Marathon County looks for options to grow subwatershed
The Record-Review The Marathon County conservation services director Kirstie Heidenreich on Aug. 22 said she hopes to bring new life to a stalled Fenwood Creek Subwatershed Project.
She said the program, which currently gets around $45,000 annually from municipalities and industry purchasing phosphorus pollution credits, has enrolled only five farms among 65 in the Fenwood Creek Subwatershed.
Heidenreich said the five participating farms have reduced ag pollution but, together, the handful of farms will not be able to meet a county strategic plan goal of reducing phosphorus run-off in the subwatershed by 20 percent or 14,016 pounds by the end of the year.
The reductions are estimated at 5,160 pounds per year. The director said the county expects to receive a $341,541 Targeted Resource Management (TRM) grant in January 2023 to better fund the Fenwood Creek Subwatershed Project and she hopes to kick off a major enrollment push starting in September.
The Fenwood Creek Subwatershed Project has struggled for funding. Last year, the Marathon County Board of Supervisors failed to budget money for the conservation program. Senator Kathy Bernier (R-Chippewa Falls) and local assembly representatives proposed funding the project with state dollars, but that plan, too, was rejected by the state legislature. Within the past weeks, the county’s Human Resources, Finance and Property Committee voted not to allocate a requested $3.6 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars for the project.
The Fenwood Creek Subwatershed Project is a voluntary program that rewards farmers on a per acre basis for using techniques that reduce phosphorus run-off, including managed grazing of livestock, altered crop rotations, planting cover crops and growing crops with minimum or no tillage.
Heidenreich acknowledges that it would cost “millions of dollars” annually to scale up the Fenwood Creek Pilot Project county-wide. She said she plans to discuss at an Environmental Resources Committee meeting what the future of the project could be. “We need to take a fresh look at what is feasible,” she said.
Heidenreich thinks that if the county can show a significant reduction in phosphorus run-off in the Fenwood Creek Subwatershed the state may be willing to fund a statewide project.
This would be in the tradition, she said, of Marathon County taking the lead in conservation programming. She noted that Marathon County’s non-metallic mining program was adopted statewide by the legislature.
The Marathon County’s Land and Water Plan says that the county will pursue Targeted Performance Standards if the Fenwood Creek Subwatershed Pilot Project fails to deliver phosphorus run-off reductions consistent with the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) study of the Big Eau Pleine watershed. That study calls for an 80 percent reduction in phosphorus pollution from farms, municipalities and industry to meet federal Clean Water Act standards.
Heidenreich said she is aware of the back-up plan but is not ready to advocate for it at the moment.
“Not yet,” she said. Targeted Performance Standards have been used by the state legislature to improve water quality in areas of the state dealing with agricultural pollution, including Kewaunee County where manure from dairy farms have fouled drinking water wells.
