Driftless Area & The Farm Bill - Conservation field notes with steven rinella

Over the last few years one of my personal favorite places on the planet has become the driftless area of Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota the area takes its name from the fact that it was spared from the leveling crush from glaciers that flattened the rest of the Midwest during the Pleistocene epoch. Now is stands out in the Midwest as an area of gorgeous vein lake creeks and limestone outcropings you can almost thing f it as a nice dandy buckle on America's corn belt. While the driftless area is known for many things including phenomenal dear hunting and great small game hunting it's particularly well known for it's Brook trout fishing. Brook trout are of course the only native trout that we have eat of the Mississippi River. However, the brook trout's existence in the driftless has not always been guaranteed. Starting over a century ago intense agriculture in the surrounding landscape sent millions of tons of eroded soil in millions of pounds of fertilizer down into the driftless and it threatened the very streams upon which Brook trout depended. It buried gravel bars and silt and degraded water quality to the point where native aquatic life was threatened. For a while there it seemed like the story the driftless area was coming to a sad end. But thankfully, we were able to reverse the trend. Because the Federal Farm Bill we could channel funding into the hands of thousands of private landowners who were eager to make conservation improvements on their own private land but didn't always have the funding to make it possible. I'm talking about simple, highly effective things like a cropshare program for fencing along streams to keep cattle from trotting down into the ripe agrarian zone. Or planting forest buffers to help stabilize eroding creek beds. And these things not only helped the land or the projects occurred but they benefited the land downstream from those projects as well. And thanks to thank, we were able to reverse the bad trend of the driftless and restore native Brook trout habitat. The farm bill still works for us today by sending critical dollars to landowners who agree to take steps who improve the natural resources on their own ground. And the taxpayer investment in these programs is essential. Their power has multiple two, three, and sometimes four times by additional resources that local, regional, national conservation organizations bring to the table. Through the efforts of groups like Presence Forever one dollar invested by the American taxpayer becomes four dollars that can be invested in habitat improvement. And those improvements tend to be far-reaching building a fantastic patch of pheasant cover helps control runoff and absorb nutrients and helps to send clean water downstream to the driftless areas Brook trout. But for several years now, the Farm Bill conservation programs have been as threatened as the driftless areas Brook trout once were. Federal budgets are tight but when the federal investment evaporates out here on the ground, the impetus for much of this good conservation work evaporates along with it. If we roll back Farm Bill conservation programs too far, we might push some critical habitat past the point of no return and as a sportsman that's not a future that I can support. If you agree with me you should contact your local elected officials and let them know that you support farmville conservation programs and they should too. And if you want to find out more about the Farm Bill and its related conservation programs you should visit www.trcp.org