Citizens Working for Clean Water

By Kerry Hoffschneider

How do you get citizens from rural and urban areas working together for clean water? You come up with a way to reward farmers and ranchers for doing the right thing. That’s exactly what the Cheney Lake Watershed has been doing around Wichita, Kan. for more than two decades. They are educating farmers by meeting them where they are at – oftentimes that means the best conversations happen when two pick-ups are parked along a dirt road. 

One of those country road conversations occurred when watershed outreach coordinator, Howard Miller, and watershed project coordinator, Lisa French, were hearing comments about a small livestock operation feeding their cattle close to a stream. Hoping to help and offer positive solutions, they went on a country drive and talked to the South Hutchinson, Kan. farmer and cattle producer.

“One day Howard and I were driving by the place people were talking to us about and saw the guy out there feeding his cattle close to a stream,” French said. “So, we talked to him. He said, ‘Oh, well if there is a problem, we should probably do something about that.’ We told him we would help him put his water up on a hill and that he could feed his hay up there. It turned out the changes made things much easier for him and then he began to learn more and even converted cropland into permanent forage. He said, ‘Just because I have been doing it that way doesn’t mean I have to do it that way forever.’”

According to Miller, the Cheney Lake Watershed (North Fork Ninnescah River) covers 633,000 acres within five counties in south central Kansas including portions of Reno, Stafford, Pratt, Kingman, and Kiowa. More than 99 percent of the watershed is used for agricultural purposes. The Cheney Reservoir was formed back in the mid-1960s when the Bureau of Reclamation built a dam in cooperation with the City of Wichita, making the reservoir an important source of drinking water and recreation for the City of Wichita and surrounding communities.

“About 70 percent of the drinking water comes from Cheney Lake and the rest from groundwater. There are about 425,000 people in Wichita, close to a half million people are using water in that system,” he said. 

“Back in the early 1990s, there were blue/green algae blooms from too much phosphorous and sediment run-off showing up in the Wichita water supply. In Kansas, every county is set up to have a United States Department of Agriculture USDA/Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offices, along with those are local organizations in every county called conservation districts that are managed by boards. Some of those board members started to become concerned about the sediment and other run-off in the lake. They began to talk about developing the watershed effort. Wichita was a willing partner and has remained a good partner from the beginning.”

Miller explained the Cheney Lake Watershed, Inc. was formed to improve water quality by working with watershed farmers. The Citizens Management Committee (CMC) is made up of seven farmers and landowners in the watershed who are willing to make improvements on their own farms and who will share ideas and information with neighbors. The CMC is a subcommittee of the Reno County Conservation District and is the board of the watershed with set goals to reduce nutrients and sediment that reach the lake from agricultural sources.

 From the beginning, Miller added, the City of Wichita has committed funding to help farmers reach watershed goals. The project is partially funded by EPA 319 funds through the Watershed Protection and Restoration Strategy (WRAPS) program at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. The CMC focuses educational efforts and funding in the most vulnerable acres of the watershed with the practices that will have the greatest reduction in sediment and nutrient loading. These practices include; reduced tillage, cover crops, grass plantings, relocation of livestock feeding areas, and an overall strong emphasis on soil health in both cropland and rangeland.

Miller and French were both involved with the CMC in various capacities prior to becoming the two, full-time staff members for the Cheney Lake Watershed. Miller said, “I was on the CMC as a dairy farmer. Back in 1996, I did a waste system on the dairy farm that I operated, and my father owned. We turned in cost-share dollars and when the check came from the City of Wichita, my dad said, ‘That was a good idea.’ Those dollars from Wichita get a lot of projects done to this day. The watershed project can pay from 70 to 90 percent of these projects for farmers and that really lowers their risk.”

“The biggest thing we have seen to this day is a shift from conventional tillage to no-till and then to cover crops,” Miller explained. “No-till alone is not enough to control erosion because there is still too much bare soil for too much of the year. We need to keep all that bare soil covered with cover crops.”

The watershed has a group of farmers that meet for lunch to talk about cover crops in a peer-to-peer format, Miller added. They call themselves Rye Growers Anonymous, he said, “We think it’s best for farmers to learn from other farmers. Farmers are also more apt to change if other farmers they know are changing.” 

“Our board is a very active board when it comes to the education part,” Miller added. “They will stop and talk to neighbors along the road or catch them at a local restaurant.” 

“We couldn’t just stick our heads in the sand,” said Sig Collins, a rancher who has been on the CMC since its fruition in 1994. “We knew we had to do something. The partnership with Wichita was a good opportunity to work on it together. There are more people in Wichita than in the watershed. If we worked on it voluntarily, we could do it on our own terms, not theirs.” 

French, who works more one-on-one with farmers on projects, contracts and grants, said the partnership is working and gave some examples of where they have seen the most success, “We have about 17 to 20 percent of the Watershed enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). When those contracts expire, we work very hard to get that land converted into a grazing system instead of tillage. We pioneered a project that helped farmers pay for perimeter fencing and has a cost-share for water. That is a big hurdle because it is very expensive to get those things done. After making these types of changes, we are always pretty assured that the land will stay in grass all the time.” 

“Another thing we do is help convert a lot of cropland to forage,” French added. “Lately the economics of grain farming has not been as well, so people are seeing livestock as an option. We’ve seen people convert entire fields and put acres that had grain under pivots placed entirely into grass for cattle. With that, they are using fewer inputs as far as chemicals and fertilizers too. Wichita pays $100/acre one time as an incentive payment for people to make those changes if they do so for at least 10 years.”  

Improving farm and ranch economics while improving the environment are becoming increasingly central to watershed efforts, Miller reiterated, “With soil health and cover crops farmers can do something good for their own pocketbooks too. I wish I would have known these things as a farmer. It’s about trying to mimic what the good Lord already knew, a diversity of species is a good thing, no different than the native prairie. We just screwed that system up with tillage and other practices. It’s like being a drug addict in a way. We need to get rid of the tillage equipment we are addicted to and get around a group of people who think differently.” 

French and her husband, Jim, have farmed in the watershed and have been doing cover crops since the 1980s, “We have moved towards multi-species cover crops and have a grass-finished cow/calf herd that we rotate through those. We also have some cash crops such as grain sorghum and we try to use that residue as much as we can for grazing.”

“Everybody likes to think of themselves as a good steward. For some, the clean-tilled field looks right to them or the pasture mowed down to nothing. It’s about changing the picture of stewardship and why that has a positive impact on water quality while also making their farm less prone to droughts and floods,” French said. 

“A big part of the success of the watershed is the idea that farmers are being proactive about what they need to do to care for downstream neighbors,” French said in closing. “It’s also economic development in a much broader sense. Our watershed project is geared towards water quality for Wichita and how we can make our community and farms more resilient and able to handle the extreme weather events we are seeing. If we continue to grow that footprint, we will be a success.” 

Learn more at: www.cheneylakewatershed.org | Cheney Lake Watershed | 18 E. 7th Ave. |South Hutchinson, KS 67505