Can We Really Clean Up an Impaired Watershed?

Below is a nice article written in the Lancaster Intelligencier/New Era newspaper that talks about a project that I am lucky to be involved with.  Penn State received a grant and that money was matched by other sources to fund whatever is needed to improve the water quality in an agriculturally impaired watershed.  At the most basic level this is a huge experiment to see what works and what progress can be made when all available resources are concentrated in a small area.  This will be a huge learning process for everyone involved in the project, and the goal is not only to just clean up this particular watershed, but to take those lessons learned to other watersheds and hopefully clean up those as well.

Actual article:

Local watershed may be key to saving Chesapeake Bay

Conewago effort to serve as model

By AD CRABLE, Staff Writer

The Conewago Creek watershed — a sparsely populated but heavily farmed area at the junction of Lancaster, Dauphin and Lebanon counties — is being put in a big test tube.

A unique grass-roots cleanup strategy being tried here, if successful, may become a model for how to clean streams across five states and make meaningful strides in restoring the Chesapeake Bay.

And, not so coincidentally, it night help Pennsylvania farmers avoid crackdowns and residents prevent hits in the pocketbook.

President Barack Obama has issued an executive order calling for stronger action to clean up the bay. Lancaster County is in the cross hairs.

As part of that accelerated marching order, Conewago Creek, with its two-dozen tributaries, has been tabbed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as Pennsylvania's "discovery watershed."

The watershed covers three townships in northwestern Lancaster County.

Two similar experiments will be tried in Maryland and Virginia, but only the Conewago is under way.

Initial funding for the three-year project totals $1.5 million, but more is expected to be funneled into the effort as it gathers steam.

An ambitious grass-roots watershed group has joined forces with local officials, Penn State and a gaggle of federal and state agencies to attempt a from-the-bottom-up approach.

At least 15 entities are aboard the public-private partnership, known as the Conewago Creek Collaborative Conservation Initiative. Together, they'll try to restore an entire watershed, not by edict or mandatory regulations, but with a voluntary communitywide plan.

The hope is that communities will be infused with a sense of shared responsibility and roll up their sleeves.

The diversity of partners means the technical advice, manpower, money and rapport with landowners are already aboard.

The partners will be working with a nod toward what's happened with Lititz Run. There, Warwick Township officials, farmers, residents and groups such as the Donegal Chapter of Trout Unlimited have made huge progress in restoring the stream.

"We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We have to take what happened in Warwick Township and transfer it to the Conewago," Kristen Saacke Blunk, director of Penn State's Agriculture and Environment Center and head of the Conewago project, said.

South Londonderry Township in Lebanon County already has begun rallying the troops.

"We welcome this involvement," township supervisor Rugh Henderson said. The township formed an environmental advisory council to encourage residents to make their properties, regardless of size, better able to store water and reduce fertilizers and pesticides.

"We have two dozen natural areas. We have wildflower gardens. We're ready," Henderson said.

To that end, the Conewago project is holding a seminar for watershed residents and municipal officials on how to protect water quality in backyards. It will be held at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, April 10, at the Lebanon Ag Center on Cornwall Road in Lebanon.

An unprecedented level of monitoring will be deployed in waterways in the Conewago watershed so that even minute improvements in water quality can be shown to each participating landowner, proving they are making a difference.

Gauges will keep close tabs on such vital signs as dissolved oxygen, sediment, phosphorus, nitrogen, flow and water temperature.

Every farmer, each municipality and all 3,000 homeowners will have to want to do something on their land to make it healthier.

As Don McNutt, the Lancaster County Conservation District's administrator, said, "Anybody in the Conewago watershed is part of the problem — and part of the solution.

"Storm water needs to be treated as a resource rather than just blowing it out through pipes into these 24 streams."

Added Mike Hubler of the Dauphin County Conservation District, "It's everybody's watershed, and you have to do it down to the lowest common denominator — and that's the individual landowner."

For the homeowner, perhaps it's plugging a gutter into a barrel to catch rainwater, planting a rain garden or checking to see if the septic tank is working properly.

For township supervisors, it might be pushing for more-than-required storm-water controls with new growth.

"It's got to be a whole community approach to be successful," Blunk said.

"There are going to be things just about anybody can do that can make a difference."

Clearly, much will be expected of farmers.

