Saving Water on Florida Ranches
State of Florida adopts a water savings program on ranches, initially developed through Conservation Innovation Grants
Lake Okeechobee, the largest freshwater source in Florida, covers 730 square miles—about half the size of Rhode Island—and is exceptionally shallow for a lake of its size. Historically, the lake would flood its banks regularly and flow southward.
Now the Lake is encircled by the Hoover Dike and the rainwater from the watershed no longer flows south, but is channeled to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee Estuaries on Florida’s east and west coasts. This water comes primarily from the Lake’s largely agricultural watershed and is dumped into the ocean loaded with nutrients that impact the lake’s and estuaries’ water quality and marine life.
In 2005, the World Wildlife Fund received a NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant develop a pilot project to design and field test a payment for environmental services (PES) program to enhance water management in the Lake Okeechobee watershed. WWF convened a group of stakeholders including a group of ranchers, South Florida Water Management District, NRCS, the MacArthur Agro Ecology Center, University of Florida Researchers and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Soon enough, the Florida Ranchlands Environmental Services Project (FRESP) was launched to implement an innovative market-based approach to protecting the headwaters of the Everglades.
“Because of over drainage in the Lake Okeechobee watershed there was no place to hold water on the landscape during Florida’s rainy season. As a result, water managers were dumping, depending on rainfall, billions of gallons of valuable freshwater into the ocean,” said Sarah Lynch, FRESP project manager.
A PES program offers incentives to sellers, in this case ranchers, to change their land management practices in return for the generation of ecosystem services—in this case, water retention and nutrient runoff reduction. FRESP offered 10-year contracts to ranchers to “farm” water, holding rainfall on ranchlands at crucial times to reduce nutrient and water flows into Lake Okeechobee and its connected coastal estuaries. Ranchers, with technical assistance from NRCS,, designed projects to retain water on their lands. The stakeholder collaboration helped design program details such as monitoring and permitting requirements and contract setup.
A key aspect of FRESP is that it allowed ranchers to continue ranching, only seasonally flooding pastures to help with Lake Okeechobee water flows. Participation in FRESP was a voluntary choice for ranchers.
“Ranchers know best where and how to generate water management services on their ranch, so they decide if they want to participate in the program and what they are willing to do,” said Lynch.
Once the program design was complete and piloted, WWF applied for and received a second CIG award in 2008 to mature the pilot into a broader program, which was successfully implemented before being succeeded by a new program launched by the State of Florida in November 2010. Building on the success of FRESP, the Dispersed Water Management Program was created by the South Florida Water Management District, an agency responsible for improving water quality, maintaining flood control and water supply and Everglades restoration. The Dispersed Water Management Program continues to partner with Florida ranchers to this day.
FRESP was critical to proving that on-ranch water management is a feasible and cost-effective way to improve water management in the Everglades ecosystem, with the added benefit of providing ranchers with a new source of on-farm income.
Since 2004, Conservation Innovation Grants has funded innovative technologies and approaches to natural resource conservation on agricultural lands.
