Boone County water quality project launched

Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig recently announced that the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship is partnering with Boone County and the Boone County Soil and Water Conservation District to launch the state’s latest “batch and build” project. The first phase of the project includes a goal of installing more than 20 edge-of-field conservation practices, including bioreactors, saturated buffers and multi-purpose oxbows. These science-based practices, which are outlined in the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, are proven to improve water quality and reduce the loss of nutrients into Iowa’s waterways.

The project builds on the success of the similar “batch and build” model that has been highly successful in efficiently installing water quality practices in Polk, Dallas and Story counties as well as in the Middle Cedar Watershed of Linn, Benton, Tama, Grundy, Black Hawk and Buchanan Counties. Instead of building projects separately for individual landowners as has traditionally been done in the past, the “batch and build” model modernizes the project management process by installing batches of conservation practices on multiple farms at once.