What if the key to a profitable family farm isn't growing more acres, but creating more value from the land you already have? In this week's episode of The Nature Stack, fifth-generation organic farmer Will Glazik shares how his family has built a resilient agricultural business through diversification, innovation, and a commitment to soil health. His story raises a bigger question: how do we reward farmers not just for the crops they produce, but for the ecological value their land provides?

For decades, the conservation industry has been playing defense, fighting to preserve environmental protections while underinvesting in the natural resources that sustain our economy. It's time to go on offense. From farmers and conservationists to hunters, anglers, and public health advocates, we have an opportunity to build a broad coalition around clean water, healthy food, thriving wildlife, and resilient landscapes. We need durable laws, smarter incentives, and new investment models that recognize nature for what it is: essential infrastructure.

Today’s blog introduces the idea behind The Nature Stack: land is a multipurpose asset that can produce food and energy while also providing habitat, storing carbon, retaining water, and supporting communities. It argues that the challenge—and opportunity—is to better value and stack these benefits so conservation and restoration can become economically viable alongside productive land uses. The new podcast will explore how farmers, conservationists, investors, energy developers, scientists, and others are already putting these ideas into practice.

We absolutely need strong enforcement of the Clean Water Act and durable protections for wetlands. But protecting what remains won’t restore what we’ve already lost.

The wetland mitigation market created a powerful model for financing restoration—but it was primarily designed to compensate for new impacts. What if we built a complementary market for restoring lost ecological infrastructure, with municipalities, corporations, public agencies, and private capital paying for measurable benefits like flood storage, water quality, habitat, and watershed resilience?

We need both: strong protection against future loss and an investable framework for restoring ecological function at scale.

What if we paid landowners to store water?

We already pay landowners to host infrastructure—transmission lines, pipelines, fiber, wind turbines and solar projects. Why couldn't we build a similar model for water?

In my latest piece, I explore what that could look like: regional watershed authorities, small resilience fees, long-term easements, storm-event payments, and private project developers restoring wetlands, floodplains and other natural water infrastructure.

The individual pieces already exist. The opportunity is to put them together into a scalable market—one that pays landowners for providing water storage and resilience while creating an investable model for restoring watersheds.

We don't necessarily need a new technology to solve our water problems. We may need a better market structure.

What lessons can we learn from renewable energy as we think about to create an investable market architecture for nature?

Renewable energy did not become investable simply because wind and solar became cheaper—or because investors decided they wanted to address climate change.

It became investable because the United States gradually built a market around it. PURPA opened the electricity system to independent producers. Renewable portfolio standards created obligated buyers. Long-term power purchase agreements converted demand into predictable revenue. RECs made environmental attributes trackable and transferable. Tax incentives and public finance reduced early-stage costs and risks. Together, these mechanisms gave developers a reason to build and investors a credible path to repayment.

Ecological infrastructure has enormous economic value too. Wetlands store water. Floodplains reduce downstream damage. Healthy soils improve infiltration. Riparian corridors protect water quality. Yet the farmers, landowners, and developers who restore these systems usually cannot capture enough of the value they create to finance the work at scale...or to incentivize stewardship at scale.

Meanwhile, we already pay for the absence of resilience—through flood damage, disaster relief, insurance claims, crop losses, emergency repairs, business interruption, water shortages, and displacement. The problem is that these costs are fragmented and reactive. Avoiding a loss creates real value, but that value does not become investable revenue until a creditworthy buyer agrees to pay for it.

My latest article asks what renewable energy’s evolution can teach us about closing that gap. What would it take to create recurring demand for ecological infrastructure, give independent providers access to buyers, and support projects with long-term service agreements tied to verified performance?

Grasslands demonstrate what we can finance within the market we already have. The next challenge is building the market that wetlands, floodplains, and resilient landscapes still need.

We already have a strategy for making conservation investable: invest in grasslands. By using traditional farmland investment as the foundation, investors can target returns comparable to farmland while directing capital toward land management that can significantly improve biodiversity, soil health, water resilience, and other ecological outcomes.

Sand Valley is demonstrating how golf can serve as an economic engine for landscape scale restoration. Golf courses are not known for their environmental benefits. A typical 18-hole golf facility spans 146 acres, roughly 110 football fields, making golf’s national footprint a surprisingly large opportunity for ecological restoration. Across the country, the golf course footprint is over 2 million acres—more than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. This historically has had a negative impact on the environment—from heavy pesticide and fertilizer use, to thirsty irrigation practices. Sand Valley is showing how the intentional integration of nature and sustainable design can actually be a powerful market differentiator for a golf course. By replacing a pine plantation with native savanna, reducing resource-intensive turf, and creating habitat for species from monarchs to birds, Sand Valley shows how recreation can provide the economic engine for restoring nature. Golf is the entry point; nature is the beneficiary.

What if farmland is not the space between nature—but the connective tissue that helps hold nature together?

Working lands cover an enormous share of the United States. That scale makes agriculture one of our biggest opportunities to reconnect habitat, improve water quality, rebuild soil, and strengthen resilience—all while producing food and supporting profitable farms.

Perennial systems, managed grazing, prairie strips, buffers, and other regenerative practices can bring natural processes back to the farm. The goal is not to eliminate row crops. It is to restore balance and recognize the full value that well-managed farmland can create.

Nature restoration does not have to stop where agriculture begins.

We are ignoring an infrastructure investment opportunity right under our feet.

You can’t just plant prairie and walk away.

The journey to restoring nature at scale will start where we grow our food. Millions of acres with the potential to be reawakened, starting at the bottom of the food chain—the soil. But it’s not as simple as taking it out of conventional production—we have to continue to work with the biology and ecology to give nature a running headstart.

But it takes:
✔️ Patient capital
✔️ Thoughtful land management
✔️ Integration of livestock
✔️ Consumers who care where their food comes from

When we put these conditions together, we can truly make magic happen—the return of bird song. The return of dark aggregated topsoil that holds water. The return of farm profitability. And market rate returns for investors.  

Don’t be afraid of trying and failing. If you failed, it means that you tried to do something hard. That is worth being proud of. And if you try enough times, you will eventually succeed.

At Land Steward Partners, we have a big vision of restoring native prairie ecosystems through bison production. With the right conditions, nature pays for itself.

We can’t rewild former agricultural landscapes and not consider where our food is going to come from. If we instead look to rewild within our agricultural landscapes, we might be surprised at how much biodiversity and food production can co-exist.

In January, we get back to work, and I feel like it’s just what I need after several weeks of chaos and indulgence.

It’s time to quietly build, put in the hard work, and focus on personal wellness and health too. Just like plants and animals go into a dormant period where they are hibernating and conserving energy in the winter, we can go into a period of deep work and focus for a few months, cutting back on the extra activities that drain our energy.