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Ag Water Exchange website assists Minnesota farmers

Discovery Farms is addressing changes brought on by the buffer rule to help Minnesota farmers understand its impact.

The producer-led program collaborated with the Minnesota Agricultural Water Resource Center to develop a blog at Ag Water Exchange dot com that coordinator George Rehm calls a vehicle for exchanging information on water quality issues.

“What we tried to do there is summarize the data collected from Discovery Farms, relate that data as best we can to results from research from the north-central region or across the country.”

Since implementation of the buffer rule more than a year ago, he tells Brownfield Discovery Farms has cautioned against a one-size-fits-all policy.

“There are places in Minnesota where we have steeper landscapes that require wider buffers.  By contrast, we have landscapes that are very flat (and) level where a narrow buffer will satisfy any of these needs to reduce the amount of sediment reaching streams.”

In addition to the buffer rule, Rehm says recent blogs have touched on flooding concerns in corn fields and the benefits of tile drainage.