Grants enable farmers to clean up

SWOOPE – Five miles of creek runs through Charlie Drumheller’s Bellevue Farm and into the nearby Middle River.

Looking out Wednesday on the 365-acre cattle and hay operation, Drumheller, 61, points to the fencing he’s put up to keep the cattle out of the creeks and protect the water from being polluted. He also points to awards his farm has received for its environmental efforts.

“You can see how clear that water is,” Drumheller said. “I wouldn’t be the least-bit hesitant to drink out of that.”

Measures such as fencing, planting trees and installing a well, all of which Drumheller has done, can be cost-prohibitive for farmers, but he said there are federal grants available to help. A $300,000 federal grant to the Annapolis, Md.-based, Water Stewardship Inc., to aid in reducing nutrient runoff, is expected to help also.

The grant was announced June 1 by Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine as part of $2.4 million in federal money to fund four statewide projects focusing on reducing nonpoint source pollution in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Water Stewardship, Inc., already surveying the nutrient management programs of 44 Shenandoah Valley farms, will use the additional money to add another 50 Valley farms to survey by this fall. The group is working in cooperation with other local and national groups that will ask for volunteers from their producers to participate in the program.

Tom Simpson, president of Water Stewardship Inc., said the group does independent, third-party assessments of a farmer’s conservation performance and then works with them to develop a program to reduce nitrogen loss to achieve the average nitrogen reduction expected by Virginia from farms.

“The concept is that this is a shared effort throughout the supply chain to help reduce the impacts on water quality from agriculture production,” Simpson said. “Those impacts are not necessarily due to poor management or mismanagement, but our current production systems can be leaky. So we have to look at how to continue farming and reducing the impact on water.”

For many farms, however, the streams, creeks and rivers that run through or along their properties are the source of water for grazing cattle.

Drumheller said creating an alternative water source is “the most expensive issue” for farmers.

On Drumheller’s farm, he has a well that pumps fresh water to about 13 waterers, located in each paddock, from which the cattle drink. He said with the mostly fescue grass in this part of Virginia, it raises the temperature of cattle, particularly their feet, so their normal instinct is to use the creek to cool off their feet and deposit their feces in the water.

Installing a well, he said, costs about $10,000 to $15,000, depending on how deep the water source is and how much pipe is needed to move the water from the well to the waterer.

Drumheller paid an aerial photographer from James Madison University about $350 to survey the geology of his farm, who determined where the ground faults in his land intersected. That, Drumheller was told, was where there would likely be a more abundant water supply.

The hundreds of dollars he spent saved him thousands, he said, versus other area farms who did not do an aerial survey and had to dig wells more than 800 feet deep. To dig a well, he said, costs several dollars per foot.

In 2003, Drumheller put 55 acres of his farm in two voluntary federal programs: the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program and then the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which provided him the money to install additional fence for rotational grazing.

“It’s to prevent any nutrients from the pasture land going into the creek,” Drumheller said. “Also, obviously, it keeps the cattle out of the creek.”

Fencing costs several dollars per foot, depending on how it is built and who is building it, Drumheller said.

He has also taken additional steps to prevent nutrient runoff, including planting more than 7,500 trees, earning numerous awards, including the Bay Friendly Clean Farm Award and the Shenandoah River Basin Award, both in 2003. He also has a nutrient management program in place, testing the soil every three years to ensure that nutrient levels are within state and federal guidelines.

Drumheller says it’s a farmer’s natural instinct to be good stewards of their land.

And Simpson said he’s found Valley farmers receptive to the group and to making improvements in their nutrient management programs. They are willing, he said, to look to the future of agriculture and improve the environmental performance on their farms.

“I wouldn’t say they ran out and embraced us, but they invited us to sit at the kitchen table to listen,” Simpson said.