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Agriculture Florida Panhandle Project - Rural Areas - Opportunities for the Future Under the Florida Panhandle Initiative, the basic underlying focus is to identify and protect the region's underlying natural biodiversity. Obvious methods to follow to protect biodiversity include acquisition of the most sensitive areas by nonprofits or local, state or federal govcerments. Though effective, the out-right acquisition of lands is costly and requires perpetual land management costs to be incurred. Thus, protection of the region's biodiversity purely through this approach is prohibitively expensive, inefficient and counter to America's purvasive land ownership patterns. Though some of the region's "biodiverse hotspots" may be acquired, many, many other "lesser hotspots" on private property will also survive into the future through the wise land management decisions and careful stewardship of enlighted land owners. Most landowners care greatly for their lands. Landowners generally act wisely as good stewards of their land if provided opportunities to integrate good resource stewardship practices (protective of biodiversity) with good farming or forestry practices that ensure reasonable monetary return from their land. An objective under the Florida Panhandle Initiative is to help provide the links to these opportunities. If your reading this page and have any input that would be useful please contact dpennington@1000fof.org. RESOURCES Rural/Farming Florida APA and 1000 Friends of Florida White Paper - Rural Florida, Opprortunities for the Future - ADOBE pdf-Files
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