Partnerships between public conservation agencies, agricultural researchers, and private producers offer the potential to maintain and improve public lands while increasing agricultural profitability, but must meet a diverse set of needs and interests for their success. Through formative program evaluation, we developed a set of ‘best practices’ for partnerships in conservation agriculture to monitor and manage partnership activities and assess their outcomes. We define best practices in agricultural partnerships as a set of ecological, organizational, and ethical standards designed to motivate participation and discussion of potential obstacles, goals, and procedures, and to encourage mutual learning. This set of best practices was piloted in a five-year interdisciplinary partnership between extension agents and academic researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, land managers from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and private cattle producers to explore rotational grazing management on Wisconsin’s public grasslands.

Established through a process of internal evaluation and site visits, workshops, group-interviews, and interdisciplinary literature review, we developed this set of best practices to evaluate the success grazing partnerships on public lands. These best practices will be used throughout the course of the partnership to guide actions, help partners define goals, maintain communication, deal with conflicts, and evaluate the many interrelated biological and human outcomes of grazing management at the completion of the project.

The use of program evaluation to collaboratively establish best practices and measure their success is becoming increasingly important as partnerships in land use and conservation change to meet the needs of a more resilient agriculture. While our research is ongoing, we plan to further explore best practices as an evaluation tool to inform and facilitate partnerships in conservation agriculture, ultimately supporting new agricultural opportunities for farmers and maintaining critical habitat.