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farmOS Conservation Planner: New Community Designed Software for Streamlining Conservation on Agricultural Lands

March 23, 2026 by Liat Wilde, Greg Austic, Dan TerAvest, Mike Stenta, Erin Pearse, Erika Foster

farmOS Conservation Planner: New Community Designed Software for Streamlining Conservation on Agricultural Lands

This post originally appeared on the Point Blue Science for a Blue Planet blog: New Community Designed Software for Streamlining Conservation on Agricultural Lands

Using diverse social science approaches to improve module development of the farmOS Conservation Planner.

Written* and Reviewed by:
Liat Wilde, Point Blue Conservation Science, Social Scientist
Greg Austic, Our Sci
Dan TerAvest, Our Sci
Mike Stenta, farmOS
Erin Pearse, Cal Poly, Initiative for Climate Leadership and Resilience
Erika Foster, Point Blue Conservation Science, Director of Soil Research and Conservation

Conservation planning is complicated work. It is a collaborative process between land stewards and technical professionals to create a detailed plan to manage natural resources effectively and sustainably. Conservation planning provides a pathway which tens of thousands of farmers per year use to access federal, state and grant funding to improve their operations. It is one of the most important pathways enabling farmers to adopt sustainable agriculture practices. The process involves spatial data, national management or "practice standards", landowner priorities, regulatory requirements, finances, and a whole lot of paperwork — often all at once, often in a truck, often offline. For years, planners have had to stitch together tools that were never designed with their workflows in mind. Today, we're excited to share a solution in development: the farmOS Conservation Planner, built in direct partnership with the people who do this work every day.

The Conservation Planner software walks technical assistance providers through the full planning workflow: a simple intake form to kick things off, an embedded GIS interface for drawing field boundaries and land use areas, structured site assessments, an NRCS practice library to build recommendations, and automated generation of a downloadable Resource Conservation Plan document. It also tracks practices across a portfolio of operations — useful when it's time to build a grant proposal.

Collaboration at the center

This tool didn't start with a feature spec written in a conference room. It started with conversations — on farms, over the phone, in forums, and at field days. We built this software on top of the existing farmOS platform, where the community contributes directly to development of openly shared code (aka "open-source"). The Conservation Planner was created by the Upper Salinas–Las Tablas Resource Conservation District (RCD) in partnership with Cal Poly's Initiative for Climate Leadership and Resilience, with support from the UC Research Grants Program Office and contributions from the Coastal San Luis RCD, Central Coast Soil Hub, and Community Environmental Council. Planners were involved from the start as co-designers, not late-stage testers. As the tool developed in California, the team elected to broaden the scope of feedback and learn from an extended community of practice from around the country, using different participatory approaches.

A multidisciplinary dive into planning needs

We combined a user survey, in-depth interviews, a competitor analysis, and conference workshops to understand what planning professionals ("Planners") want and understand how they prioritize values in their workflow — relationships, field visits, and decisions that are as often as much social as they are technical.

Our 51 survey respondents were mostly California RCD staff and technical service providers (TSPs), alongside other Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) Planners, nonprofit staff, and consultants. Here's what we found:

The tool landscape is a familiar patchwork. The most-used software for conservation planning? Excel (used by 42 of 51 respondents), Word (39), and Google Earth (37) — followed by ArcPro (32) and then, in fifth place, Conservation Desktop (18), a planning program used internally by the NRCS only. Planners have built their workflows around general-purpose tools, not specialized ones, because the specialized ones haven't kept up. In interviews, TSPs were especially critical of Conservation Desktop, rating it between 2.7-4.0 out of 10 across project management, geographic input, site data, and plan storage categories.

The priorities are clear. When asked to name their development priorities in open responses, GIS and mapping topped the list (nearly 25% of responses), followed closely by low cost and collaboration, and plan output quality. The submarket split is telling: TSPs care most about collaboration tools, while other planners (without access to the internal NRCS Conservation Desktop) emphasized low software cost. Everyone wants better mapping. Notably, most existing tools — including Conservation Desktop — don't let users draw field boundaries directly or auto-generate plan documents from templates. Receiving this feedback, the farmOS Conservation Planner now does both.

The open source question needs some tending. Conference discussions also surfaced a common misconception worth naming here: farmOS is "open source", which is not the same as open data. Open source means the code is freely available and community-governed, while the data remain securely protected and private. That distinction matters for adoption, and it's something we'll keep clarifying.

From feedback to features

The findings will motivate the next evolution of the tool. The dominance of Excel, Word, and Google Earth in existing workflows made it clear the real competition isn't specialized software, it's the status quo of many environmental professionals. That pushes us to focus on making the Conservation Planner genuinely easier than the patchwork, not just feature-equivalent. The strong signal on GIS and mapping reinforced the embedded map interface as a core feature. And planners' emphasis on clean landowner-facing output is reflected directly in the automated DOCX plan generation.

Software, like a good conservation plan, is iterative. The foundation is solid, and what we build next is shaped by an expanding community of practice. With these integrative feedback methods, we're not guessing at features and needs, we have a community-driven plan.

Get Involved

Please join us as we continue to collaboratively develop farmOS Conservation Planner.

Thanks to every planner who gave us their time, their frustrations, and their wishlist. We appreciate the work you do, and look forward to learning other ways we can support you.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. farmOS is a registered trademark of Michael Stenta. The project is supported by UC Climate Action Seed Grant R02CP7344 (Sustainable Land Initiative) and the 11th Hour Project (G-25-69015).

*This post was drafted with the assistance of Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, with survey results and analysis conducted by the project team.