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Eisele: Impact of Coon Valley Watershed Project still felt today

Tim Eisele
Correspondent for The Capital Times  —  6/07/2008 10:17 pm

COON VALLEY -- Seventy-five years later, the impact of the historic Coon Creek Watershed Demonstration Project is still being felt in western Wisconsin.

To the uninitiated, the area appears to be indistinguishable from other rural areas in Wisconsin, with trees dotting farmers' fields.

But Sam Skemp knows better. A district conservationist for the National Resources Conservation Society in Vernon County, he witnessed the area receive 10 to 15 inches of rainfall in a 16-hour period in 2007. Without the unprecedented erosion control efforts conducted three-quarters of a century earlier.

"I had never seen a rainfall like this and was afraid that every one of the conservation practices installed in streams would be damaged. Thankfully all of the dams held and there were no lives lost in Wisconsin, but once I was able to get into the uplands what I found amazing is that there were a lot of places that it was difficult to tell that we had had a significant rainfall. I was amazed," Skemp said.

"What it brought home to me was how important the work that we've done is. Fifty years ago, 13 inches of rain would have virtually wiped out the Village of Chaseburg and parts of Coon Valley, and now the watershed is enough of a sponge to take that water and allow it to infiltrate," Skemp said.

The Coon Creek Watershed was the very first project in the United States designed to combat the effects of erosion. It began in 1933 after Hugh Hammond Bennett, a soil surveyor, convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt that erosion was a major problem for America's farmers.

Besides losing soil and polluting waterways, erosion reduced farm productivity, Bennett said, and a government program to reduce erosion could also put people to work through the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Encompassing 90,000 acres in what is known as the Driftless area -- the region in southwest Wisconsin that the glaciers did not cover -- the project was started by the then Soil Erosion Service. That federal agency was renamed the Soil Conservation Service in 1935 and today is known as the NRCS.

Congress provided $5 million for erosion control and the very first showcase project in the nation was in Wisconsin. It was referred to by Bennett as "Project Number One," and by Aldo Leopold as an adventure in cooperative conservation.

Experts in soils, forestry, wildlife, and hydrology met with local farmers to convince them to sign up for the program. If they did, they received free advice, that took into account the entire farm, and that also received a minimum payment.

In exchange, the landowners agreed to practices such as rotating crops, planting contour strips, installing grass waterways, fencing cattle out of woodlands and planting slopes in hay, cover crops or trees.

This was no easy task in the 1930s, when it wasn't popular for independent farmers to participate in programs offered by the "feds." It took a lot of convincing to get people to sign up.

Yet farmers were in dire economic straights as erosion was taking their land's productivity away. Some had no choice but to participate, even though they secretly thought they'd eventually return to their old, traditional practices. Still it took courage to sign an agreement with the government.

Ernest Haugen, Coon Valley farmer, remembers the day in 1934 when his father decided to sign up for the program. His father had to decide how many acres to enroll and what kind of grass seed to use. Sixty percent of the land had to be in grass or hay, Haugen recalled. Other requirements included that 20 acres had to be terraced and timber had to be fenced off so that cattle could not pasture in it.

"A lot of areas had become wastelands," Skemp said. It was common to farm up and down the hill, rather than along the contour, and steep land was overgrazed and denuded.

Stan Trimble, hydrologist from UCLA, has studied Coon Creek for the past 35 years, and tells that Hugh Hammond Bennett had heard stories of villages that were buried by erosion.

Trimble relates that the problem was not that the Scandinavians and Germans who settled the land in the 1800s were bad farmers.

"They were good farmers and intended to pass on their land to their children," Trimble said. "But, they were used to the climate in Europe and did not have the technology to deal with the intense rainfall of eastern North America."

The prairie land had been so rich that it was seen as inexhaustible but over time land practices took their toll.

Bennett's project was successful, and soon people came to the area to see improvements in the land.

Pat Leavenworth, Wisconsin's state conservationist for NRCS, said that what was started 75 years ago has not stopped, and many of the landowners today care about conservation more than ever.

"It is a wonderful story and water quality continues to improve and wildlife has returned to increasingly productive land," Leavenworth said.

The Coon Creek project has a legacy 75 years old. Today it is a tribute to the foresight of the farm families who adopted the modern conservation farming practices, and to the government employees who overcame challenges and worked with private landowners.

Tim Eisele (teisele@chorus.net) is a full-time freelance outdoor writer and photographer. He is a founding member and past president of the Wisconsin Outdoor Communicators Association and active member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America.

Tim Eisele
Correspondent for The Capital Times  —  6/07/2008 10:17 pm