By Janet Kubat Willette
jkubat@agrinews.com
ROCHESTER, Minn. — A retired northeast Iowa Extension watershed coordinator swapped ideas with the Basin Alliance for the Lower Mississippi in Minnesota last week.
John Rodecap, who farms near Decorah, Iowa, has 17 years experience working with watersheds.
He talked about the performance-based farm and watershed environmental management program he used when working with small watersheds of 25,000 to 40,000 acres. The approach gave farmers within the watershed ownership of the program, he said.
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"I think they need to own the problem, they need to own the solution," Rodecap said.
Participation in outcomes designed to improve water quality, soil condition and profitability climbed to 60 percent to 70 percent with the local-driven approach where neighbors talked to neighbors, he said.
Norm Senjem, basin coordinator for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, dusted off a powerpoint prepared some time ago for a proposed Total Resource Management program. The idea is similar to Iowa’s, but it relies more on agency personnel than the Iowa approach.
Norm Senjem, basin coordinator for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, dusted off a powerpoint prepared some time ago for a proposed Total Resource Management program. The idea is similar to Iowa’s, but it relies more on agency personnel than the Iowa approach.
Rodecap said the technical staff need to stay in the background, answering questions only when asked. They can’t lead the discussion because the watershed leaders need to determine how to best solve the issues in the watershed.
It’s also essential to work with farmers when they have time, meaning winter or summer, Rodecap said.
The watershed efforts he was involved with began with him securing funding and then talking to Extension or the Natural Resources Conservation District to identify conservation leaders in the watershed.
"There’s leaders in every watershed," Rodecap said.
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He then met with the leaders and presented them the information he had regarding the status of the water in their watershed. He’d ask if he could use their name on letterhead to announce a watershed meeting.
Before that first meeting, neighbors would call their neighbors listed on the letterhead, asking questions, Rodecap said.
"Neighbor to neighbor discussion is so powerful," he said.
The main conversation at the meetings would be "I remember when," Rodecap said.
Many of the farmers are the third, fourth or fifth generation on the land and they feel responsibile to maintain or improve the water quality. He tried to nurture that sense of responsibility and community.
From there, the farmer-leaders developed a menu of items for farmers to choose from to meet the identified objectives. For example, the 2008-2009 menu for the North Fork Headwaters Watershed includes payments for the phosphorus index, soil conditioning index and nitrogen performance management.
A $500 bonus is paid if three years of monitoring shows evidence of reduced contaminants leaving the field. Monitoring is done by college or university students as part of their coursework.
The data is given to farmers to educate them and the watershed provides information and funding to farmers to help meet long-term goals.
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Rodecap said they have measured improvement in some watersheds, with less contaminants, more fish and more macro-invertebrate population. The waters aren’t pristine, he said, but they didn’t become impaired in two to three years. It will be a long-term effort.
The approach of putting farmers in charge of improving their environment while improving their profitability would be a good approach for the federal government to take in farm program spending, Rodecap said in a later interview.
Farmers have made improvements, but there are no measurements for them to report to the general public.
Now, farmers receive a direct payment, but they have no responsibility to the taxpayer for receiving that money. He said that 30 percent of that money should go to make the farm program more palatable to the general public by investing it in efforts to improve environmental performance in the field.
The money would go to watershed councils to address their specific concerns. Farmers need to know how what they do in the field impacts water quality and how changes could improve their profitability. Farmers who elected not to participate would not get the 30 percent of farm program dollars.
