DRIFTLESS REGION - With four producer-led watershed councils now operating in the northern Driftless Region of Crawford, Vernon, Monroe and LaCrosse counties, it should be no surprise to anyone that they are setting the pace and lighting a ‘conservation fire’ in the region.

After all, it was the Coon Creek Watershed Project, undertaken by the fledgling Soil Erosion Service, back in the 1930s, spearheaded by Hugh Hammond Bennett and Aldo Leopold, that helped to mitigate and correct the horrific wind and water erosion of the period, and ring a bell around the WORLD.

Well, guess what, they’re at it again.  The four watershed councils are the Tainter Creek, Bad Axe River, Coon Creek Community, and Rush Creek Conservation watershed councils. While all four groups operate separately, they have also achieved cooperation to maximize funding and educational opportunities for the members of all.

This was on full display on Wednesday, March 29, at the ‘Joint Watershed Council’ meeting held at the Eagles Club in Viroqua. The event featured a taco bar dinner, and educational proposals for 2023, to be offered to all watershed council members, and paid for with an amalgam of funding from within the four watershed councils – talk about conservation cooperation!

Leader honored

Each of the four watershed councils were born in the aftermath of rampaging flood waters – each in their own season. In modern times, the Tainter Creek Watershed Council is the grandmother of the local watershed revival. That watershed council was born out of the detritus left behind by catastrophic flash flooding in September of 2016, which tore through the small watershed. More than 11 inches of rain, dumped along the Crawford-Vernon county line overnight, and saw residents waking up to destruction and chaos.

One woman’s car was even swept away in the floodwaters, stimulating a heroic swift water rescue in the early morning hours. Farmers and road crews awoke to survey damaged fences, stranded livestock, and bridges and roads destroyed.

This experience, combined with the organizing efforts of Matt Emslie of Valley Stewardship Network (VSN), moved a group of farmers in the Tainter Creek Watershed to gather in late 2016. Berent Froiland accepted the leadership role in 2017. 

“It was a harmonious fit that Berent was the Franklin Town Chair, a local agricultural cooperative Agronomist, and the watershed leader, that likely spurred the success of this first in the local watershed council revival,” VSN Regenerative Agriculture Outreach Specialist Dani Heisler observed.   “He was able to encourage and facilitate forward progress with so much local buy in and support.”

After five years of dedicated leadership of the group, Froiland decided to step down from his role in the spring of 2023, and was honored for his contributions at the March 29 meeting. A young farmer in the watershed, Jesse Blum, has stepped forward to take on the responsibilities.

Since their launch in 2017, the group has increased acres of working lands in the watershed planting cover crops, hosted two major soil health educational events with hundreds of participants, and many smaller field days in the watershed.

Through the watershed council’s auspices, using Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) funding, 2,709 acres were planted in cover crops from 2019 through 2022.

Most recently, the group concluded a three-year project in the watershed in partnership with the Wallace Center Pasture Project. That project used $173,000 in funding from the U.S. EPA Gulf of Mexico Project to implement 10 projects in the watershed on 986 acres for grazing of cover crops, conversion of cropland to managed rotational grazing, repair of flood damaged fencing, grazing of prairie, repair of heavy use areas, and upgrading existing pasture to managed rotational grazing.

A key part of the project is to measure the impacts of the projects on working lands within the watershed on water quality. Initial water quality monitoring along Tainter Creek has already demonstrated improvements in water quality from the watershed’s efforts, and is ongoing.

Modelling estimates that the changes in practices funded by the grazing project will result in preventing 2,300 pounds of phosphorous from leaving fields in the watershed per year, and 1,600 tons of sediment prevented from eroding from fields each year.

Other councils

The Tainter Creek Watershed Council soldiered forward on their own for almost five years, when their hard work paid off in the formation of three other watershed councils in 2021 and 2022. Those are the Bad Axe River, Coon Creek and Rush Creek watershed councils.

Formation of the Bad Axe River Watershed Stewards was stimulated when local grazer Kevin Parr was named 2020 State Conservation Farmer of the Year for his innovative work in implementing a managed rotational grazing system on his farm in Vernon County’s Harmony Township.

On August 31, a celebration was held on his farm, delayed almost a year due to the pandemic. The event drew almost 100 local farmers, as well as state figures such as DATCP Secretary Randy Romanski and Matt Krueger, Executive Director of Wisconsin Land +Water.

Following the celebration, a large group of farmers gathered in Parr’s barn, and the watershed council was born.

Like the Kickapoo River and Coon Creek watersheds, the Bad Axe River Watershed had been heavily impacted by back-to-back wet years and catastrophic rain events in 2018 and 2019 that produced unprecedented flooding. These disasters stimulated a growing recognition that the agricultural community could play a big role in helping to mitigate the impacts of flooding - on farms and in their communities.

The watershed council applied for and received funding from DATCP’s Producer-Led Watershed Council grant program, and began to hold education events on member farms. They also began to send representatives to the Joint Watershed Council meetings, held approximately quarterly.

Through the watershed council’s auspices, using DATCP funding, 1,372 acres were planted in cover crops in 2022.

The Coon Creek Community Watershed Council also kicked off operations in August of 2021, with a first meeting at the Coon Valley Park. The Coon Creek Watershed had been devastated in the catastrophic flood of August 2018, with three PL-566 flood control dams breaching in the headwaters, and sending unprecedented amounts of water rampaging through farms and communities.

