By Candice Abinanti, NACD Director of Communications

Rich Duesterhaus, NACD’s Senior Advisor, was seven years old when NACD was formed in 1946. Working on his family’s farms in Illinois and Missouri, he aspired to be a farmer. A summer internship with the Soil Conservation Service, now NRCS, changed that. Rich began to see a career path complimentary to agriculture in soil conservation.

Now, at 87, Rich has dedicated over six decades to a career in conservation. He held multiple roles with the Soil Conservation Service, including State Conservationist, Assistant, and Deputy Chief. Rich was also once the Executive Director of the National Conservation District Employees Association and President of the Soil and Water Conservation Society.

In 2023, Rich was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award—and the creation of the Rich Duesterhaus National Conservation Partnership Lifetime Achievement Award—at NACD’s Annual Meeting in New Orleans. Rich’s passion for conservation is reflected in the numerous national programs and initiatives he has managed and influenced. He is a well-known and respected mentor to many throughout the soil and water community.

I’ve admired Rich for years. To help celebrate NACD’s 80^th anniversary, I sat down for an interview with this influential octogenarian. I still fondly recall that Rich began his own eighth decade of life by being the first person to ascend to the top of a ropes course during an NACD staff retreat and bungee jump down three tiers, unfazed, as if he had done it a million times before. I think that’s a lesson for all of us: we can all take big leaps at any stage of life.

You mentioned your local conservation district helped your family farm. How?

My first exposure to conservation districts was on our farm in Missouri. We had a gully in a 20-acre pasture, and we wanted to stop it from continuing to erode. A couple of technicians came out, and they said the simplest fix was to make a pond. So, we had a dam built and a 10-acre lake created that stopped the gully. It also gave us a place to go swimming and fishing because we stocked it.

On the rest of the farm, we did some things that our neighbors at the time thought we were crazy to do. We didn’t plow, which was the very, very early days of people deciding we don’t have to plow. It wasn’t quite no-till in today’s definition, but it was reduced tilling. We also started side dressing nitrogen. I had an uncle that sold anhydrous ammonia for nitrogen, and so we could place the nitrogen right next to the plant crop. We also did cover crops as well as crop rotations then.

What led you to a career in conservation?

That exposure to conservation districts really didn’t entice me to think about conservation as a job yet. I was still thinking I wanted to be a farmer. It was during college that my thinking changed a bit. We had a second farm in Missouri with more erosion problems, and technicians helped us there with diversions and some grass waterways. So, I learned that there was more to farming than just planting and harvesting crops.

In college, I got a summer job working for the Soil Conservation Service and worked with a local conservation district. I learned a lot, and that was the beginning of seeing that there might be a career for me related to agriculture that wasn’t farming.

What are some of the significant changes you’ve seen in conservation districts over the decades?

Staffing is one. Many districts did not have employees. This would have been around 1959-1960. Working for the Soil Conservation Service, we were asked to go to the districts to see if we could get them to hire a technician. We managed over time to get the districts to hire about 1,000 conservation technicians by the early 1970s. That was the beginning of getting districts involved in staffing for the technical side of things, and it mushroomed after that.

Urbanization is another. In the 1960s, the Soil Conservation Service also moved in a big way to urban conservation work. Some leaders saw how soil information could help people locate septic tanks and learn where not to build houses, things like that. They helped the soil scientists and other people see that there were interpretations that could be made from soil data that the Soil Conservation Service hadn’t even thought about. There was a lot of good information not only for agriculture, but also important for urban uses of land.

Illinois’ Ela Township, in the McHenry-Lake County Soil and Water Conservation District, was one of the earliest soil publications that interpreted the use of soils beyond agricultural purposes. It helped transform the whole story as the Soil Conservation Service worked to get the country’s soil mapped. Today, eighty years later, the whole country has been mapped. That database, the Soil Survey Geographic Database, is a wealth of information for decision makers who want to do almost anything with land. Throughout my whole career, I’ve had a very deep interest in tools like this to help decision makers. From 1965-1985, conservation districts grabbed hold of urban conservation work, and today many play a strong role in urban conservation. I played a little tiny part in that, including serving as a District Conservationist in the Chicago Metropolitan area.

What’s an important lesson you’ve learned?

How important relationships are. In every location I’ve worked in, I get more done by learning about people and what they’re interested in. Not coming in saying “I’ve got the solutions for all your problems,” that’s not the approach that works, but facilitating and supporting peer-to-peer learning and relationship-building. I could say, “Well, you know, Sam has been doing this for three years. Talk to him before you decide to do it.” I think that peer-to-peer relationships are really, really important to conservation and what Hugh Hammond Bennett and the people in the USDA understood in 1937.

In the decades ahead, what do you think districts need to be focused on and adapting to?

We need to be looking at least three to five years down the road for what social changes are occurring, are likely to occur, and help anticipate and prepare for those changes. Change management and preparing for change is a whole science in and of itself. It’s a space I’m not sure we’ve invested enough in. We think we know where we want to be, but getting there is going to require some sophistication.

I think that Americans support the mission and goals of what we are after, but we haven’t done as much as we need to do to connect with people across our little sphere. We can’t just think about the agricultural world, or just the forestry world, or just the grasslands, the cattle, livestock, whatever. We need to think about our whole population and really think globally, because it’s a global society today. We have been one of the leaders in the world for erosion and flood control and food production. I used to be able to say that we can outproduce anybody and still make a profit. That’s not true today. Other countries have more land and lower labor costs, so we have to rethink how we’re going to use land to produce food in this country. It’s got to be done in a collaborative way, so it comes back to relationships. It will take leaders who know how to have a vision and then chart a path, and that means citizen involvement too: voting, volunteering, putting money where your interests are. I think that 80% of the time there’s stuff to agree on, so work on that. Let’s work on what we can get done together.

What do you think we need to do today to prepare for tomorrow?

We have something we should be proud of—that districts, their officials, and employees are in most cases trusted advisors. If we can take the trust that is built locally to the next two or three levels of scale, that’s where the action is going to be. We’re not going to be where the action is if we don’t start in that direction. It’s nice to only worry about your county, so comfort zones will be pushed, but we need leaders who have vision, finesse, and the ability to lead a crowd. You may live in one watershed for water, but you may live in a larger watershed for air, and you may live in an even larger watershed for wildlife, public transportation, or any number of services. There is an important role for local decision-making, but if we’re not connected up and also with our neighboring districts, we’re not going to be a part of the solution.

What’s your conservation “why”?

I care for my grandkids, great-grandkids, and the future of society. These days, the bottom line for a lot of things is money, and money put in the right direction can do more good for more people. My interest is in that space. We already know enough to do better than we’re doing. If we can apply that knowledge across scales, we can make our space a better place to live, work and play because we know how to take care of our natural resources. There’s got to be a way to expand the population that receives those benefits, whether it’s fishing in that pond, picking strawberries, enjoying a walk in the woods, or knowing that you’ve got clean air and clean water that is going to make you healthier.