New York - Water Quality, Nutrient Management

"We want folks to be able to go out and scoop up a cup of water from their creek," says Bob Almeter, Farm Service Agency County Executive Director in Chenango County. "If people know they'll get clean water out of buffers, they'll put them in." Almeter and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) District Conservationist Lauren Johnson work as a team. In just a year they have enrolled nearly 175 acres--35 miles--of riparian buffers on the Susquehanna River and several of its tributaries (mainly the Chenango, but also the Unadilla and the Otselic). The Susquehanna is one of the major rivers of the Chesapeake Bay drainage, rising west of Albany, and reaching the bay just northeast of Baltimore, Maryland.

Almeter says, "We don't have to go out to sell buffers and groan about it as you would if you had to sell candy bars at a ballgame. We get to go out and help people do good things for the land, for our grandkids." Almeter's comment aside, he and Johnson have, in fact, undertaken a vigorous campaign to promote buffers. They have talked to landowners, sent newsletters, participated in radio interviews, and made 1,800 telephone calls to farm operators. "Some people were unfriendly; others said the program sounds interesting. We found them, took aerial photographs, outlined a proposal, and went out to make a presentation. We told people we want to clean up water quality; here's what we can do, and oh, by the way, we have money." A few people told Almeter they'd "do it for the bucks," but he says "most want to do it anyhow." One farmer on the Unadilla who enrolled some land in 1997 came back in 1998 "to add another seven or eight acres of environmentally sensitive land, including four acres of wetland. So, we're working on a wetland with CRP [Conservation Reserve Program], and we'll get even more buffer that will go around the wetland." Almeter adds that when he was looking at the place, "ducks flew off. It was wonderful."

One who wanted to install buffers is Dan Marshman of Tiger Lily Farm near Oxford. Started in 1865, this sixth generation dairy is in a partnership Marshman runs with his brother, Bob, two of Bob's sons, and one of his own. The family owns about 830 acres and rents an additional 200 or so, some of it in cropland for the dairy and some in woodland, managed on a 20-year rotation for harvest. Marshman says, "We have a buffer strip averaging 35 or 40 feet wide everywhere we have land on the river. Our land seldom floods because we have an extremely high riverbank, but there are a few lower spots where the buffers are wider." Almeter says the Marshmans have always been good stewards, "which explains part of their success in agriculture. Dan told me: the land has been good to us, so it's about time we do something for it."

One of the things Marshman likes best "is that it's a pesticide buffer. Unless you were following the directions to a "T," you'd have runoff of pesticides. The buffers force people to keep their spray away--because your cornfield won't be that close to the river." He also says they have become involved in nutrient management--"calibrating our spreader, counting loads per field, calculating what fertilizer to use and how much we need, doing a manure analysis, and, as we're required to do, taking soil samples on all our fields. I think we're realizing--now that we're measuring the number of loads and when they go on--that we're putting a little more manure on than we thought we were, so we should be able to reduce our corn starter." That, Marshman says, is helping the bottom line.

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