Farmers Planting By Plane To Help Improve Water Quality

Some Dane County farmers are planting crops they won’t harvest as part of a pilot project designed to improve the quality of nearby lakes.

Cover crops can reduce fertilizer runoff from farm fields into water. The phosphorous runoff can feed lake weeds and algae.

Spring barley seeds were dropped Tuesday by airplane onto fields owned by nine farmers in Dane County.

About 1,000 acres of cover crop were planted by plane, twice as much will be planted by tractor, said Heidi Johnson, a University of Wisconsin-Extension crops and soils agent.

“With anything with farming you want to see how things work first and how it works with your crop rotation before you adopt it. So they’re doing it on small acreage,” Johnson said.

Money for the project comes from federal funds Dane County received to improve the Yahara watershed. Farms in DeForest, Waunakee, Sun Prairie and Fitchburg are taking part in the five-year pilot. Participating farms, all of which are in the Yahara watershed, receive about $60 an acre to pay for seed and planting costs.

Other areas of the state also have partnerships between farmers and those concerned about lake quality.

“In Dane County the effort has been led by the Yahara Pride Farms group which is a farmer-led watershed group,” Johnson said. “They’ve been providing funding to farmers in their group to try out cover crops and see how they work.”

Yahara Watershed Improvement Network (Yahara WINS) is an organization that’s trying to stop phosphorous fertilizer runoff from farms, sewer plants and urban storm water that is feeding algal blooms.

“From cleaning what is already in our streams, to partnering with our farmers and cities, we need an all-hands-on-deck approach to cleaning up our lakes,” said Dane County Executive Joe Parisi.