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. Iceland's Soil Conservation Service (Landgræðsla ríkisins), founded in 1907 and merged in January 2024 into "Land og skógur" (Land and Forest Iceland), supplies participating farmers with fertiliser, grass and tree seed, and matching payments to revegetate eroded pastures and desertified home-fields. Formal farmer cooperation is dated to either 1990 (Icelandic farmers'-association sources) or 1994 (peer-reviewed literature); sources disagree on the exact founding year, though the underlying agency's erosion-control mandate is over a century old.

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 — alongside distribution of red fescue, lyme grass and downy birch seed. Around 600 farmers nationwide participate, including about a fifth of Iceland's sheep farmers, up from roughly 370 in the mid-1990s. Historically the scheme has covered about 85% of seed and fertiliser costs, with farmers contributing labour and transport. An independent peer-reviewed study of a restoration site in southwest Iceland measured soil-carbon accumulation of 0.4-2.2 tonnes C/ha/year depending on whether 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, so it is not cited here as fact. The carbon figures above come from a single external academic case study, not a programme-wide accounting system.

Read the full analysis: https://island.is/en/land-reclamation-by-farmers-grant-application/land-reclamation-by-farmers