Brownhaven Dairy farm being a good neighbor

We cel­e­brated our son’s sec­ond birth­day the other day and I went out to the garage freezer to get some ice cream. I found gooshy boxes of ice cream, par­tially thawed meats and one huge mess of the result­ing hor­ri­fy­ing liq­uid rapidly fan­ning out across the con­crete floor.

Who was to blame? I had, as far as I had known, been the last to get some­thing from the freezer and I must have not com­pletely shut the door. It must have been my fault, and, based upon the less-than-pleased response my wife had regard­ing the sit­u­a­tion, she seemed to agree with that con­clu­sion. Fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion, how­ever, yielded some dif­fer­ent results. I asked my three-year-old daugh­ter if she had been in the freezer recently and her response was, “I tried to get the ice cream out but I couldn’t reach it.” Hmmmmmm…

When some­thing goes wrong, peo­ple are usu­ally look­ing for some­one to blame. Such is the case with water qual­ity, par­tic­u­larly in the noto­ri­ous Grand Lake St. Marys Water­shed in west­ern Ohio. The result has, unfor­tu­nately, led to fin­ger point­ing at agri­cul­ture in the watershed.

“We’re three miles from the lake and we live on a major state high­way, so peo­ple watch us pretty closely,” said Lou Brown, who runs Brown­haven Dairy with his brother Alan. “The town peo­ple are very upset about farm­ers pol­lut­ing their lake and they will tell you about it.”

But rather than try­ing to dodge the blame (whether it is right or wrong), Brown and other farm­ers are tak­ing exten­sive mea­sures to elim­i­nate the poten­tial for water pol­lu­tion from their farms. In fact, rather than avoid­ing all of the unwanted atten­tion directed at ani­mal agri­cul­ture in the area, Brown wel­comes the scrutiny as a chance to shine.

I want peo­ple to come and see and learn about what we are doing here,” he said. “We want to do every­thing we can to be good stew­ards of the land.”

Brown’s par­ents pur­chased the farm in 1959, which now includes 230 acres of corn and alfalfa for feed­ing the 210-cow dairy. The Browns have a long his­tory of coop­er­at­ing with neigh­bors, the com­mu­nity and gov­ern­ment con­ser­va­tion pro­grams, includ­ing the Envi­ron­men­tal Qual­ity Incen­tives Pro­gram (EQIP) and the Con­ser­va­tion Reserve Pro­gram (CRP). Every acre of the land the Browns man­age has been care­fully assessed to deter­mine the best land use to max­i­mize pro­duc­tion while min­i­miz­ing envi­ron­men­tal impact.

One exam­ple of this phi­los­o­phy is the wet­land that was installed on the farm through CRP four years ago. The com­mon­sense mea­sure turned a los­ing propo­si­tion in terms of pro­duc­tion into a win for the sur­round­ing farm fields and the envi­ron­ment. Instead of pay­ing the same high inputs for their less pro­duc­tive ground, the wet­land diverts excess water from their fields at plant­ing time and elim­i­nates some of the crop dam­age from the wildlife.

In addi­tion, they installed 34 acres of 200-foot wide buffer strips along all the roads and ditches from which they are per­mit­ted to make hay. They also installed 2 acres of quail habi­tat in the lower-yielding land along the woods to pre­vent any crop inputs from leav­ing the field through sur­face water. Other than nitro­gen applied at corn plant­ing, all of the nutri­ents on the farm come from manure applications.

Brown closely adheres to the tight manure appli­ca­tion reg­u­la­tions and plants cover crops on the farm that fur­ther reduce runoff and nutri­ent loss, improve water infil­tra­tion and ben­e­fit the soil. Other efforts for water qual­ity man­age­ment on the farm include the four tile stops on the four large tiles that leave the property.

“We can com­pletely shut off the drainage tiles leav­ing this farm,” Brown said. “We shut them off every time we apply manure and after the crop is planted so we can con­serve mois­ture and boost our yields. And you can visu­ally inspect eas­ily to make sure your manure is not going anywhere.”

The truth about the prob­lems in the Water­shed is that the sit­u­a­tion is extremely com­plex and the actual blame is tough to deter­mine accu­rately. As a major land use, agri­cul­ture is cer­tainly one com­po­nent of the prob­lem, but not the only one. And, with more farm­ers like Brown tak­ing mea­sures to address the sit­u­a­tion, improve­ments will occur.

“This part of Auglaize County has been really gung ho about adopt­ing all of these prac­tices,” Brown said. “We are not the only ones doing all of these things out here and it has to be mak­ing a dif­fer­ence in the lake.”

If things do not improve, maybe there needs to be fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion in the blame game of Grand Lake St. Marys.

This col­umn is brought to you by Ohio agri­cul­ture. Matt Reese writes for Ohio’s Coun­try Jour­nal and resides in Bal­ti­more, Ohio. Con­tact him at mkcreese@yahoo.com. For more, visit freshcountryair.blogspot.com.

Posted by Staff Reports on Sep 15 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.