Land & Water Conservation - August 6, 2026 — Agenda

GREEN COUNTY LAND AND WATER CONSERVATION COMMITTEE USDA Service Center Monroe, Wisconsin 53566 1627 4th Avenue West Phone: (608) 325-4195 AGENDA Thursday, August 6, 2026 9:00 AM 1. Call meeting to order 2. Review and approval of June minutes 3. Review and approval of bills 4. Staff resignation 5. SAA tour 6. Clean Sweep 7. 5-year review of Land and Water Resource Management Plan 8. Discussion on conservation easements 9. Agency and staff reports 10. Committee concerns. Items may only be discussed and any item requiring action must be placed on a future committee agenda. 11. Public comment/question period (time limit not to exceed five minutes per person) 12. Set next meeting date 13. Adjourn Upon reasonable notice, efforts will be made to accommodate the needs of individuals with disabilities through sign language, interpreters of other auxiliary aids. For additional information or to request the service, contact the Green County Land and Water Conservation Office at (608) 325-4195 Ext. 3. Land and Water Conservation Board County Land and Water Resource Management Plan Five Year Review of LWRM Plans County: Green Implementation Covering Past Five Years and Future Directions Answer these four questions in writing (not to exceed 4 pages) 1. Provide a representative number of accomplishments that can be directly traced to activities identified in multiple work plans. For each accomplishment, explain how the planning process helped the county achieve its outcome, including planning adjustments that helped better target county activities. Green County has implemented state, county, and federal programs over the past five years. We utilize a number of sources to help pay for implementing BMP’s such as DATCP bonding, GPR, producer led watersheds, NRCS contribution agreement, Sand County Foundation, Wisconsin Women in Agriculture, and ARPA funding. Green County staff have helped in the design and installation of the following practices over the past five years: Grassed waterways 36,124 feet Streambank improvement 25,460 feet Rock crossings 17 Roof runoff systems 6 Fence 62,863 feet Animal trails 9384 feet Well decommissioning 110 Manure storage structures 5 Shallow wildlife ponds 12 Wetland restorations 6 Nutrient management 185,315 acres Filter strips 375 acres Cover crops 14,321 acres Trees sold 40,365 CREP contracts 31 CREP acres 375 CRP contracts written 204 CRP field status reviews 376 Last year our department took over the water testing program from UW-Extension. Every year four townships are targeted. We have tested 184 wells in the past two years. In 2024 our department took over the Clean Sweep program, once again from UW-Extension. In those two years, we have had 329 participants bring in 5845 pounds of agricultural waste and 15,783 pounds of household waste. We also make this event a prescription drop-off site. For two years we had a program with Wisconsin Women in Conservation. Tonya walked farms with 40 women to give them ideas on how to improve their land and resources of how to get practices applied. We host a Green County land judging contest each year. (We have been doing this since 1968.) We hosted the Southwest Wisconsin contest twice. (We take turns with Grant and Lafayette counties.) We co-hosted the state contest twice with Blackhawk Technical College. A total of 1397 high school FFA students participated in these contests. We have two producer led watersheds that our department is the collaborator for. These groups have annual meetings and field days to learn from one another. We work with the Upper Sugar River Watershed Association to help control phragmites, which is an aquatic invasive species. We do not have a lot of it in the county, but are trying to keep it under control. We administer the wildlife damage program. We had 13 landowners participate for deer damage, one for goose damage, and one for bear damage. (It was getting into their bee hives.) We work with the county drainage board and attend their meetings. We do their annual inspection report every year of the four legal drains that Green County administers. Last year we used our drone to fly each of the drains. We host two youth conservation days each year, one in May and the other in October. All fifth-grade students in Green County are invited. We average around 100 students at each event. Students learn about soil, forestry, fish management, prairies, watersheds, conservation, groundwater, recycling, and wildlife management. We decided to inspect all the manure storage structures in the county and completed the project. (approximately 110, with 44 being built before we started issuing permits) We have no exclusive ag zoning in Green County, so our Farmland Preservation Program is limited to long term contracts. We are down to less than 20 now, but we still do a status review on them every four years. We submitted an application for an AEA to increase Farmland Preservation numbers. Also, we have been doing a weekly radio program since 1951. 2. Identify any areas where the county was unable to make desired progress in implementing activities identified in multiple work plans. For each area identified, explain the work plan adjustments that were made to refocus planned activities. If no areas are identified, explain how the county was able to make progress in all the areas planned. Every year we have projects that don’t get done. Things change. The weather and the grain/livestock market are two of the biggest factors that either work in our favor or totally against us. Landowners are going to pay the bills that are necessary to survive, before they will dish anything out for a conservation practice that may have no real-life impact on their bottom line. When these projects don’t get done right away, we don’t discard them. We hold on to them and sometimes they will get constructed. It may not be next year, but eventually will get done. 3. Describe how the county’s work plans implement its priority farm strategy and the effectiveness of county actions implementing agricultural performance standards and conservation practices on farms. In particular, the county should describe outreach, farm inventories, and additional funds that were pursued to implement its strategy. We had defined a priority farm as land lying within a 303 (d) watershed or within a Water Quality Management Area (WQMA) and having one or more issues of non-compliance with the Performance Standards found in DNR Administrative Code NR 151. The Monroe High School has a LAUNCH program for juniors and seniors to experience project-based learning to solve real- world problems. We were selected to be part of their program at no cost to us. The students were given the task of using GIS to identify priority farms by ranking parcels on how many times they were flagged on using various susceptibility criteria. That criteria was: parcels within 300 feet of a 303(d) stream, tax parcels within 250 feet of new wells drilled since 2008, tax parcels within 1000 feet of municipal wells, tax parcels within 250 feet of transient non-community wells (i.e. churches, campgrounds, gas stations, restaurants motels, public restrooms, and taverns), and parcels with soils that are susceptible to groundwater contamination with two feet or less to groundwater or bedrock. After a thorough review the students found only one tax parcel that was flagged on all five categories and it was a golf course! With that being said, most of our work is from landowners voluntarily requesting assistance. However we are currently targeting one watershed with the ARPA funds we have received. We often look to pursue additional sources of funding. In the last five years we secured four different pots of money. The first was ARPA funds in the amount of $50,000 for the construction of soil conservation practices. We are targeting that money for the northeast part of the county, since we have never targeted that area before. We received $11,000 from WiWiC for assisting women landowners. We have two producer led watersheds and they have received $155,586 in grant funding education and for promoting and installing conservation practices in their respective areas of the county. A contribution agreement with NRCS has brought in $77,385 for work done on the Conservation Reserve Program. The biggest source of funding to date is a grant from the Sand County Foundation for $200,000 for installing cover crops, field borders, and creating pastures. 4. Provide representative examples that show changes in direction for work planning in the upcoming five years, with specific examples provided showing adjustments in planned activities in the county’s most recent work plan. We have applied for an Ag Enterprise Area. If approved it should ramp up conservation work in the Brodhead/Juda area. Having never had one before, we are unsure how many hours this will eat up annually. We are looking into what we can do for ag conservation easements. We have some farmers who are very interested in getting their farms into this protection program. We recently began looking into how the process works. It looks like partnering with the Driftless Area Land Conservancy would be a good approach. Work with the Sand County Foundation was not even a consideration in our last workplan. We were awarded a large grant in this program and will continue to work installing cover crops, field borders, and creating pastures. It is our best guess these practices will expand as farmers needs change.