There’s been lots of interest lately in farmer-led watersheds, so I thought I’d put together a sort of “start-up guide” based on our experience with the Wisconsin Farmer-Led Watershed Council Project. This document details how we got started, and breaks down some of the key takeaways for success that have come out of our project. […]
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I recently participated in a webinar focused on farmer leadership in watersheds — Lois Wright-Morton from Iowa State University, Todd Sutphin from the Iowa Soybean Association, and I discussed what we have learned about best practices for engaging farmers in watershed work.
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A detailed look at how we first created our farmer-led watershed councils.
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How do you define a farmer-led watershed council? It’s simple really. You need these three things: An identified, shared, water, soil, or other natural resource concern A group of farmers organized within a defined watershed and willing to play a leading role in addressing the shared concern(s) A vision for change, ideas of how to […]
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This week has been pretty exciting in the watersheds — we seeded two of our cover crop/tillage test-plot locations with cover crop seed into standing corn. It went really well! This far north, we need to give the cover crops as much time as possible to germinate and establish before things start freezing, so planting […]
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We have been working hard to establish and analyze three on-farm cover crop and tillage test plots in the watersheds, made possible in part by a grant from SARE, the Sustainable Agriculture, Research and Education program at USDA. We have randomized, replicated trials of cover vs no-cover, and tilled vs no-till plots on three farms […]
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2014 was a great year for the Farmer-Led Watershed Council Project. The number of farmers that participated and council activities all increased. See all the details in our 2014 Report: 2014 FLWC Report
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“It has the hopeful feeling of a revolution – one that might achieve results that have long been elusive in improving water quality impacts from agricultural land.” A great article about our project by Greg Seitz on St. Croix 360! Check it out: Farmers Doing ‘Groundwork’ to Restore St. Croix River Water
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We are very excited to share this video about our project with you, featuring two Horse Creek Watershed farmers (Polk County). The video does a great job of summing up what we do: work together to find ways to make farming better for the water and soil, while increasing productivity and helping everyone be more […]
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(Not a lake. A cornfield.) The records are mounting: “a record rainfall in a calendar day for the month of June of 4.13 inches was set at the Twin Cities international Airport yesterday [June 19]. This breaks the old record of 3.48 inches set on June 29th 1877.” (weatherunderground.com) “25.05 inches and counting precipitation at Minneapolis-St. […]
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