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WATERLOO – From the outside, the barn at Bowman and Bowman Farms looks like any newer barn in northeast Indiana.
But instead of horses, hay or cattle inside, there’s a water quality lab, where Bob Ostheim is cleaning filters for another round of testing water samples for herbicides, nutrients and fecal bacteria. His purple gloves stand out among the rough-duty laptops, lab equipment and technicians dressed in Carhartts and work boots.
Welcome to one part of the world of the St. Joseph River Watershed Initiative, a non-profit partnership dedicated to protecting and restoring the St. Joseph River and the nearly 700,000 acres it drains in six counties across three states.
The initiative has been studying the river and its tributaries since 1996, but officials concede they are years from declaring the river healthy.
They know the problems – too much sediment, herbicides, livestock waste and nutrients – and the source – largely the farms that dominate land use in the area. But they don’t know why or how to stop them.
“Every time we try to get a handle on this, new questions pop up,” said Greg Lake, acting director of the initiative and director of the Allen County Soil and Water Conservation District.
The lab just northeast of Waterloo, which is supported by the federal Agriculture Research Service, hopes to answer some of those questions, but it will take time.
Lake said the health of the St. Joseph River matters for reasons beyond the fact that it’s the source of drinking water for more than a quarter-million people in and around Fort Wayne. It is also part of a watershed – the area the river drains acts as a single system rather than separate components of ditches, creeks and the river itself.
It is also an important part of the Maumee River’s watershed, which is part of the Great Lakes watershed – the largest source of fresh water in the world.
And yet for decades, the St. Joseph River has been a mess, swarming with bacteria, murky with sediment and carrying dangerous herbicides such as Atrazine, which may cause cancer.
“If anyone wants to use the river for anything other than a sewer, you’ve got problems,” Lake said.
Scott McAfee has problems, too. He’s a technician at the National Soil Erosion Research Laboratory, and today he’s reaching into the nearly freezing water of Cedar Creek east of Waterloo to perform maintenance on the velocity gauge on the bottom.
The water is deeper than his gloves are long. When he’s done, he reaches upward and water runs out the long gloves.
“Yeah,” McAfee says. “That’s cold.”
The gauge is part of an array of sampling stations across the watershed, in this case, part of a study ordered by Congress to see whether voluntary efforts by the agrichemical industry are working or federal laws are needed to stem the flow of nutrients into rivers and lakes.
In this study – the only other one like it in the nation is on Big Walnut Creek north of Columbus, Ohio – two sub-watersheds get intense scrutiny.
In one, farmers are pushed to adopt practices such as no-till farming, which helps prevent erosion, and buffer zones, natural areas near ditches and creeks that help trap sediment and chemicals before they reach the water. The other area is used for comparison, to see whether the efforts are working or Congress should ban, say, fertilizers containing phosphorus.
Automatic sampling stations draw water samples every 12 hours, every half-hour during a rainstorm. The beige boxes largely blend into the landscape except for the overhead power lines running to them and the antennas on top.
But inside, they have electronics, a refrigerator to keep the samples chilled, and a machine holding 24 glass bottles that will be sent to the lab at Bowman and Bowman Farms when they’re full.
As soil scientist Stan Livingston closes up the station, he says it takes years of data to spot trends because the results are so heavily affected by the weather. Drainage ditches are the first place rain goes after it stops soaking into the soil.
“In a storm event, these streams will go right up – in two hours, they’ll be at full flow,” Livingston said. “If we get a wet spring, we see a lot of everything.”
And eventually, everything ends up in Lake Erie.
In the 1970s, Lake Erie was known as a “dead lake” because phosphorus was causing huge algae blooms that used up all the oxygen in the water when they rotted. Today, phosphorus levels in the lake have returned to 1970s levels, and “dead zones” have returned as well (see related story).
Could what’s happening on the rivers be what’s choking Lake Erie?
One thing Lake, of the watershed initiative, thinks might help the rivers and eventually Lake Erie is two-stage ditches.
Most drainage ditches are severe, with steep sides and scoured bottoms. But on the Noble County-DeKalb County line just east of Indiana 3, county surveyors – again in a partnership with other agencies and programs – have changed about a half-mile of ditches.
In the new ditch, the stream bed is slightly wider, and it’s flanked on each side by a wide, flat area that leads to a much more gradual bank.
When water is high in the old ditch, it has nowhere to go but up, and it runs faster and faster, dumping floodwaters downstream, eroding banks, and carrying tons of sediment and farm chemicals.
In the two-stage ditch, high water spills out of the streambed onto the plateau, where it slows down, dropping the pollutants it carries. With the wider profile, it can also hold more water, reducing flooding downstream.
“The neat thing about a two-stage ditch project is that it’s showing real good results even if it’s not the whole ditch that’s done,” Lake said. “The parts that are done make up for the parts that aren’t.”
Lake said officials are hoping the National Resources Conservation Service will offer to pay for half the cost of converting ditches to a two-stage design.
And there is also hope the federal Farm Service Agency will let farmers enroll the extra area that two-stage ditches require in the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers for taking crop land out of production.
Despite the lack of hard evidence of what’s causing the contamination in the river, there are tantalizing clues.
A few years ago, an outside study examined the fecal bacteria plaguing the St. Joseph and determined most of it was from horses.
Horses?
“We thought, ‘No way,’ ” Lake said. “Something’s got to be wrong with that data.”
Then, officials from the watershed initiative drove every road in the watershed and plotted on a map every location they saw horses.
The map was covered with red dots.
The manure from one horse can contain 59 pounds of phosphorus compounds a year. One pound of phosphorus can produce 500 pounds of aquatic plants such as algae.
It’s too soon to know whether there is a connection, but Lake is quick to point out that no one is interested in assigning blame, only in working together to solve the problems. And when farmers see actual data on pollutants found near their farms, they become very interested very quickly in helping.
“When we use (water quality data) in presentations, it really catches the eye of producers,” Lake said. “It’s a tremendous outreach and education tool.”
In the meantime, other efforts continue as well.
The Indiana General Assembly recently passed legislation banning phosphorus from dishwasher detergent, effective July 1, 2010.
Since most phosphorus does not come from wastewater – all large wastewater plants are required to remove phosphorus from their discharge – it won’t change the situation on the St. Joseph, officials said.
Likewise, some cities have banned lawn fertilizer containing phosphorus, but that, too, is not expected to make a difference.
That doesn’t mean phosphorus shouldn’t be banned, said Peter Richards, the senior research scientist at the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio.
“There’s a number of things that can cause very little pain, and they should be done,” he said.
dstockman@jg.net
