Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9411140041
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-14 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SU CLAUSON-WICKER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FLOYD LENGTH: Long
But for Floyd County cattle farmers Liz and Dan Bender, who remember alders growing along that stream, the view has lost much of its beauty.
The trees, which held their pasture soil in place and cooled the water for native fish, have disappeared. Years ago, the water ran clear.
"After the cattle ate the [small, shrub-like] trees, the bank collapsed into the stream," Liz Bender said. "So there went all that soil - there went the water quality."
In a study of the New River basin two years ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service found the East Fork of the Little River had one of the greatest potentials for pollution problems of any major tributary to the New River.
In rural areas, the pollution enters streams as silty runoff from winding dirt roads, as fertilizer washed off cultivated fields, as soil from eroding banks, logging operations and construction sites.
Concerned about water quality and the erosion of their pasture, the Benders joined the Little River Watershed Association. The association of landowners is working to determine the extent of pollution in the East Fork of the Little River and to develop its own pollution management plan.
The Benders offered their farm as a demonstration site where conservation practices - such as keeping cattle out of streams - could be shared with other landowners. Middle Creek, a tributary of the East Fork, flows through their farm.
The group was initiated last year by the National Committee for the New River and the Skyline Soil and Water Conservation District, a group with a locally elected board that deals with soil and water issues.
David Ingram, a Floyd County supervisor who owns a farm on the Little River, says the group wants to act on the problem before the problems lead to outside intervention.
"The feds sometimes take a bulldozer approach [to local problems]. Locals can do it with aplomb," says association member Jack Lawson, who is also one of Floyd's two elected directors on the Soil and Water Conservation Board.
The Environmental Protection Agency awarded the Little River project a $48,000 grant to work with local landowners developing voluntary methods to control the sedimentation and pollution problems. Approximately $10,000 will be spent for conservation efforts on the Bender farm; the remaining $38,000 will underwrite education, public meetings and similar efforts.
Government agencies could have justification for keeping an eye on Little River water quality: it merges with the New River near where Radford, Blacksburg and Christiansburg draw their water supplies.
So far, the Little River has almost no regulation, and Floyd Countians, who don't even have a zoning ordinance, would like to keep things that way.
Water tests of the Little River's East Fork are not yet conclusive, but they indicate levels of fecal coliform (bacteria, usually from feces) and inorganic nitrogen from fertilizers are a little high. The trout population is in decline. The river also has a sedimentation problem.
"Anyone can see the Little River runs blood red after a rain," says consultant Van Anderson with the National Committee for the New River. That sedimentation kills off fish by smothering aquatic plants and insects, he said.
Anderson, a landscape architect, paddled the Little River through Floyd County to the New River and found that the bottom had become flat and muddy. "When you touch bottom with your paddle, it makes a soft sucking sound instead of rocky clunk," he says.
Anderson is seeking extra funding from the Virginia Environmental Endowment to test the effect of sedimentation and siltation on the river's aquatic life. By gauging the reality of existing pollution in the river, rather than just anticipating future problems, Anderson hopes to help landowners assess problems and minimize them before action is forced on them.
The only way to change, Anderson said, is to slow the loss of soil from the surrounding land. Since most Floyd land along the river and its tributaries is agricultural, the solution must come from changes in farm practices.
Armed with information from the federal Soil Conservation Service, the Virginia Cooperative Extension and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farmers already have been practicing contour farming and rotational grazing to maintain the soil-holding capacity of their fields.
In addition, the Benders are stabilizing stream banks by dumping rocks along the edges and planting trees. To prevent cattle from destroying the plantings, they've fenced off portions of the stream, created stream crossings, and provided another water source for their cattle.
After they became a demonstration project, the EPA grant paid 75 percent of their conservation costs - an opportunity that may be open to other Little River farmers depending on the success of the current project.
One of the Benders' more expensive acquisitions was a cow-level, concrete watering trough known as a spring box. With a price tag of $800-$1,500, the spring-fed pool cost roughly as much as a quarter-mile of fencing. Luckily, it won't require nearly as much maintenance, especially during the spring floods.
Ron Sheffield, a Virginia Tech graduate student doing research on cow behavior on the Bender farm, thinks the spring box could be worth a lot more than a quarter acre of fence. The agricultural engineer believes cattle who are given a choice will prefer the spring box over the stream any day.
"They probably would much rather drink clean water at their level than scramble down a slippery bank for dirty water," he says. "In future studies, we could test whether cattle tend to drink more water, graze more, and gain more weight when they're on a spring box system. I suspect they would."
"I'd like to think that my research would convince legislators that you don't have to adopt drastic, expensive measures like fencing cattle out of the river to clean up the water. Measures like that could put farmers out of the cattle business," Sheffield says. "In the utopian view, if we convince farmers to put in spring boxes, vegetation will grow back on the stream banks and the Little River will stop running red. But of course, this is just one solution."
Members of the watershed association have blamed some of the sedimentation problem on Floyd's steep dirt roads and will present a list of problem areas to the Virginia Department of Transportation's resident engineer.
With the development of the Benders' demonstration farm and increased educational efforts, consultant Anderson hopes the Little River Watershed Association will send the message to the federal government that communities can take care of their own problems.
For more information about the Little River Watershed Association, call Van Anderson at 951-1024 or Cynthia Hancock at the Skyline Soil and Water Conservation District, 382-3262.
by CNB