CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Installing a conservation drainage system on the farm begins with methodical planning utilizing the Natural Resources Conservation Service experiences.
Conservation drainage practices include nutrient management, filter strips and cover crops. Drainage water management practices include saturated buffers, constructed wetlands and denitrifying bioreactors.
Ruth Book, Illinois NRCS conservation engineer, said there are three phases with a total of nine steps in the NRCS planning process before implementation.
Phase 1 is collection and analysis — identify problems, determine objectives, inventory resources and analyze resource data.
Phase 2 is decision support — formulate alternatives, evaluate alternatives and make decisions.
Phase 3 is application and evaluation — evaluate the plan and implement the plan.
“There’s a lot of work that goes into conservation planning. We want to be able to think broadly to start with. What are the issues and what might work to solve them, and then we can drill down into specifics,” Book said in a webinar hosted by the Illinois Sustainable Ag Partnership.
“Often, especially with conservation practices, I’ve noticed we want to jump to phase three immediately — let’s just put something on the ground. I want to emphasize that really may not be the right way to go about things.
“It would be better to think about what the problems are and what might work properly out on a particular field before we just jump right into implementing some conservation drainage practice because somebody talked us into it.”
NRCS Standards
NRCS has conservation standards that support each of the conservation drainage practices and maintains a library of standards that represent years of research and lessons learned.
“These standards, if followed, are going to help you, they won’t do all of it, but they’re going help you plan a project that’s going to do what you want it to do and it’s going to last for a significant length of time. It’s science-based and based on the research,” Book said.
“It’s also used by a whole lot of people not just NRCS employees or people who are helping with NRCS sponsored projects, but also people around the country, people around the world are using these NRCS conservation practice standards to inform what they do.”
She added that even some regulators look at the NRCS standards and build them into law, “which we kind of discourage because practice standards change by definition. We’re always listening to the latest research. So, if you build something like that into law it may not be what the people writing the law had intended if the practice standard changes.”
NRCS uses the conservation practice standards as a way to see the bar to make sure the taxpayer get what is expected.
“What is the taxpayer going to get if we implement this conservation practice out on the land and either provide technical assistance on how to plan and design it or even some financial assistance for getting that practice on the ground. Following the conservation practice standard is going to help set that bar to make sure the taxpayer gets what they’re hoping to get,” Book said.