The Price of a Drop
Water as a Crop Program Pays Landowners to Conserve Natural Resources
How much is rainfall worth? There's no firm price for the precious droplets that fall from passing storms, but municipalities and businesses in North Texas have become interested enough to pay landowners for conservation work to protect it.
As rain falls and crosses private land, landowners become a critical part of the drinking-water supply chain as it drains toward streams, lakes and reservoirs. Their conservation ethics play a role in deciding whether surface water is clean -- or not -- and, to some degree, how plentiful this resource is for consumers.
"What does a gallon of silt cost you in terms of water quality and storage-capacity reduction when it winds up in a lake?" asks Gary Price, who owns the 77 Ranch with his wife, Sue, at Blooming Grove, Texas.
The Prices and a few of their neighbors in the Texas Mill Creek Watershed, a part of the 18,000-square-mile Trinity River Basin, chose four years ago to participate in a program called Water As A Crop. The program was developed in 2009 by the Sand County Foundation, Madison, Wis.
UNIQUE HARVEST
As part of the program, the couple installed cross-fencing to improve pasture productivity through rotational grazing. They also planted native grasses to both reduce erosion and further increase the supply of forage produced by their pastures.
"The overall idea from Sand County was to show the urban areas downstream the value of keeping the water clean and keeping silt out of Richland-Chambers Reservoir," Price said. Richland-Chambers is the main water source for the Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD), which supplies water to Fort Worth and 11 Texas counties.
The Water As A Crop program (waterasacrop.org) offers landowners resources to improve the conservation of water where it falls and produce clean water as a valuable crop. Craig Ficenec, of Sand County Foundation, said his group's initial contribution was small, only $10,000 to $15,000 that went to a half-dozen ranchers. But that investment helped generate $6 million from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), as well as money from private industry, government agencies and foundations. Sand County is a private, nonprofit organization working with private landowners on voluntary land-management practices.
With cost-sharing money from the NRCS Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and private funding, about 100 participants in seven watersheds are installing cross-fencing, riparian buffers and other practices to improve soil health and water quality.
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BROAD GEOGRAPHY
"Forty percent of the people in Texas depend on the Trinity River Basin as their main water source," Price said. "Water that comes across our land either goes to Tarrant County or to the western edge of Dallas County through the Tarrant Regional Water District, or down into Lake Livingston, and is part of Houston's drinking water."
Even brewer MillerCoors, located in Fort Worth, provides funding to the Navarro Soil and Water Conservation District for conservation projects. "MillerCoors uses a lot of water to make beer, so they're interested in how we conserve and clean up water," Price said.
"Our earliest watershed-protection efforts were working with Texas AgriLife in the early 1990s, trying to figure out hot spots for sediment and nutrients in the watershed for our reservoirs," said Darrell Andrews, assistant director for the environmental division of TRWD.
Andrews said the main nutrient issues are nitrogen and phosphorus. By no means are farms and ranches the only contributors to these problems in Tarrant's 5,000 square miles of watershed. Industrial plants and septic tanks contribute to algal blooms and sedimentation.
MANY CONTRIBUTORS
NRCS and the local soil and water-conservation districts are knocking on doors and offering these programs to farmers.
"And another thing is interesting to us -- private partnerships like MillerCoors have said they think what we're doing will be beneficial to them, and they want to help financially. For them to come to the table is huge," Andrews said.
Getting landowners to the table is huge, too. "This is a new way of seeing agriculture as a public benefit and getting landowners to see how they're really affecting the general public," said Al Leal, acting state resource conservationist for NRCS.
One way management of the landscape benefits the general public is with a supply of clean water. "Testing being done will show the yield from a well-managed rangeland, the amount and quality of water coming off of it versus poorly managed rangeland," Leal said.
CAREFUL EVALUATION
Two years ago, Bill Fox, an ecosystem scientist with Texas A&M AgriLife, installed three stations on the 77 Ranch to measure rainfall runoff and infiltration through three different plant communities in pastures. Fox expects it will be seven to eight years before he can draw definite conclusions, but so far, he's found that the Prices' mixed-grass prairie is capturing a lot of rainfall. A tallgrass prairie on the ranch saw substantial runoff after a hard rain, not what he expected at first.
"But that event was after several other rainfall events," he said. "Those deep soils are holding more water, so you get runoff after a series of rainfall events."
Leal points out the main concern is controlling overland flow.
"In the Trinity Basin, we're using principles that work on infiltration, to where we're keeping soils in place to do the filtration for us," Leal said. "So we're introducing no tillage and increasing the diversity of rotations on cropland. And on grazing lands, we're looking to diversify bermudagrass monocultures. The end term for the landowner is sustainability."
STAYING PUT
As for the Tarrant Regional Water District, Andrews is optimistic.
"We're in for the long term," he said. "As long as we own the reservoirs, we're in, because the management of that watershed helps the water quality downstream."
Price adds, "We're all in this together. If we manage [our natural resources] a certain way, we could benefit financially from that. To us, sustainability means I'm here next year."
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