Source Water Solutions

BY CAROL BROWN

Small towns that pull their drinking water from a public well are susceptible to groundwater contamination. Nitrates can be one of the biggest culprits.

Iowa’s Source Water Protection (SWP) program, through the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR), works with community leaders, farmers and landowners for water improvement before it gets to a public well. The DNR’s definition of source water is “drinking water in its original environment, either at the surface or below the ground, before being treated and distributed by a water system.”

The Iowa Soybean Association (ISA) staff worked with Rebecca Ohrtman, DNR source water protection coordinator, as she began a pilot program connecting communities with

farmers and landowners. She saw a need for a statewide SWP framework that included partnerships to secure technical and financial resources for source water protection.

“Becky knew there was going to be a need to interface with agriculture at the local level, so she contacted ISA and other ag organizations,” says Anthony Seeman, ISA environmental research coordinator. “ISA worked with farmers in the well capture zones and helped monitor their operations.” The SWP is a relative of the upstream–downstream partnership concept, which connects municipalities with farmers and landowners. The implementation of conservation farming practices upstream leads to improved water quality for downstream municipal water systems.

Enacting the pilot program

The majority of Iowa’s public water supplies draw from groundwater systems, Ohrtman says.

“There are about 520 susceptible public water supplies and about 220 highly-susceptible public water supplies in the state,” he says.

Protection for these systems was virtually non-existent before 2006. Ohrtman began assembling local teams for pilot programs in 15 communities. The goal was to develop and implement plans using best management practices in the capture zones to decrease longterm risk to municipal wells. A capture zone is an area of land from which the well draws its water, either through groundwater or surface sources. For a community of 1,500 people, a capture zone for one well is about 1,000 acres.

The teams typically consisted of farmers within the capture zone, Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) field staff, the municipal water operator, county supervisors, county emergency management and city council members — every community’s team was slightly different.

Ohrtman says they conducted on-site groundwater assessments and identified point and non-point sources. ISA offered educational workshops on the impact of conservation farming practices and conducted nitrate soil tests with farmers and landowners in the project areas.

Kenny Cousins, a Griswold area farmer, plants cover crops to prevent soil loss and utilize excess nutrients. He and other farm neighbors plant cover crops and only apply anhydrous in the spring on land that borders wells supplying Griswold’s drinking water.

A wetland win

One of the first projects was adding a wetland in Elliott in Montgomery County. But the citizens in the town of 350 looked beyond just fixing their water issues. The wetland was installed next to the elementary school, and it’s now an outdoor classroom. The area includes walking trails, a shelter and a pedestrian bridge. County supervisors utilized the excavated soil from the wetland location to build a road in town that frequently flooded.

“The Elliott SWP team chairman, the late Steve Howell, realized the wetland would not be an immediate fix, but rather a less expensive, longterm holistic solution to reduce nitrate levels and build a better community,” Ohrtman says.

Coming through with cover crops

Griswold, another SWP pilot community, is about 12 miles north of Elliott in Cass County. Farmers in the well’s capture zone planted cover crops to help reduce the nitrates in Griswold’s wells.

According to the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, cover crops can reduce nitrates in waterbodies by an average of 30 percent. For improved water quality in Iowa and downstream, the strategy recommends conservation agriculture practices that reduce nitrogen and phosphorus entering Iowa waterbodies by 45 percent.

“Three wells supply Griswold with water, and one of them is on our land. We’ve planted cover crops on about 120 acres near the well for five years now,” says Kenny Cousins, a farmer in the SWP program.

“After four years, 75 percent of the capture zone has cover crops,” says Jeff Metheny, Griswold public works director. “The city pays for the cover crop seed and fall planting, while the farmers and landowners are responsible for their spring termination.”

This fall, the city paid for 200 acres of drilled cover crops and 180 acres aerially sown. Not one farmer has opted out of the program, Metheny says.

Now that the pilot program has ended, SWP is scaling up across Iowa. This fall, farmers near Plainfield in northeast Iowa planted cover crops on 100 percent of their capture zone. Manning and Deloit are using the Conservation Reserve Program to take acres out of ag production in their capture zone. Near Sioux Center, farmers in the capture zone are using crop rotations and rotational grazing for nitrate reduction.

After 15 SWP pilot projects over seven years, Ohrtman says she learned it takes great partnerships, a framework with a committed local team, farmer ingenuity, technical resources and viable planning to keep Iowa public water supplies sustainable for future generations.

Contact Carol Brown at cbrown@iasoybeans.com.