Jasper County teams with IDALS for soil and water improvement projects

The Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship formed a formal agreement with Jasper County last week that will effectively kickstart the search for bioreactor and saturated buffers projects between farm fields and local watersheds in an effort to protect water quality and reduce nutrient loss in soil.

Jasper County Supervisor Brandon Talsma said IDALS has been trying to work with landowners to implement soil conservation and edge-of-field practices. But participation has been slim. By forming a 28E agreement with the county, Talsma said the hope is to get more landowners and farmers on board.

Using the county as a government entity and doing what IDALS calls “batch-and-build projects,” landowners do not have to worry about finding contractors to install bioreactors or saturated buffers. The county is not running the program, but will instead use its bid processes to find the contractors.

“If there are individual landowners who are interested in this, they need to reach out to the Soil and Water Conservation Districts or the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship,” Talsma said. “That is who is coordinating the program and who will get them signed up for the program.”

When that list of projects has been completed and IDALS believes it has a sufficient number of projects in that package, it will come before the county board of supervisors to bid out. Talsma said the county just gets to do “all the behind the scenes stuff” related to the project.

As an outdoorsman and a person with a farming background, Talsma said there are big benefits to these types of projects. Regardless of the cause of nitrogen runoff and whether soil erosion is perceived to be “a minor or major program,” he said anything Iowans can do to decrease them is a good thing.

“It shouldn’t matter where you stand on the subject,” he said of soil and water quality issues, which he noted are controversial topics in Iowa. “We’re supposed to be good stewards of the land. Our livelihood depends on the land. So why wouldn’t we want to do everything we can to take better care of the land?”

In a past meeting, Matt McDonald, water quality initiative projects coordinator at IDALS, said bioreactors and saturated buffers act like a kidney. Whenever a field is tiled and drains into a waterway or ditch, the bioreactors and saturated buffers intercept that and filter the water before it is released.

IDALS has completed similar projects in Boone, Dallas, Polk and Story Counties.

Jasper County Soil and Water Conservation District can be contacted at 641-792-4116.