Story originally printed in the Vernon Broadcaster or online at www.vernonbroadcaster.com
Published - Monday, May 05, 2008
Nation’s first watershed project recognized on 75th anniversary
The Driftless Area has become known for developing organic agriculture, but 75 years ago this a was also the birthplace of soil conservation farming practices eventually adopted worldwide.
The USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service honored the nation's first soil conservation project, the Coon Creek Watershed, at a 75th anniversary celebration in Coon Valley, Friday.
"We owe a debt to the early, courageous landowners" who signed up for the project, said Arlen Lancaster, the current chief of the NRCS. Their efforts "forestalled another dust bowl," he said eluding to soil loss during the 1930s in the lower plain states..
U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D-La Crosse) praised NRCS for "bringing scientific expertise to the field. I don't know what we'd do without them."
Kind said soil conservation efforts don't just benefit farmers, noting that trout fishing in the four-state Driftless Area of the Mississippi River basin generates $1.1 billion in economic activity each year. Those cold-water trout streams would not be viable without soil conservation efforts.
Sam Skemp, who works for the NRCS in Vernon County, said the flooding in August 2007, in which 10 to 15 inches of rain fell in less than 24 hours, put all the soil conservation work "to one of the biggest tests it's ever been through."
Skemp said when he was able to get back onto the slopes two weeks after the flood, "it was hard to tell we'd had a significant rainfall."
Stanley Trimble, a hydrologist from UCLA, who has studied the Coon Creek watershed since 1973, said the soil conservation measures installed were designed to hold up under a 25- to 50-year rain event.
"They withstood what might be a 1,000-year (rain) event," Trimble said. "What more can you ask for?"
Friday's event in Coon Valley also was a celebration of the Driftless Area Initiative, a four-state collaboration among six resource, conservation and development councils. The group, which started in 2002, is working on economic and environmental sustainability.
Last year, Kind secured a $618,000 congressional appropriation for the Driftless Area Initiative, which will be used to promote the production and use of perennial biomass, like grasses and legumes, for energy.
European farming practices brought to our region by its first settlers caused erosion on a widespread scale and made much of the landscape unusable in a short period. Topsoil disappeared and ditches and gullies formed in places because of practices that disturbed soil and provided routes for runoff to begin erosion. Waterways and streams began to fill with silt.
Soil research 75 years ago, a joint effort by local farmers and soil conservation experts, started a revolution in American agriculture. Into the situation stepped soil conservationist Hugh Hammond Bennett and naturalist Aldo Leopold, who worked with local farmers to create the Coon Creek Watershed Project. They helped farmers terrace hillsides and plant crops in strips to reduce erosion.
The sides of the Coon Valley Legion Hall were doted with displays and photos from that time including some of Leopold and some of the CCC work camps and crews that did much of the labor to implement the practices. One photo showed a camp that was located just a stones throw from the celebration.
On a rainy Friday, they celebrated that success, which has been replicated across the nation as the federal government works with private landowners to protect the land. More than 100 people attended the celebration in Coon Valley, which included music, speeches about the history of the project, and bus tours of the area.
It was the first of many projects started by Bennett, who went on to become the first chief of a new federal agency - the Soil Conservation Service, now the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service.
All stories copyright 2006 Vernon Broadcaster and other attributed sources.