EPA coordinator visits North Fork watershed council meeting

Leah Medley (left), Iowa coordinator for the EPA Region 7 office in Kansas City, listens to Gene Langel, Brian Hermsen, Randy Lansing and Carl Mensen discuss farming and water quality issues following a recent North Fork Maquoketa watershed council meeting.

NEW VIENNA – Why do producer-cooperators in the North Fork Maquoketa River watershed participate in their water quality project?  Mostly because they have a say in project activities.

At least that’s what a group recently told Leah Medley, coordinator of 319 projects in Iowa for the EPA’s Region 7 office in Kansas City, when she attended a recent watershed project council meeting in New Vienna.

Medley, who has a background in biology, has been with EPA about one year and was in Iowa visiting projects funded by the federal Clean Water Act Section 319 and some projects funded by other sources.

North Fork Maquoketa Watershed Project is funded by Iowa’s Watershed Improvement Review Board (WIRB) and is a performance-based water quality project.  Section 319 funding projects are overseen by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

Performance-based projects have a different approach to water quality in that producers within the watershed are involved in decision-making from the start, deciding which farm management practices they want as part of the project.  They can also decide which practices they want to adapt on their own farm.

“I’m interested in learning what makes you come to the project (meetings),” Medley told the group.

“It’s voluntary,” some members told her. “We are doing what we want to do and there’s not someone (else) over there with a measuring stick.”

The producer-cooperators said they feel landowners are in the best position to know which management practices will work on their own farm.  They also said they feel many standards attached to federally-funded projects are over-engineered and too costly for their farms.

Performance-based watershed projects emphasize local involvement and use various tools to measure the effectiveness of farm management practices that producers use to reduce nitrogen, phosphorus and soil losses on their farms.

Producers receive a relatively small incentive to use various practices on their farms.  These include N, P, and manure management and land-based practices like installing or improving waterways.

In addition to visiting the North Fork watershed council meeting, Medley also attended a Mississippi River Basin Initiative meeting held in Dyersville, and visited county Soil and Water Conservation District offices involved in 319 projects and Iowa State University water quality staff in Ames and Fayette.