Coon Creek
Coon Creek
Saving the soil started here
by Joe Hart
Earlier this year, a group of farmers and politicians convened in Coon Valley to celebrate the birthplace of modern conservation as we know it. The basic tools of soil and water conservation, including contour strips, terracing, and grazing and rotation methods, were pioneered in the Coon Creek watershed, and this year marks the 75th anniversary of the federal program that launched their practice.
The anniversary event, held in April, was well attended by local and national dignitaries, including the chief of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Arlen Lancaster, who flew in from Washington D.C. to address the gathering. “Every farmer in the nation has a tie to the Coon Creek watershed,” Lancaster said. “You changed the course of our history.”
As he spoke, thousands of miles away from sunny Coon Valley, another history-changing set of events was unfolding in countries like Haiti, Bangladesh, and Egypt. There, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in riots protesting the skyrocketing price of food. In the past year, the costs of basic foodstuffs have more than doubled: Soybeans by are up by 107 percent, corn by 125 percent, wheat by 136 percent, and rice by a staggering 217 percent.
The problem of rising food prices has varied and complicated roots: Simple weather plays a role, as droughts and flooding around the world, from Australia to the Kickapoo Valley, damage crops and farmland. Recordhigh fuel prices increase the cost of raising crops in the first place. Government subsidies for biofuels divert food crops for industrial purposes. Changing dietary habits among the growing middle class in Asia have shifted global demand toward crop-intensive foods, namely meat. And at the macro level, economic policies promoted by the likes of the World Trade Organization have encouraged subsistence farmers to enter the global commodities market, undercutting the ability of countries to feed themselves.
For farmers here at home, however, the math is simple. Since the 1980s, the price for a bushel of corn or soybeans has remained roughly stagnant, and farmers—especially small-scale traditional family farmers—have lost their shirts. In 2007, corn prices hit an all-time high of $3.40 a bushel, and farmers planted a record crop. Even before the floods that destroyed crops across the Midwest, prices were predicted to top $8 a bushel.
For any farmer who’s managed to stay in business over the past few decades, $8 corn is good news. But conservationists are worried. A growing number of farmers are opting out of voluntary conservation programs like the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to convert marginal farmland to grasses, wetlands, and other environmental uses.
Instead, they’re planting these marginal fields with crops, and that could threaten the environmental gains of the past 75 years. “It’s a real concern,” says Wisconsin’s state conservationist, Pat Leavenworth.
If you’re under the age of 80, you might be forgiven for taking the stunning beauty of the Driftless region for granted. But 75 years ago, it was a dying landscape. Settlers here farmed with methods brought from the old country, priding themselves on ruler-straight rows of oats, wheat, and other crops. Under Wisconsin’s heavy rains, however, their habits proved devastating. After mere decades, rain had roiled clear-cut slopes into mudslides, cut impassible gullies through once-fertile farmland, and washed topsoil—10 to 12 feet of it—down into the valleys, where it clogged the region’s streams, turning them into sluggish, marshy rivers.
By the 1930s, the problem of soil erosion, whether by rain or wind, was considered a “national menace.” The Dust Bowl whipped up millions of acres of American topsoil and literally blew it out to sea. By 1934, the U.S. government estimated that 35 million acres of cultivated croplands had been “essentially destroyed” by soil erosion, while 100 million acres had lost “all or most of the topsoil.”
In response, the federal government launched a demonstration project along Coon Creek designed to conserve soil, improve waterways, and increase yields. A team that included soil scientists, surveyors, workmen, and the young naturalist Aldo Leopold set up camp along the creek. They worked with farmers to transition to rotational grazing systems and contour planting in strips that alternated crops with hay.
Early signers-on to the program were rewarded with federal payments, but farmers rapidly enlisted in the program as they witnessed its success. “After the first year, they had to put additions on their barns for the increased hay yields,” says Leavenworth.
Earnest Haugen was 13 years old when the conservation work began on his father’s farm, which perches above Coon Valley on a steep ridge. Today, the 87-yearold still farms with his brother Joseph on their father’s spread, although in recent years they’ve reduced their stock to a half-dozen cows, and a neighbor cuts the hay on their terraced fields.
On a recent afternoon, while thunderstorms threatened on the horizon, Haugen walked me through his 160 acres to show me some living conservation history. The earth is springy, and acres of thriving alfalfa pastureland are divided by barbed wire strung along hand-hewed posts of black locust—some of which were planted by Civilian Conservation Corps men in the 1930s.
With evident pride, he points out the first modern terrace ever constructed, a low mound about eight feet high, stretching across a field, carefully surveyed to prevent water from ripping topsoil off the field.
Today, the fruits of the project are evident, as Haugen can point out. Here and there, an old gully dating from the early part of the twentieth century has grown over with grass and trees. Slopes that once were grazed now sport soil-protecting forests. Haugen points out a massive culvert at the bottom of one steep field. Years ago, he says, road crews installed the culvert to handle runoff from the field, but in his tenure on the farm, it’s remained dry.
