Field-to-Stream Partnership helps farmers improve water quality in Southeast MN
A collaboration among farmers, farm groups, private industry, conservation organizations, researchers and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture is gathering on-farm data to help farmers better protect water quality in Southeastern Minnesota.
The Root River Field-to-Stream Partnership started in 2009 and uses innovative equipment and technology to monitor sediment and nutrient runoff from farm fields. The real-world, on-farm runoff data will help farmers better understand what is leaving their fields and entering nearby waterways so they can implement conservation practices to address the issue.
“We need this kind of site-specific, edge-of-field information, said Kevin Kuehner, a soil scientist with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. “This really is an important project.”
Part of the project included conducting walk-throughs on farms within the Root River Watershed to evaluate existing on-farm conservation efforts. All but one farm within the watershed agreed to participate with a walk-through.
“That’s a tremendous rate of participation,” Kuehner said. “It shows that farmers in this area want to learn more about what they can do to improve water quality.”
Kuehner said what they found on the walk-throughs was that most farmers had conservation practices in place, but many needed some maintenance or adjusting.
“A little bit of tweaking,” Kuehner said. “There wasn’t always a need to take more land out of production, just fine-tune the conservation practices that were already there.”
Since the Root River Watershed is so large – about 1 million acres – Kuehner and his team broke it
up into three sub-watersheds for research purposes. At least one edge-of-field and one in-stream monitoring station is located in each of the three areas.
The in-stream samples are being used to determine the long-term effects of conservation practices used as part of the project.
“We’ve been able to bring a lot of groups together and advance the discussion on how we manage the Root River Watershed,” Kuehner said. “We’re starting to get that data and we’re starting to apply it. It shows that we can all work together to benefit a larger landscape.”
To learn more about the Root River Field-to-Stream Partnership, go here.
