–Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig made a stop at the Water’s Edge Nature Center Tuesday afternoon to get a firsthand look at a recently completed water quality improvement project. Kossuth County Conservation partnered with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship to build a bioretention cell that was designed to help reduce the amount of runoff making its way into Smith Lake. Naig tells KLGA News these projects can have a big impact in the fight for improved water quality.
Naig says projects like this bioretention cell can be part of the larger water quality effort when concerned parties work together.
Prior to his stop in Kossuth County, Naig visited a farm site near Gilmore City in Humboldt County to look at a project to close the last Agricultural Drainage Wells (ADW’s) in the state.
Naig says this site involved 8 different properties and 13 different landowners who had to come together and agree for the project to move forward.
The state did an inventory of every Agricultural Drainage Well back in the late 1980’s, finding nearly 300 at that time. When money was allocated to close ADW’s in 1997, 195 remained, and of that total, 178 were located in Humboldt, Pocahontas and Wright counties.
