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Farming: State conference is all Wet
State farmers have water on the brain

Tuesday, February 8

By David Griffith
Intelligencer Journal Staff

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the video shown at Monday's meeting of a state farm group spoke volumes.

The video began with a Holtwood farm hit by Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which dropped 11 inches of rain on the area.

The audience watched, unfazed, as murky brown rivers swept the soil away from the farm, down to the Susquehanna River.

What came next was a shock, however, and drew appreciative rumblings from the 50 or so people gathered for the annual meeting and legislative reception of the Pennsylvania State Council of Farm Organizations.

The camera switched to the neighboring Cedar Meadow Farm, where Steve Groff has earned an international reputation for his strides in no-till planting. There, the water ran clear, almost sparkling by contrast.

The soil was staying put.

"It's both frightening and encouraging to see what can be done," Barry Frantz, of the Natural Resource Conservation Service, said. "It shows what's possible. If we used a tenth of those practices across Pennsylvania, imagine the benefits."

Frantz was one of two guest speakers at Monday's events at the state Capitol Building, which included a luncheon attended by several urban legislators, afternoon meetings and a dinner reception.

Following up on Frantz's theme of water usage and conservation was Paul O. Swartz, executive director of the Susquehanna River Basin Commission.

"Most of the time we're dealing with too much water ... and most of our conservation practices are oriented that way," Frantz said.

But, Frantz said, the number of droughts in our area is on the rise, despite hurricanes that occasionally drench the region with too much water.

"Droughts are happening often enough that we need to start thinking about it," he said. "In Pennsylvania, we waste a lot of water because we have it, and we carry those bad habits over to when we don't have it."

No-till planting and cover crops, among the methods used by Groff, are good ways to manage the water we do have, Frantz said.

Swartz said every year in the 1990s was marked either by drought or an excess of rainfall. He said there also is a steady increase in the demand for water in the Susquehanna Basin, which covers about half the state, including Lancaster County.

Consumptive use, which takes water from the basin without replacing it, has doubled since 1970, and likely will increase at the same rate or more over the next 30 years, according to Swartz.

"This problem is only going to become more and more acute," he said.

Also during Monday's meeting, the council of farm organizations passed a number of resolutions dealing with agricultural issues.

The group voted to support property tax relief for farm buildings used solely for agricultural purposes and to exempt from local income taxation interest on farm business accounts and gains on sales of farm livestock and farm machinery.