Since their formation, this watershed council has been on fire. Their name – Coon Creek Community (CCC) reflects their view that it will take all members of their community – the business community, rural and urban residents, and the farming community – to come together around protecting their watershed and reducing the impacts of flooding. The acronym, ‘CCC’ is also a nod to the watershed’s history as the location of the first Watershed Demonstration Project and much work by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

The group has achieved recognition as a state and federal non-profit, elected a board, engaged in strategic planning, held education events at member farms, and last August, put on an impressive one-year birthday bash in the Coon Valley Park. They have partnered with UW-Madison Greener Pastures on an oral history project.

The group’s non-profit status has allowed them to become eligible for a broad spectrum of grant funding, which they have pursued successfully.

In the last year, they have been awarded a $65,000 Reilly-Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Collaboration Grant, to launch an effort where the watershed council will partner with the UW-Madison English Department, and UW-Madison Planning and Landscape Architecture Department; Natural Resources Institute UW-Extension, Organizational and Leadership Development; and Extension Lakes at UW-Stevens Point.

This two-year grant will be used for the purposes of building organizational capacity and leadership in all of the watershed councils, supporting CCCWC planning, developing a toolkit tor community-led organizations to use when working on critical issues, strengthening connections among the universities and UW-Extension, and growing support for the cross-sector organization.

In addition, they have received a DNR Surface Water Grant for $10,000 that will allow creation of an EPA Nine-Element Watershed Plan.

The Rush Creek Watershed Conservation Council was formed in 2022, and has continued to meet and join in joint meetings. The group applied for but did not receive DATCP funding for 2023. Like the other watersheds, Rush Creek has been heavily impacted by catastrophic rainfall events which have produced devastation due to flash flooding.

2023 joint projects

In 2021 and 2022, with all the watershed councils operating individually, there was a lot of overlap in educational content. Those meeting at the Joint Watershed Council Meetings began to hold discussions about how to maximize their funding, and collaborate between watersheds on educational opportunities. This has borne fruit in 2023 with an exciting lineup of collaborative events.

The Tainter Creek, Bad Axe River and Coon Creek groups, in addition to DATCP grant funding, have received allotments from Ho-Chunk Nation funds paid to Vernon County. The funds are earmarked primarily for activities that increase public awareness, and projects on the landscape in the watersheds that help to increase infiltration on and reduce storm water runoff from working lands, and reduce soil erosion.

The groups will continue to meet separately, and sponsor educational events in their watersheds. In addition, using all of their combined funding, the groups have agreed to jointly sponsor the following exciting lineup of events this year:

April 22-23: ‘Cover Crop Bingo’ is scheduled for April 15.  This will be a self-guided tour of farms in the watersheds where cover crops have been planted. The CCCWC used Ho-Chunk funds allocated to the CCCWC to purchase signs indicating the cover crops sponsored by the local watershed council. Prizes will be contributed from each council, along with prizes purchased using Ho-Chunk funds. The goal of the event is to create awareness of cover crops as a practice to reduce soil erosion.

May 6: CCCWC will hold the first annual ‘Conservation Day’ in the park in Coon Valley. All watershed councils and groups supporting water quality and regenerative agriculture are invited to attend, and have information booths. Groups already signed up include the Savanna Institute, Seed Savers, B&E Trees, UW-Madison Greener Pastures/Grassland 2.0, and Neutral. There will be kid’s fishing demonstrations, music from the Spunky Bumpkin band, and a hog roast.

July 20: There will be a field trip to the Savanna Institute’s agroforestry demonstration farms in the Spring Green area. This event will be funded through a few sources.  As this is an educational event, expenses related to food and materials will be paid through the DATCP awards to the Bad Axe Watershed Stewards, the CCCWC, and the Tainter Creek Farmer-Led Watershed Council.  Since the Councils will be travelling together, that expense will be paid through the Ho-Chunk funds allocated to the Bad Axe and Tainter Councils. A Joint Watershed Council meeting is planned in the evening, following the Savanna Institute trip, and will be paid for through the Ho-Chunk Funds allocated to the Bad Axe and Tainter Councils as these meetings support community involvement in conservation.

August 18-19: An educational demonstration on water infiltration is scheduled for August 18-19 at the farm of organic dairy farmer Travis Klinkner.  DATCP funds from Bad Axe, Coon Creek and Tainter will be used to pay for this event. The two-day event will feature one day of presentations for producers on the topic of increasing water infiltration on working lands, and a second day focused on educating the general public about the good work being undertaken on watershed council farms.

September 7 and 9: CCCWC will bring venerable Coon Creek soil erosion researcher Stanley Trimble to the watershed. Trimble is the author of the iconic book ‘Historical Agriculture and Soil Erosion in the Upper Mississippi Valley Hill Country.’ Dr. Trimble, first at UW-Milwaukee, and later at the University of California-Los Angeles, conducted groundbreaking research about soil erosion in the watershed. Trimble’s almost four decades of research built on the work of scientists who studied the watershed starting in the 1930s.

On Thursday, Sept. 7, watershed council members will gather at the Genoa Overlook along the Mississippi River, for the September meeting and a cookout event – a place often enjoyed by Trimble and his students during their years in the watershed.

The September 9 event, will be a ‘black tie’ celebration 90th anniversary of the original ‘Coon Creek Watershed Project’ will feature and educational presentation by Dr. Trimble. The event will take place at the Tucker and Becky Gretebeck ‘Pumpkin Patch,’ on their farm in rural Cashton.