INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in Indiana has added four watersheds to the list of those deemed high priority, making farmers and landowners eligible for funding for conservation practices designed to improve water quality.

The four new watersheds are Big Pine (Benton County), Busseron Creek (Sullivan and Vigo counties), Fish Creek (Greene, Monroe and Owen counties) and Plummer Creek (Greene County). They join four watersheds already listed – Big Pine Creek (Benton and White counties), Little Wea Creek (Tippecanoe County), Cicero Creek (Boone, Clinton, Hamilton and Tipton counties) and Middle Eel (Kosciusko, Miami and Wabash counties).

Farmers and landowners in the watersheds may apply for money to help pay for practices that reduce nutrient loading to streams, such as cover crops, nutrient management programs and reduced tillage, said Jill Reinhart, assistant Indiana state conservationist, special projects. “It’s the same suite of practices we promote for soil health,” she noted. “Not only do these projects protect the environment, but they help with production and the bottom line.”

The first application deadline for next year hasn’t been announced but will probably be in January, she said. 

The Indiana projects will be funded through NRCS’ Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative (MRBI). 

The program encourages farmers to adopt conservation systems that enhance wildlife habitat and restore wetlands in addition to helping with water quality, said Jane Hardisty, Indiana state conservationist.

“By targeting small priority watersheds within the Mississippi River basin, we are helping farmers to deliver local water quality benefits that contribute to large-scale improvements for the basin as a whole,” she explained. “Water quality is important to everyone, and the many partnerships created through this initiative are promising to the future health of these watersheds.”

Indiana NRCS has supplied more than $11 million in funding to targeted watersheds since MRBI was created in 2009, Hardisty said.

Thirteen states, including Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee, comprise MRBI. The initiative looks beyond individual state borders to develop policies to improve water quality in the entire basin and the Gulf of Mexico, said Martin Lowenfish, NRCS national conservation initiatives coordinator.

“MRBI is one of the efforts that NRCS takes to accelerate conservation that has a regional or national concern,” he explained. “We look at the goals of producers and what their resource challenges are. Soil health is really important and cover crops are a great tool, but there’s no magic bullet. It’s not cover crops, and it’s not regulation either. We really think we can accomplish a lot with a voluntary approach.”

Conservation efforts on cropland in the Mississippi River Basin have reduced the amount of nitrogen flowing to the Gulf of Mexico by 18 percent and phosphorous by 20 percent, according to a 2013 report from the USDA’s Conservation Effects Assessment Project.

“We do recognize the limits of our scope,” Lowenfish stated. “We recognize the limitations of what the funding can do. It’s not enough to fix the gulf. We know the gulf is a huge problem.”

Farmers in the Mississippi River Basin understand the need to improve the environment and their bottom lines by adopting conservation practices, he said.

“We’re working hard to find the intersection of what’s good for resources and what’s good for farm operations. Where we can find these benefits, it makes sense for farmers to do them. As a farmer, if you’ve got phosphorous or nitrogen you paid for ending up in the river, then they’re not going into your crops.”