Farm kids learn a passion for stream ecology at Farm Family Day.
Cattle exclusion and crossing on Ervin Weaver’s farm
Lance Williams, stream ecologist, leads curriculum discussion with local school teachers.
2007 Outreach and Engagement Awards
The Sugar Creek Project —2007 Ohio State Finalist
Kellogg Foundation representatives, Vice President Bobby Moser, Professor Richard Moore, and project staff plant a tree honoring the Sugar Creek Project as a 2007 awards finalist. Photo by Ken Chamberlain.
Faced with issues revolving around Ohio’s second most polluted watershed, researchers at Ohio State University College of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Sciences and local farmers teamed together in 2000 to learn about the watershed. The team, starting with a group of 15 farmers formed around their own desire to be socially responsible and the researchers who wanted to work on a watershed from a participatory headwaters perspective, created a practical approach that has spawned 4 farmer groups; a research, extension, and outreach team of 30 scientists and faculty; 10 grants from the USDA, NSF, and the EPA; 100% endorsement from superintendents of all local public schools in the watershed, a grassroots approach to water quality credit trading, progress towards family-farm based sustainable agriculture, and a significant reduction in the pollution levels. These accomplishments have created “The Sugar Creek Method,” a national and international model for community-level participatory change.
One of the hallmarks of the project is that scientific research and extension outreach are complementary and inseparable. Farmers wanted to be socially responsible for their water quality but were unable to respond to the EPA finding that their watershed was highly polluted because the number of EPA sampling sites was too limited to assign specific causes. At the farmers’ request, the researchers conducted biweekly water sampling at the individual farm level, currently sampling 105 sites. The participatory approach of the team, the high density of sampling, and a common sense approach to water quality emphasizing upstream to downstream together are resolving the sources of “Non Point Source Pollution.”
The questions initially raised by the farmers stimulated the researchers to pursue a new scientific paradigm through an NSF Biocomplexity grant that linked social and natural sciences. Ten graduate students have been permitted to conduct research on local land and a recently awarded NSF GK-12 grant will fund eight graduate students per year from 2007-2011 to conduct more research in the watershed. These same STEM science students will team with local science teachers to raise the community’s science standards, thus effecting long- term change in the community.
Last, the Alpine Cheese Water Quality Credit Trading Program is Ohio’s first water quality trading program. Based on the factory’s 5-year pollution permit on phosphorus, a method was devised to broker credits at a county-level agency that had a high degree of trust and networking within the Amish area of the watershed. The factory, the local agency, and the university became partners, equally splitting “extra credits” generated so that the factory could lower costs and that the agency and university could spawn further water quality projects in the watershed. Because of this project, the factory was able to expand. This created 12 new jobs and new milk demand for 35 small Amish dairy farms while the many conservation projects on farms improve water more than if the factory had lowered the pollution level by itself. More information: sugarcreekmethod.osu.edu
