Mission
Protect Future Harvests
The mission of HHCD is to provide educational outreach, technical assistance, and financial support to communities and landowners to protect the soil, air, forests, and water resources on which we all depend. The District brings together community members, agencies, and organizations, to work collaboratively on preserving the ecological integrity and economic vitality of the Hampden-Hampshire region for many generations to come.
What is a Conservation District?
Conservation Districts were established in the 1930’s in response to the menace of soil erosion and severe drought that caused the Dust Bowl. Congress created state soil Conservation Districts and the Soil Conservation Service (now called NRCS) to provide landowners with techniques to conserve and protect their resources. The first Conservation District in Massachusetts was founded in 1945. There are currently 13 Conservation Districts in the State, corresponding with 14 counties. Each District is governed by a board of locally elected citizens who volunteer their time and leadership. The Massachusetts Association of Conservation Districts (MACD) gives one voice to the districts.
A Conservation District is a voice for their local community, providing leadership on conservation issues and establishing priorities for conservation projects. Conservation Districts partner with state and federal agencies to deliver needed programs, education, and technical assistance to their communities.
Land Acknowledgement
The Hampden Hampshire Conservation District acknowledges that we work on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Nipmuc and Pocumtuc peoples, who have stewarded this land for thousands of years. We recognize their enduring relationship with the land, waters, and ecosystems of this region, and we honor their past, present, and future contributions. As conservationists, we commit to learning from Indigenous knowledge and to caring for these lands with respect, responsibility, and reciprocity.
“Vastly underrepresented both in this book and in conversations about regenerative agriculture are the contributions of indigenous populations – the people who employed the stewardship model of soil management for thousands of years before being dispossessed of their lands or shipped across the ocean and enslaved.
I firmly believe we owe it to the indigenous and Black populations to avoid claiming their style of agriculture as our invention. No individual alive today is the originator of concepts and practices such as land stewardship, living soil, permaculture, conservation agriculture, or mulching… We are simply discovering what indigenous populations knew intuitively for thousands of years: that our role is not to force anything in nature, but to listen to it, to steward it. In that way, agriculture that focuses on living soil is not an innovation, it’s an apologetic response to the many wrongs forced upon the land and for the attendant harm and loss suffered by many people” – from the Living Soil Handbook, by Jesse Frost