Timing off for launch of new ag stewardship program

Friday, November 13, 2015

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

A farm stewardship program intended to limit nutrient loss from fields in southwestern Ontario subwatersheds will likely fall below enrolment targets for its first year of operation because of timing, predicts Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association’s first vice-president.

The Great Lakes Agricultural Stewardship Initiative (GLASI) priority subwatershed project “was introduced late and of course farmers are busy at this time of year so it hasn’t gotten the attention that we were hoping,” says Embro dairy farmer Gord Green. The soil and crop improvement association is managing the three-year project on behalf of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

The project is designed to encourage farmers located in six subwatersheds in southwestern Ontario to adopt best management practices to reduce nutrient loss.

Participants will get back as much as 80 per cent of costs associated introducing practices and components such as cover crops, buffer strips and fertilizer placement innovations.

Individual project costs are capped at $75,000 says Brad Glasman, Upper Thames River Conservation Authority manager of conservation services. Upper Thames is one of four conservation authorities involved in the project. The others are: Essex Region Conservation Authority, Lower Thames Valley Conservation Authority and Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority.

The program is one of three for farmers that Ontario Soil and Crop is operating under the provincially driven Great Lakes Agricultural Stewardship Initiative. The others are the farmland health checkup, which pays for a certified crop advisor to assess farm field health focusing on soil and pollinator health, and the farmland health incentive program that shares up to 60 per cent of costs, with a $25,000 cap, for introducing best management practices to reduce nutrient loss.

All three programs target watersheds emptying into Lake Erie, Lake St. Clair and the southern part of Lake Huron.

The subwatershed program is different than the incentive program because of its narrow geographic range and focus on gauging how effective the best management practices are at reducing nutrient loss by establishing monitoring through the participating conservation authorities, says Karen Jacobs, Ontario Soil and Crop environmental outreach specialist,.

Ontario Soil and Crop issued a request for proposals early in the fall to area conservation authorities and other organizations that could help deliver the program in their areas, Jacobs says.

“By having the high percentage of cost share and the higher program caps, we’re hoping to achieve very dense BMP implementations. We’re hoping to make these subwatersheds a ‘superstar’ of soil and farmland health,” she says.

Jacobs says both the association and the provincial government contributed to the program design. They’re still determining just how the funding will be divided among the different subwatersheds. Green says about $700,000 had been allocated to year one of the project but he wasn’t sure if that amount included money going to the participating conservation authorities for monitoring.

Glasman says UTRCA chose two small watersheds — Upper Medway Creek and Upper Kettle Creek — because of previous involvement in those areas that has helped to generate a lot of background data on the creeks and buy-in from the adjacent farm community. “By no means are they (the subwatersheds) different from much of the watershed — there’s no red flags or anything like that,” he says. He estimates there are about 60 farms in total in the two sub watersheds.

Water quality monitoring is key to the project with measurements taking place at the end of the fields where the projects take place, as well as at the outlets of the subwatersheds.

“We think it’s a great opportunity because it can give us a chance to really focus on some areas and see if we can create a difference with the farmers in those areas and hopefully transfer that information across not only our watershed but hopefully others can learn from it,” Glasman says.

The deadline for applying to the sub-watershed project in its first year and for submitting invoices is January 15. The deadline for the broader incentive program was changed this week to Feb. 1, 2016 from Dec. 15, 2015.

Green, Soil and Crop’s incoming president, says those deadlines are going to be tough to meet because in order to qualify farmers must first complete their environmental farm plan and a farmland health checkup.

Moreover, he says he’s concerned about whether the farm sector understands the significance of the issue and the programs. “If we talked this up at soil and crop meetings and FarmSmart and SWAC (Southwestern Agricultural Conference) and then people respond, they’re going to have act reasonably quickly to get it done by spring as far as getting the health checkups done and getting the applications in for cost share,” he says.

Another challenge for the subwatershed project, he adds, is that it’s going to take “a few years” to measure a difference in what are essentially minute amounts of nutrients. “So it’s going to be a difficult one to measure progress and even figure out what works and what doesn’t and how to make the improvements that are required,” he says.

He anticipates the cost share programs will be revised over the next several months to make them more user friendly.

In June, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and governors of U.S. states occupying watersheds that feed into Lake Erie’s Western Basin agreed to reduce phosphorus entering the western end of Lake Erie by 40 per cent (of 2008 levels) by 2025. (See ‘Lake Erie agreement confronts Ontario farmers with stiff phosphorus reduction targets,’ Better Farming, November, 2015.) Nutrient loss related to farming activity in watersheds within the southwestern Ontario region is identified as a key factor in Lake Erie’s ballooning phosphorus counts.

“They set targets but in reality we need some lead time,” Green says. BF