By ANN HINCH

Associate Editor

INDIANAPOLIS —Humans and water are inseparable for myriad reasons.

Attention on keeping water supplies clean and safe can be seen in news coverage on the effect fracking natural gas has on groundwater and protests of oil pipelines across Native American lands, to worries about fertilizer-fed lake algal blooms and “dead-zone” hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Everybody’s got stories about rivers,” Ryan Schnurr – a native Indiana author and doctoral student – pointed out at this month’s Indiana Water Summit in downtown Indianapolis.

During the first Summit in 2018, White River Alliance (WRA) Executive Director Jill Hoffman said organizers solicited hundreds of ideas on Post-It notes from those attending, to help guide efforts leading up to the 2019 Summit. The entire process is geared toward formulating regional water plans for the state.

Between the two summits, the WRA hosted three forums focused on input from major water stakeholders such as industry and agriculture to figure out how their usage ties in with one another and individual users. The forums also focused on education and how to best create campaigns to inform the public about water’s value.

This year’s Summit included a printed “roadmap” titled “Where Do You Fit In?” illustrating how interconnected business, agriculture, industry, utilities, the environment, and people are when it comes to water usage and how they impact one another. It also points out problems that can affect water quality, and intersections where there is a monetary expense associated with use, as well as where government regulations kick in.

(You can download this roadmap at https://thewhiteriveralliance.org/programs/water-summit/a-sustainable-shared-water-future)

Hoffman said organizers have talked with Farm Bureau, state Soil and Water Conservation Districts, the state ag department, USDA, and some individual farmers so far, in seeking information specific to agriculture in water use and conservation.

“None of this is regulatory,” she said of the WRA’s efforts at planning. “It’s the opposite of that.” The idea is to get stakeholders to want to participate voluntarily, including farmers and agribusiness, to help their specific region of the state.

This year’s Summit had more state legislators in attendance. Asked about their role in water planning, if not to enact regulations, Hoffman explained there’s not much reliable funding for studies on water use and other local and regional conservation efforts. The idea is that legislators may mandate more state funding.

Too, she said lawmakers travel and talk with a lot of people, including farmers, and they become a good conduit for carrying ideas from one area to another – a senator might hear of a reliable practice on one farm and share it with farmers elsewhere.

“Sometimes we treat them almost like they’re not human,” she said of lawmakers – but they are people who talk to a lot of other people, including experts, and learn a lot in the course of doing so.

Practicalities

At this Summit were three farmers touted as running sustainable operations, including Mike Werling of Decatur. The 2012 Indiana River Friendly Farmer award winner farms 350 acres he said are entirely no-till. He said he “plants green” – seeding corn into growing cover crops. He said he uses no chemical burndown, letting the row crop benefit from nitrogen the still-growing cover provides the soil.

He also uses a 16-species mix for his cover, quipping that no person eating only potatoes every day could expect to remain healthy, so it stands to reason “the more species we can put out there, the better it feeds the soil.” He showed photos of his soil, which is moist but able to break up easily.

Werling said he started no-till in 1985 and has raised his soil’s organic profile – a major contributor to its health – considerably in that time. He’s also mindful of pesticide use and drift because of a beekeeping neighbor who rents his tiny livestock to California growers for pollination.

In 1989, Rodney Rulon also went to no-till and has planted cover crops for the past 15 years, using liquid hog manure on 320 acres each year. “We feel responsible for what leaves our farm,” he said of runoff.

Conservation is the best economic model for Rulon Enterprises LLC, based in Arcadia, while also improving soil health – including its ability to better regulate temperature and moisture – and trapping carbon in the ground.

“I don’t think what we do should be unusual, and I don’t think it’s as unusual (among farmers) as you may think,” he explained to an audience made up largely of non-farmers.

What we think of now as “traditional” farming methods are not sustainable, he said. Rulon said he has tracked the financial benefits of no-till and cover for himself as roughly a 254 percent financial return on his production, or about $57 in profit for investment of just over $22 per acre right now.

Decades ago, he said farmers diversified their products more, and even planted cover to preserve field health. “Nobody in Indiana tried to make a living growing (only) corn and soybeans until 50 years ago.”

One of the things WRA learned from Farm Bureau is that farmers could use more academic and practical help in their conservation efforts. “(We were told) there’s just a need for technical training on some of these topics,” Hoffman explained.

Summit panelist Mike Starkey added that Indiana farmers have been fairly “screaming” for state officials to authorize more funds for conservation practices and education. He owns Starkey Farms in Brownsburg and for years has welcomed tours of his fields.

Rulon said there are growers who tried a conservation practice like no-till or cover 20, 30 years ago and didn’t get favorable results – he thinks some could be convinced to try again, since the methods and teaching have improved over time. Werling added he has done farmer-to-farmer mentoring to “talk up” conservation practices from his experience and has had some success that way.

Interested in learning more about Indiana water planning or lending ag expertise to the effort? Visit IndianaWaterSummit.org or call 317-672-7577.