Addressing issues of water quality
Point of view: Let’s be good stewards of the land
BY CLAY POPE The Oklahoman Comments Comment on this article6
Published: January 27, 2010
Water is our most precious resource. You can live about five weeks without food — you won’t last five days without water. That’s why recent Oklahoman articles quoting a report from the Oklahoma Water Resources Board showing that only one in 10 of our lakes are considered at the high end of purity should make us all concerned.
Clearly we have a lot of work to do to. The good news, however, is that Oklahoma’s farmers and ranchers, in partnership with the state and federal government, are already taking action to turn this situation around.
Currently, more than $37 million has been dedicated for non-point runoff control through the Oklahoma Conservation Commission’s water quality efforts in conjunction with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, the USDA Farm Services Agency Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, the EPA Clean Water Act 319 Program, local conservation districts and the Water Resources Board Revolving Loan Program. Through these efforts, the conservation partnership is working with landowners to address runoff in areas such as the North Canadian River watershed, the Eucha-Spavanaw watershed, the Illinois River watershed and the Fort Cobb watershed.
In these and other watersheds, agriculture producers are switching to practices like no-till farming to control runoff and soil erosion. They’re fencing off miles of vegetative buffers to control nutrient and bacteria in the water and to keep livestock out of the streams. Marginal land is being converted to grass. Improved pasture management and manure handling practices are being implemented. All this through voluntary efforts often started by the local landowners themselves and which the landowners "cost-share” with, putting money out of their own pockets into the program.
Does this work? Already we have seen reductions of more than 60 percent in the nutrient loading in parts of the Illinois River and the Eucha-Spavinaw watersheds. In the next few weeks, we will be hearing about streams throughout Oklahoma that have been "de-listed” by the EPA, meaning that while they were once considered polluted, they now are considered clean because of the work done by the landowners in the watersheds. We should be proud of this, but more needs to be done.
Through the work of the Conservation Commission, NRCS and local conservation districts, we’re making headway in water quality, but it costs money. Oklahoma has never undertaken a 319 program where the money hasn’t run out before we ran out of landowners who wanted to work to address the problem.
Oklahoma landowners learned the hard way during the Dust Bowl what happens when we don’t care for our environment. We have to make sure during today’s tight state budgets we keep working with these stewards of the land to address water quality issues the same way we’ve always addressed soil conservation — through voluntary, locally led conservation efforts. If we do, we can ensure that when we say we have water, water everywhere, it will be protected.
Pope is executive director of the Oklahoma Association of Conservation Districts.
Read more:
http://www.newsok.com/article/343490...#ixzz0dqFSij6K
Originally Posted by yermom
anyone else help us out?
