Through a grant from Fund for Lake Michigan, Sand County Foundation is actively promoting a performance-based conservation approach with the Village of Grafton, and other communities and industries in the Milwaukee River watershed. This collaboration has created a successful adaptive management strategy where Grafton's water treatment facility partners with farms to improve water quality and meet permit needs. Making thoughtful connections and training others to facilitate this new strategy allows Grafton to build a strong future on the base Sand County Foundation helped establish. For more information on that work, click here.

The Milwaukee River Pay for Performance project was a collaboration of Winrock International and Delta Institute with capital support provided by the Great Lakes Protection Fund. A data driven performance based approach tracked the environmental impacts of farmer selected conservation practices and offered payments based on verified environmental improvements. For more on that work, click here.