No silver bullets in managing major runoff events

Monday, October 7, 2013

The solution, say those involved, is to look at entire watersheds, and not just rivers and streams. It requires that farmers and cottage owners work together and understand each other's perspectives

by DON STONEMAN


Last fall, after corn harvest, bulldozers reshaped Sebastian Kraft's sloping farm northeast of Port Albert, in Huron County, fashioning catch basins behind five erosion control berms. Not long after, in January to be exact, Kraft and the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority (MVCA) got a chance to see how well the berm worked. They were not disappointed.

"Last winter when we had our big runoff in January there was five feet of water behind (a berm)," says Phil Beard, the MVCA's general manager. "Before, (water) would have been rushing down and taking his topsoil to his neighbours."

Sebastian Kraft says a soybean crop now grows in that 110-acre field. The project cost close to $70,000 with the MVCA picking up most of the tab, says Kraft, who paid $8,000.

Kraft is part of a 40-farm project called the Garvey Glenn Watershed, just north of Port Albert.  There is an eight-year project to complete work on the watershed, dependent upon landowner approval and funding. "The Garvey Glenn project is a full systems approach, looking at full watersheds," says Geoff King of the MVCA. The 4,000-acre watershed project aims to build resiliency in dealing with the impacts of climate change, including major runoff events and droughts.

There were a number of good reasons for doing this work, Kraft says. One is that "it is the neighbourly thing to do" when your water is draining onto another property. "When (the conservation authority) came to the table, it was a no-brainer," Kraft says.

While Kraft is cropping with no-till practices, it isn't enough alone to keep soil in place. "There is a fair bit of slope and we are taking water from a neighbour."

Funding for "green" projects is a concern. "The actual green infrastructure projects are completed with any funding programs that are available at the time. Funding pots are constantly coming and going," says King. The conservation authority is investigating providing Payment for Ecological Goods and Services to landowners to take land out of production and to maintain these green projects long-term. "Nothing is available at this time."

King remembers when Huron County farmers, such as conservation pioneers John Maaskant, Don Lobb and Francis Hogan, were building and installing berms, terraces and grassed waterways in the 1980s. Maaskant, in particular, remembers spending the then-princely sum of $80,000 to terrace one 120-acre farm, following the advice of an Iowa State University engineer.

King says the difference is that now these projects are being undertaken as part of a systems approach "to deal with the impacts of climate change," looking at entire watersheds. The goal is to improve water quality in the inshore waters of Lake Huron.

"We've learned over the years that you can't fix a big river. You've got to go down in the sub-watersheds and fix them one at a time," says Jim Ginn, mayor of Central Huron and a former board member of the Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority. He was involved about eight years ago in a watershed planning exercise. The North Bayfield Watershed initiative dealt with about 40 square kilometres and more than 60 projects. "We've taken what we've learned from there" elsewhere, he says.

The cottage owners think the problems on the lakeshore come from the streams. Farmers like to think it comes from cottage septic systems, Ginn says. The truth, he says, is that the solution to clean water along the Lake Huron lakeshore involves both. And nearly everyone Better Farming contacted for this story says the solutions are complex.

Mari Veliz, healthy watersheds supervisor at the Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority in Exeter, is supervising the project to clean up rural storm water all along the Lake Huron coast from Sarnia to the bottom of the Bruce Peninsula. She says installing water and sediment control basins to slow down the flow of water into streams after storms sometimes does little to benefit the farms where the basins are located, but it does a lot to prevent erosion on properties several miles downstream.

"The basins may prevent the obvious erosion in your fields, but they benefit even better downstream. That is part of why we have cost-share programs."

Veliz finished a watershed-based best management practices programs with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food and the Huron Federation of Agriculture last year. It took place over a couple of years, and the 2012 drought made it difficult to determine the effectiveness of some of the practices, which included measuring the sediment and phosphorus in water leaving catch basins and grass waterways and comparing it to the water entering the abatement areas.

She says there are no "silver bullet answers." The study revealed that practices that hold back sediment and phosphorus, for example, do nothing to reduce nitrogen in the outflow, and vice-versa.

In general, grass waterways reduced the loss of phosphorus and sediment by 50 per cent, much more than did the catch basins, Veliz says. But reducing the peak flow of rushing water and allowing it to be released over hours or days reduces erosion downstream and therefore sediment and phosphorus in the entire watershed. Best management practices are often more effective at the watershed scale than at the site scale, she says.

"The important thing that we have found over the last couple of years is that it is really the storm events that have the increased concentrations (of pollutants in the runoff water). And so the best management practices need to be tailored to address those events."

Farm soils are most prone to erosion when there are no crops, such as during March snow melts and rains and mid-winter melts such as the January melt referred to earlier.  "Those events contribute to the nutrients downstream."

The conservation authority has been monitoring creeks nine times a year on a routine schedule since the 1960s and, in general, quality is improving. "We are not necessarily monitoring following the storm events," Veliz says. "We need to be more tailored in how we go about addressing those events in more places and monitoring to see if we are effective."

Bacteria counts and sediment are what the cottage people look at, Central Huron's Ginn says. The conservation authority looks at phosphorus and nitrates as well. But sediment was a greater concern for the cottage owners he encountered. Algae bloom "is not the big issue here that it is elsewhere in the lakes," Ginn says. His farm backs onto the Maitland River between Goderich and Clinton.

"It's complicated," Ginn says. "There isn't one clear solution and it is going to take many people working together and understanding other perspectives to make improvements."

He has about a dozen projects on his farm backing onto the Maitland River. "About three of them actually make me money and the rest of them cost me money. Some of them are very expensive," Ginn notes, citing "broad-based berms on agricultural fields. You are looking at tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to do a good project on your farm." The Wyse Line project near Holmesville cost in excess of $100,000.

Both the Conservation Authority and the local Stewardship Council work to get farmers money for cost-sharing. But, Ginn says, some of these projects benefit a property owner downstream, not your own property, and "it is not easy to get someone to take part in a project like that."

A lot of people benefit from clean water, Ginn says. "The whole cost shouldn't be borne by one person."

Near the Maitland River, downstream from Holmesville, construction was proceeding this summer on a broad-based berm on a farm owned by the Van Beet family as part of a municipal drain.
Ike Van Beet allows that the project has not been without controversy. Not everyone is pleased or convinced that this type of work is going to work.

"I'm having some reservations," says landowner Gerard Boone, whose son farms 110 acres downstream from the Van Beet project municipal drain. "The jury is out." He says this drain isn't helping him, even though he has been assessed; there's green algae he's never seen before on the pond that provides drinking water for cattle.

Boone admits that the banks and bottom of another seasonal stream that crosses his property are eroding badly as it goes through a bush. There is more water flowing through than previously, from more violent summer storms. BF