Water Education Resources are Easy to Find

It is not hard to find information on almost any topic on the web, but sorting through what is reliable information is another story.  The Penn State Extension Water Resources team makes finding water education materials a lot easier.  The group focuses on four main program areas: Safe Drinking Water, Pond and Lake Management, Discovery Watersheds, and Marcellus Shale Water Issues.  All four of these programs have areas that impact agriculture as well as the general population.

Safe Drinking Water program educates private well owners on best management practices to protect and improve drinking water supplies.  On many farms, especially small dairies, the cows are drinking water from the same well as the people.  Although human health concerns are always the priority, animals can also get sick from poor quality water and the level of production can also be decreased when water quality is poor.  Animals on the farm can also contribute to the contamination of the well in the first place if the well is not considered in relation to animal management.

Pond and Lake Management program educates pond and lake owners on how to properly maintain their pond or lake for the desired purpose.  Many farms have ponds and animals may have access to this water resource.  Therefore the water in the pond needs to be safe for the animals to consume if they do have access, but it is also important to make sure the animals do not contribute to contamination of the pond.  In most cases it is best to keep animals away from ponds as it will reduce the water quality of the pond.

Discovery Watersheds program is a new program focused on disseminating lessons learned on improving water quality in local watersheds to other watersheds across the state.  There are many small watersheds that have made significant improvements in water quality through community involvement and implementation of best management practices so getting the word out on how these watersheds were successful is very important in light of the large number of impaired watersheds.  As agriculture is generally are large portion of many watersheds disseminating how the agriculture community was involved in the improvement of the local water can be beneficial to all.

Marcellus Shale Water Issues program is another relatively new program created by the advancement of technology that allowed for gas well drilling in areas that were previous inaccessible.  This new process of extracting the gas requires a lot of water that may be reducing water availability for other sources.  Also, this new gas boom is happening in an area of Pennsylvania where there is a lot of farming and there are huge water quality and financial implications to farmers.  Cattle coming in contact with contaminated water has already occurred, but the financial benefits to many farmers are hard to turn down and have allowed some to continue farming.  

The Penn State Extension Water Resources web page is a great source of in-depth information on these topics and other related topics.