Defiance Soil and Water has had a busy summer. Several group petition drainage projects, H2Ohio wetlands, and agricultural practices all completed. Also, the summer has seen improvements made to Penney Nature Center on Ashpacher Road — so go check it out. Between all that, our office took on two small grants called Conservation Kick funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and local governments.

These grants are administered by the Great Lakes Commission (GLC). Conservation Kick allowed our office to work with the cities of Defiance and Fort Wayne. Each of these projects worked with a farmer who was willing to install nitrogen reducing practices on their farm to help reduce nitrogen losses to benefit municipal water intake systems.

The partnership with Fort Wayne utilized a grassed waterway that drains into the St. Joseph River that reduces nitrogen by stopping soil erosion.

Our recent weather patterns have included larger, flashier rain events that have caused more soil erosion. Soil that erodes into the river contains large amounts of nitrogen. By building a grassed waterway soil particles are protected from water’s erosive effects to help downstream water users.

The Conservation Kick grant with Defiance was much more unique. With collaboration of Defiance and GLC we developed a nitrogen filter bed to remove nitrogen from subsurface tile drains. The project is unique, because to date, there are no nitrogen filter beds in the area that are built to field scale. Filter beds have been used more in the upper Midwest with little use in Ohio.

These filter beds use a carbon source, in this case wood chips, to bind with the nitrogen in the tile water. The subsurface tile water outlets into a pit that is filled with wood chips and allowed to slowly move through the chips as they strip the water of the nitrogen before the water outlets into the ditch. In other states, such as Wisconsin, these filter beds have shown a great reduction in nitrogen discharges. We hope to see those same results.

To verify our results, we have partnered with United States Geological Survey (USGS) to monitor the filter bed so we will know the reductions that are being made by this filter bed. We hope that these nitrogen reductions can improve the City of Defiance’s water quality and be a model for nitrogen reductions in the future for other partners.

New and innovative projects such as the nitrogen filter bed can only work with cooperation of people and groups that put conservation first. We were blessed to get two great producers that were willing to work with Defiance SWCD to put conservation on their farms.

None of this would have been possible without funding from Defiance, Fort Wayne, EPA, and grant guidance from Great Lakes Commission. With partnerships such as these we believe that the future of conservation and nutrient management is very bright.

We hope that these partnerships can act as a model moving forward as we work towards reducing nutrient losses in the future.

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