Although the primary role of agriculture is to produce food and fiber, there are many other services or functions it provides that society values.  These services include environmental amenities like beautiful landscapes, natural resource management and conservation, biodiversity preservation, and socioeconomic viability of rural areas.  Recognizing that farmers produce both market (food and fiber) and non-market goods and services (environmental amenities and resource conservation) from which social benefits, the goal of our research was to evaluate how changes to current farming practices in agroecologically distinct watersheds provide insight into how policy changes could be structured to provide environmental, social, and economic outcomes on working agricultural lands.  Water quality, habitat improvement, fisheries health, greenhouse gas emissions, carbon sequestration, externality costs, and farm profitability were among the benefits from developing multifunctional agroecosystems that we examined.  Results from our analysis in both watersheds indicated distinct and significant environmental and socio-economic benefits are possible when there are policies or programs in place that encourage and reward multifunctionality in agroecosystems.  Furthermore, our findings indicated people are willing to support financially the production of these multiple benefits at a level that exceeds the cost of producing them. Indeed, many of the potential environmental benefits from agroecosystems can be achieved at little or no net cost to taxpayers.  Of the challenges to transitioning to programs that encourage multifunctionality in U.S. agriculture, the biggest appears to be overcoming the political inertia and entrenched interests that have created the current agricultural commodity programs.