County to hire help for damaged farm ground

The message from Rock County landowners has been heard loud and clear: We want to fix our lands.
Action taken by the Rock County Commissioners at their regular monthly meeting Tuesday, July 21, allows the county’s Land Management Office (LMO) to hire a full-time technician and shift its focus to handle the more than 70 requests for soil conservation assistance and repairs.
The heavy rains and flooding events of June 2014 eroded numerous waterways, basins and stream banks in area fields. With an estimated $3.5 million in damage, many landowners have turned to the LMO for the technical assistance.
“We are seeing a lot of damage out there we haven’t seen in a long time,” LMO Director Eric Hartman told commissioners.
Traditionally LMO worked with only three or four projects a year for the needed technical services. The LMO partnered with the NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) or in collaboration with other soil and water conservation districts.
Currently the LMO office has about 600 potential projects. That number could grow as damage from this spring’s heavy rains added to the existing damage.
Hartman said producers are urgently looking to his office for assistance to complete repairs or design new conservation measures before more damage can occur.
“With the storm events … we’ve had a lot of farmers changing their opinion of conservation efforts,” he said.
Over the next three years, Rock County will receive $3 million in three grant phases for producers to repair damage to existing conservation practices or to create new ones.
The grant will also fund the new LMO technician position.
County Administrator Kyle Oldre explained that for the next several years LMO’s focus won’t be business as usual.
“The state has identified this as a disaster and so have we,” he said.
Oldre, who is also the county’s emergency management director, said highly erodible farmland would become the LMO’s primary focus.
He pointed to the approach taken last year by the County Highway Department in making more than $1 million in repairs due to the same June 2014 weather events.
Oldre said the highway department postponed many regularly scheduled projects in order for personnel to focus on timely disaster repairs.
“If we truly treat this as a disaster, we need to do the same at LMO,” he said.
It has been at least a decade since the LMO office has had numerous producer requests for projects involving engineering designs. Because of the previous low demand, LMO was able to partner with other conservation agencies to complete the design work.
But last year’s disaster has also increased the work demand for the partnering agencies, making them unable to provide complete technical services to LMO projects.
As a response, LMO officials have developed a plan that may help the agency handle and process applications for the next six months.
“We might be able to piecemeal part of it — at least in this initial phase — because we cannot say (to producers) we cannot start this work,” said Doug Bos, LMO’s assistant director.
The piecemeal could involve collaborating with private firms as well as reexamining existing duties of current staff members.
By next year LMO plans to be able to handle technical services in-house.
For the past decade feedlot compliance has been at the forefront of LMO’s work. The local office completed the state-required project this spring.
In addition to feedlots, LMO also handles the county’s planning and zoning requests, solid waste and recycling programs, water quality, failing septic system oversight and financing as well as the promoting, facilitating and financing of conservation practices.