Perhaps they'll fence off livestock or give up a little ground from crop fields to allow plantings of filtering trees and shrubs along creeks. Or perhaps they'll sign up for a slew of experimental cutting-edge farming techniques that are being freed from laboratories or demonstration plots to be tried here.

Among them are:

• A device that can be used in no-till farming that injects dry manure into the ground, where it won't smell, run off the fields or release ammonia, a greenhouse gas.

• Feed for cattle and poultry that uses less protein so their manure contains less nitrogen.

• Bag digesters, consisting of a cover placed over manure lagoons to capture methane, a greenhouse gas.

In addition, tried-and-true conservation techniques will be pushed, such as buffers of trees and shrubs along streams, crop rotation, cover crops and filter strips.

•••

Conewago Creek, which is the boundary between Lancaster and Dauphin counties, has a watershed that encompasses 53 square miles and 3,000 households.

In Lancaster County, the creek drains Conoy, West Donegal and Mount Joy townships. Elizabethtown gets a large portion of its drinking water from the Conewago.

Mount Gretna is the only borough within its borders, and the dammed stream forms Mount Gretna Lake. Many horse farms and stables are located there.

From its headwaters on state game lands near Mount Gretna, the stream empties into the Susquehanna between Falmouth and Three Mile Island.

Like many streams in the area, Conewago Creek is often laden with farm-related nutrients and muddy from bank erosion and runoff. It floods easily.

And like many waterways here, the stream and many of its 25 tributaries are officially designated as "impaired," meaning they can't support the fish and richness of aquatic life they could if they were healthy.

In a broader picture, the silt and nutrients that the waterways send downstream contribute to the pollution and decline of the Chesapeake Bay, the largest, richest estuary on the continent.

Most of the pollution is caused by runoff from agriculture, which accounts for just over half the land use in the Conewago Creek watershed. But housing developments, leaking septic systems, sewage treatment plants and some industrial uses in the watershed also contribute.

•••

Matt Royer grew up on a chicken farm along Conewago Creek on the Dauphin County side.

One day, he and his father, Hal Royer, were talking about how the stream's health was clearly declining.

Matt Royer began tacking up broadsides in the area, inviting anyone interested in forming a grass-roots watershed group to show up at a meeting.

Anglers, a biology professor from Elizabethtown College, the Milton Hershey Foundation — the largest landowner in the watershed — and lots of interested residents did just that.

The Tri-County Conewago Creek Association was formed in 1992 and hit the ground running. Royer is its president. He also serves as staff attorney for the Pennsylvania office of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and is on the guiding committee for the Conewago project.

The new group obtained a grant and hired consultants to study the watershed extensively and map what it would take to restore it.

Some 129 projects were outlined, and the group marshaled hundreds of volunteers and signed up farmers for four major improvement projects, from planting several thousand trees for stream buffers to performing bank stabilization work.

That ability to get boots on the ground is one reason the Conewago was chosen for a centerpiece project. Another was the manageable size of the watershed and the fact that the 2008 Farm Bill targeted small watersheds to fund conservation measures. A third was Penn State's search for a place to try all the research its staff was tinkering with.

"At the end, we hope to be able to say here's how we did it and here's what it takes to make changes daily," Blunk said.

One thrust of Penn State's involvement is to help farmers, landowners and communities obtain dollar value for doing the right thing for the environment.

Increasingly, she said, land-use actions that prevent greenhouse gases are being viewed as having monetary value, called carbon credits, and markets are developing to pay those who hold credits.

Getting money should encourage more landowners to adopt conservation measures, she said.

But the trick is measuring the value.

How much value do you attach to a farmer who practices no-till farming or has a flood plain that recharges aquifers? Or to a homeowner who plants wildlife habitat rather than a carpet of grass that needs constant fertilizing?

To help develop the project's one-community goal, an Internet program will be created with a one-stop clearinghouse of information for everyone in the watershed.

"We want to show information to say (that) when you do a practice, here is an outcome that you can expect," Blunk said.

Otherwise, McNutt said, "It's like telling a farmer he needs to lose weight and not being able to tell him what he weighs or what the diet will be."

Officials working on the project admit feeling the pressure to produce. But they're also clearly energized by the fresh approach and the opportunity to try cutting-edge down-on-the-farm conservation practices.

"It is a little daunting, but it is exciting because it's an opportunity to really make this a great place to live," Royer said.

"It's an opportunity to improve the stream and make it a place everyone can continue to live and work in and make sure agriculture is an important part of the watershed."

acrable@lnpnews.com