The Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board (TSSWCB) is a state agency that enforces the state’s soil and water conservation laws and coordinates conservation and nonpoint source pollution abatement programs.
The Texas State Legislature created the agency in 1939 to coordinate Soil and Water Conservation Districts and to serve as a single point of contact between those districts and the state and federal governments.
The enabling statute that created the board states, “The legislature finds that the farm and grazing lands of the State of Texas are among the basic assets of the state and that the preservation of these lands is necessary to protect and promote the health, safety, and general welfare of its people; that improper land-use practices have caused and have contributed to, and are now causing and contributing to, progressively more serious erosion of the farm and grazing lands of this state by wind and water.”
The statute also noted, “failure by an occupier of land to conserve the soil and control erosion upon the land causes a washing and blowing of soil and water onto other lands and makes the conservation of soil and control of erosion on those other lands difficult or impossible.”
Today the TSSWCB offers technical assistance to the state’s 216 Soil and Water Conservation Districts (SWCDs).
A seven-member board governs the TSSWCB. The State Board is composed of two Governor appointees and five landowners elected from across Texas by the more than 1,000 local SWCD directors.
The agency is headquartered in Temple.
