Bændur græða landið — Iceland's National Land Reclamation Payment Scheme

Bændur græða landið ('Farmers Reclaim the Land') is one of the world's longest-running state land-reclamation payment schemes, run by Iceland's Soil Conservation Service (Landgræðsla ríkisins, founded 1907), which merged into Land og skógur (Land and Forest Iceland) in January 2024. The agency supplies participating farmers with fertiliser, grass and tree seed, and matching payments to revegetate eroded pastures and desertified home-fields. Formal farmer cooperation under the scheme is dated to either 1990 or 1994 depending on the source, though the agency's erosion-control mandate itself is over a century old.

Participating farmers receive fertiliser, seed (including red fescue, lyme grass and downy birch) and cash matching payments to revegetate eroded land, historically with the scheme covering about 85% of seed and fertiliser costs while farmers contribute labour and transport.

In the 2024 grant round, 418 farms received support covering roughly 3,800 hectares — about 3,500 ha treated with mineral fertiliser and 300 ha with organic amendments. Around 600 farmers nationwide participate, including about a fifth of Iceland's sheep farmers, up from roughly 370 participants in the mid-1990s. An independent peer-reviewed study of one restoration site in southwest Iceland measured soil-carbon accumulation of 0.4-2.2 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year, depending on whether the land was revegetated with grass or trees.

The scheme's evidence base has real limits: no public aggregate budget figure could be verified, official monitoring relies on roughly biennial agency site visits rather than independent audit, and a widely repeated total of hectares reclaimed since 1907 could not be traced to a primary source. The carbon figures come from a single external academic case study rather than a programme-wide accounting system.