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Florida
’s precious water bodies are
in trouble. The water
quality in many areas is being degraded as a consequence of human
actions, and this realization has led to widespread efforts to restore our state’s
water quality. Danny and
Marcia Candler are good examples of
the environmental awareness found among today’s farmers and ranchers. The Candlers own and
operate a cattle ranch north of Okeechobee, where water from their
pastures flows into the beautiful Chandler Hammock Slough and splits
their 1300-acre ranch. But
the natural elegance of this oak and palm hammock not only shelters
wildlife; it also hides water quality problems that date back to when
the land was a dairy farm.
“I
bought this land in 1993. The
first time I saw the slough I knew I wanted this place as my new
home,” said Mr. Candler, a
Florida
native who grew up in a farming
family, as did his wife Marcia. Danny
explained further, “It was too expensive to meet the water quality
rules,” and so the dairy went out of business.
“Actually the Water Management District offered them a buy out.
They said we would like to buy you out and have you move
somewhere else,” clarified Marcia, describing the government program
in the 1980s and `90s, that removed over a dozen Okeechobee dairy farms
and thousands of cows from the Okeechobee region to north
Florida
and
Georgia
.
These and
other water quality improvement projects are becoming linked together
into the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program that spans the entire
United States
. A TMDL is the maximum
amount of a given pollutant that a water body can absorb and still
maintain its designated uses such as drinking water or recreation.
Loads refer to the actual quantity or pounds of chemical
(phosphorus, nitrogen, etc.) coming off the land into the rivers, lakes,
and estuaries.
The Clean
Water Act of 1972 passed by the U.S. Congress established a goal of
cleaning up all water bodies in the
United States
so that they would be suitable for fishing and swimming, and led to the
development of the TMDL program. However,
implementation of this national law was slow.
In 1999, the Florida Legislature approved the Florida Water
Restoration Act, which provides clear legal authority for the TMDL
program. This legislation
will affect many people, but those who may feel its effects the most are
farmers and ranchers. Danny
and Marcia are concerned about what the rules might mean for them. “You
just don’t know how stringent they are going to get,” commented
Marcia. Danny added, “ I
think it’s a good thing as long as it stays reasonable, you know, that
people can still meet and maintain a living.”
Upon
starting their ranch they implemented Best Management Practices (BMPs)
intended to reduce the amount of phosphorus running off their land.
One practice is to rotate cattle through several smaller pastures
so they don’t stay in the same areas for more than about two weeks at
a time. This avoids
overloading the land with too much cattle waste. Another
BMP is watering cows using troughs set away from natural streams and
fencing off the streams to prevent the cattle from depositing manure
into the water. The Candlers
have also fenced off wetland areas and planted special grasses to act as
a buffer to trap phosphorus before it reaches the wetlands and streams.
In
a more innovative approach, Danny and Marcia are working with private
agricultural engineers and the South Florida Water Management District
to test an experimental method of cleaning their runoff water.
The technique involves forcing the waters of the slough to flow
through baskets of a special material that chemically captures
phosphorus from the water. The
flow rates and phosphorus levels before and after the basket filters are
measured and used to calculate the their effectiveness.
While the
agricultural community strives to meet the new water quality goals,
their best efforts may not be good enough.
One reason farmers have trouble meeting the goals is the slow
response of the land since tons of chemicals can be stored for many
years in the soil. Prior to
becoming the Candler Ranch, the land was used for dairy farming (a more
intense consumer of phosphorus for feed and fertilizer).
The left-over phosphorus from the dairy era will continue to
leach out of the soil for many years, thus making it more difficult for
the Candlers to reach their targets.
However Danny did point
out, ”I know our numbers from the phosphorus runoff have been lower
every year since we’ve been here and since we started implementing the
BMPs.” So while things may
not be improving as quickly as other groups would wish, progress is
being made in a positive direction.
Marcia provided a reality check by explaining, “The
environmentalists and the government agencies need to realize that
it’s never going to be like it used to be.
Maybe if you got rid of about three quarters of the people…but
there’s no way to do that.”
That
doesn’t mean the Candlers are giving up, emphasized Danny, “I would
tell anybody to look at our place and see if they don’t think that we
take a lot of pride in it. We
work to keep it clean. We
work very hard to and we’re proud of it.”
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