CONSERVATION
Our Purpose. Our Passion.

Video Transcript

Updated 02/11/2008

Announcer: You see their touch on the land. And share their bounty at your table.
Now, hear the voices, and the hearts, of those who care for the land.

Gabe Brown, Conservation Rancher, North Dakota: I’m a conservationist because it’s a part of me. It’s who I am. I simply couldn’t do it any other way. I would not feel right with myself if I didn’t leave this operation in a better state than when I found it

Robin Chesmer, Conservation Farmer, Connecticut: I don’t really think about conservation as conservation. It’s something you do. We don’t want to cause any problems to the environment. You step back and think and say: yeah, I guess I’m a conservationist, really.

Lincoln Chesmer, Conservation Farmer, Connecticut: I share the feelings with my father. It’s the way we were raised, to do things right. Especially in the future, you’ll never be able to be competitive without being conservation-minded.

Donell Gwinn, Conservation Farmer, Florida: Well, my passion is just built in me. I just like taking care of things.
I care about all of the equipment that I use, taking good care of the land, water quality, I really care about keeping it right, you know.

Carmen Garcia, Conservation Farmer, Washington: It comes from my heart. All I do comes from my heart.

Erica Garcia, Conservation Farmer, Washington: I look down over my parents’ porch, down at my grandpa’s orchard that he planted, and I think of him. He took care of it. So maybe one day my grandkids will do the same for me.

Frank Austin, Conservation Farmer, Oklahoma: You know, it’s kind of like if you’ve got a neighbor down and out, you go help him out. Well when you fix up a place, you’re fixing that place up, you’re helping somebody, but it’s future generations.

Shin Houy Ho, Conservation Farmer, Hawaii: Doing conservation, I think it gives me and my Dad the sense of pride, you know, in the product that we put out to the market and in the job that we do every day, that we are doing a good job to preserve the land.

Wei Chong Ho, Conservation Farmer, Hawaii: Because the farmer, we touch the soil and water more than the city people. We’ve got to take care.

Mary Wahl, Conservation Rancher, Oregon: We’ve been here so long that I can’t even imagine not having this. I can’t imagine selling it and getting rid of this. I’ve been doing watershed protection work for at least the last decade. And on conservation, people feel differently about it in varying degrees of passion about environmental things but everybody wants the same thing. They want a future for their kids that involves ranching and part of having ranching keep going is conservation.

Terry Wahl, Conservation Rancher, Oregon: It’s probably the end of the day that’s probably one of the best. One of my best things going is, you know, I can be here, you know, my family and I stop some times and have a look around and I get to see the results of what, you know, what little I have done, is making a difference, I think

Scott Stoller, Conservation Farmer, Ohio: I used to collect pencils and I sold them one day to buy a bunch of little trees to plant. We call it a riparian buffer now. This is our livelihood. God has given us this land to be stewards of it, and we’re going to do it the best we can.

Charlene Stoller, Conservation Farmer, Ohio: To me, it’s kind of an instinct, it’s only natural to take care of the land. To me that’s obvious and I don’t know where it came from, it’s just been there. I would sure hope that at least one of my children would take this farm some day and farm it like their dad farms it. And take care of it as it takes care of us.

Announcer: They come from different places, with different voices and different faces. But they are bound with us by a common bond - the common bond of love, the common bond of caring, the common bond of conservation.

Conservation… Our purpose. Our passion.

Learn more on the web at nrcs.usda.gov