Stanley Trimble, a professor of geography at the University of California in Los Angeles, has studied the Coon Creek watershed since the 1970s. Every year, Trimble measures stream sediment against baselines set by researchers immediately following the completion of the federal project. By these investigations, he can report that the watershed is healing. A more visible measure, he says, is the return of the cold-water-loving native brook trout. “Stream quality is so much better than it was, it’s gone from brown trout to brook trout that can reproduce themselves.”
On Haugen’s farm, however, a few paces beyond the world’s first modern terrace, is a study in contrasts: Across the road lies a field that’s brown and lifeless, stubbled over with last year’s corn, traced in straight lines without regard for the slope of the land. Haugen shakes his head. “They came in and got rid of all the terraces,” he frowns.
These two fields illustrate what some worry will turn into the region’s next great soil crisis. In the 1930s, most of the farmers in southwestern Wisconsin were converting from crops like oats and wheat to diversified, smallscale dairies—operations that were tailor-made for terraced strip cropping. Farm plans called for long crop rotations, contour strips of hay, and pasturelands, all crucial elements in a small dairy operation. In the past few decades, however, family-owned dairies have been replaced by massive feedlots with tens of thousands of cows, many of them located in the West. Here in the Driftless, many farmers are converting to cropland.
Land under CRP is only one measure of the trend. In Crawford County, about 3,000 acres came out of CRP this year. In Vernon County, CRP contracts, which typically cover a ten-year period, will be expiring in large numbers over the next three years. “If corn goes to $8, I expect we’ll lose a fair number of those acres to cash grain operators,” says Sam Skemp, Vernon County’s NRCS district conservationist.
But the trend toward crop farming has greater implications than loss of CRP land. Many farmers, like Haugen’s neighbor, are converting contour strips to corn and soybean fields. “We’ve been seeing the trend for last 10 years, as dairy goes out,” says Skemp.
These trends worry environmentalists like Gary Thompson, who serves as the water quality monitoring coordinator at Valley Stewardship Network, in Viroqua. Compared to conservation lands or contoured hayfields, croplands are more susceptible to erosion and runoff, and require greater inputs of chemical fertilizers and herbicides. “We’re concerned that these changes long-term are going degrade our water quality,” Thompson says. And because cropland sheds water faster, massive conversion to crops can make floods like this year’s worse. “You have more exposed area without any growth on it. Commodity crops definitely contributed to faster runoff and more erosion.”
In spite of these concerns, it’s unlikely that we’ll return to the devastation preceding the federal programs of the 1930s. “The old traditional conservation practices that really saved the area are still largely in place,” says Rick Lange, the NRCS district conservationist for Crawford County. “There’s still an incredible amount of contour out there.” The landscape itself, with its small, separated fields, resists cropping on any kind of massive scale, and the trend toward pasture-raised meats and dairy is providing a new lease for animal farmers.
Moreover, most of today’s crop farmers are using notill methods, which vastly reduces runoff and erosion. In no-till farming, the soil is left unplowed and last year’s crop acts like mulch to protect soils. No-till typically relies on genetically modified seed such as Roundup Ready corn, and applications of herbicide, but some are experimenting with organic no-till.
“This office fought no-till like crazy when they first started taking out contour strips,” Skemp says. From a soil-erosion standpoint, however, no-till can be even more effective than contour strips. “The people from the national office came out here, and looked at the situation and said, ‘Sorry, there’s less soil coming off no-till than contour strips with tillage.’”
As a result, the increase in crop farming in the Driftless is “not the disaster it could be if farmers were using conventional techniques,” according to Trimble. Thanks to the efforts of conservation-minded farmers since the 1930s, Trimble reports, the soil itself is healing, becoming more resilient, absorbent, and fertile with every passing year.
But if history has anything to teach us on the subject, it’s that change happens quickly. “It really took a short period of time to unravel the watershed,” says Leavenworth, “and it’s taken almost three-quarters of a century to bring it even close to pre-settlement.”
Skemp takes heart in the broad range of farming methods in the region, and doesn’t see crop farming gaining much more hold than it has. Dairy farms continue to operate here. Organic Valley contributes to a thriving organic culture. Several organic vegetable farmers are located in the region. And many of the original contour systems from the 1930s are still in place.
Finally, the region has a strong environmental ethic that unites farmers and landowners of all types. Skemp recently talked to a landowner with 70 acres of CRP land about to expire. “He’s getting about $70 an acre, and I know for a fact there’s cash grain operators who would pay him two or three times that. He was not interested. And he isn’t someone who’s wealthy enough that he didn’t need the money. He just felt that having it as a wildlife reserve was the better option.”
If enough landowners feel the same way, the Coon Creek watershed project, with its legacy of cleaner water, abundant fish and game, and improved farm yields, will continue to guide the way for the next 75 years.
