The government should give priority to protecting water quality in Lake Erie’s watershed including a standard on blooms of toxic algae, said Toledo Mayor Michael Collins, four months after explosive growth of algae shut down his city’s water supply. “If we continue to delay, the harm may be irreparable,” Collins said during a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on voluntary work by farmers to control soil erosion and protect water purity.
“I’m hearing, ‘We just need more time,'” said Collins, but there was no assurance of an improvement in water quality or prevention of toxic algae in the future. “Don’t give this lip service.” The mayor called for more money for water quality research, an EPA water quality standard for toxic algal blooms, and federal targeting of funds “for infrastructure and conservation funding to those watersheds that most affect the water quality of Lake Erie.”
Chief Jason Weller of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service said USDA has worked with farmers since 2012 to reduce phosphorus content in Ohio waterways associated with harmful algal blooms. “There is no one approach that works,” said Weller. Work includes low- and no-till farming, cover crops and buffer strips along waterways. “Increasingly, we realize we have to focus on sub-surface loss,” said Weller. There are tile lines, to drain excess water, on a large portion of cropland, he said, so attention is being given to control structures and bioreactors to capture nutrients from tile lines.
Conservation leaders from Arkansas, Mississippi and Iowa described state-level efforts to reduce sediment and nutrient runoff into streams, particularly by broad-scale collaboration throughout watersheds. Minnesota farmer Kristin Duncanson said half of USDA’s conservation money should be shifted to “partnership-driven approaches to achieve outcomes at the watershed scale” such as USDA’s newly created Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP).
RCPP was deluged with 600 proposals totaling $2.8 billion when USDA announced earier this year that $400 milliion was available. USDA expects to announce winners in early January. Maximum grants would be $20 million with a requirement for matching funds from local sources.
“There have recently been increasing calls to regulate agriculture under the Clean Water Act,” said Sean McMahon of Iowa Agriculture Water Alliance, formed in August by three farm groups to encourage voluntary reductions in water pollution. “I personally believe that regulating non-point agricultural runoff in Iowa would be a very expensive and ineffective experiment due to the scale and variability of agriculture in Iowa.”
Iowa has a state goal of reducing nitrogen and phosphorus levels in its waterways by 45 percent, mostly by reducing runoff from farms. “It will take many committed partners and will likely take decades” to do that, McMahon said.