This is a place where government needs to step in for this to work. They need to pay farmers rebates for doing this stuff: storing water in the landscape, recharging aquifers, limiting fertilizer discharge (pollution), improving soil quality, limiting erosion.

There’s no individual incentive to do those things, at least on a year-to-year basis which is how people make decisions. You think about this year, within the boundaries of your own property.

But the benefits are largely for the region, not the individual.

So, it need to be done by government, or it won’t be done at all (at scale).

Of course some small individual farms will do (and are doing) it on principle because it’s the right thing to do. But we can’t rely on ethics to drive behavior at the economic level.