, ours is five times larger than the one in Minnesota.”

The Southern Indiana Sentinel Landscape encompasses more than 3.5 million acres, from just south of Indianapolis to near Jasper and from the Illinois border to near Madison.

According to Spalding, the Sentinel Landscape and its partners work to conserve land for agriculture and sustainable forestry, improve water quality, create and restore wildlife habitat and ecosystems and support rural economies.

“What we’re bringing directly to Indiana in the upcoming year is a Regional Conservation Partnership Program, or RCCP,” Spalding said. “This will provide dedicated funding to our 3.5-million-acre landscape in this state. We’ll use traditional landscape practices from the USDA, but this funding is extra money that we’re able to bring in and use only in the area of conservation practices.”

The Sentinel Landscape even helps protect training and readiness on southern Indiana’s military installations. Indiana has been selected for a federal program that seeks to prevent incompatible land use around two major southern Indiana military installations: the Naval Support Activity Crane near Bloomington and Camp Atterbury, south of Indianapolis.

“Our military installations in the U.S. are facing encroachment from outside forces, and the major encroachment comes from residential housing development. It’s horrifying,” Spalding said.

At the state level, key partners also include Freitag’s Law Center, The Nature Conservancy and numerous other local and state conservation groups.

In the past, Indiana groups, including land trusts, have been working with the U.S. Forest Service and state Department of Natural Resources to protect and conserve small tracts of land, slowly adding the acres into larger segments.

Now, the Southern Indiana Sentinel Landscape will combine efforts of federal agencies, regional organizations, state officials and communities to educate farmers and others on soil conservation, aid landowners in repairing eroding banks along streams and help Indiana add land in public parks and forests.