Dale Steppler, whose farm is in Manitoba’s most studied watershed, is sold on the benefits of the project despite the extra work of collecting data.
About 415 acres of Steppler’s 1,200 acre farm near Miami is host to the Steppler sub-watershed, which occupies a small portion of the overall Tobacco Creek project.
Like other farmers in the Deerwood Soil and Water Management Association area, Steppler provides detailed information on all his farm management practices each year, including how much fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide he uses, the crops that he grows and where he grazes his cattle. He receives a nominal fee for his participation.
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“It is a lot of extra work,” he said.
“I’ve got a lot of people to answer to sometimes. They even tell us how much phosphorous to put on, which isn’t a problem, even though it seems to be restricting us a bit. As far as fertilizer and spraying, as a farmer you can’t be wasteful in that regard anyway because you know what it costs. We don’t put on an extra pound if we don’t have to.”
Steppler has found the results of the scientific research interesting.
He said he once tagged along with a group of scientists led by University of Manitoba soil science professor Don Flaten who were touring the site. The questions really started flying when talk shifted to the freeze-thaw effect on runoff through vegetative residues. Steppler said the researchers found that natural vegetation can release much more phosphorous than they had previously thought possible, which contributed to water quality problems downstream.
He said it was heartening to see researchers challenging well-established notions about nutrient loading.
“It’s a pretty fine line. I don’t know if they know exactly what’s more beneficial yet,” he said.
“They want us to grow forages on the sides of hills to control soil erosion, which will work. But if you have a third cut in the fall that grows pretty lush, there might be a lot of dissolved phosphorous that would come off of that crop in the spring melt,” he added.
“You would be better to wait until after a frost and let your cattle in to graze it off. There would be less plant material for the freeze and thaw.”
Steppler was heavily involved with the Deerwood dam construction project and worked with the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration as a surveyor when the project got rolling in the mid-1980s. He watched many of the small dams being built.
Having served on the local municipal council for six years fixing bridges and culverts, he’s sold on small dams.
“That should be happening in a lot more areas of the province.”
Reducing peak flow by 25 percent makes all the difference, he said. In one case, the council knew that it could install a smaller diameter pipe because the flow was restricted, and in another, two pipes were able to handle what once took three, resulting in savings of one-third of the cost of the pipe.
“It actually did save real dollars for the RM. The top 25 percent of a flow is what usually gets you.”
The five small dams on his property mean that he can use the water whenever he needs it. However, since the dams are designed to only retain 50 percent of the flow, the supply is limited.
“We water cattle out of it, but there are small-scale irrigation possibilities like strawberries or something like that you could do.”
In one location, a retaining pond has been dug to catch runoff from the wintering yard for his 100-cow herd. The theory is that the nutrients captured could be pumped back onto nearby forage land using a small-scale irrigation system.
“There’s not a lot of nutrients in cattle runoff. So if you pump the water out, it almost costs you money,” he said.
“Last year it made quite a difference. You could see where the grass hung on a little bit better because we added some water to it.”
