OZAUKEE COUNTY, Wis. — In the Badger State, agriculture is a near $105 billion industry, according to the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP). It's an industry constantly looking toward innovation and profitability.
The I-Team saw how Ozaukee County farmers are using state funding to help retain soil and water, a state-wide effort to improve farming methods and stop contaminated run-off.
"This is probably the poorest ground Ozaukee County has to offer, so if we can prove it works here, we can do it everywhere," Matt Winkler said as he showed others his farming conservation efforts.
Winkler is a dairy farmer in Belgium and the vice president of Clean Farm Families of Ozaukee County. It's a group of farmers who are dedicated to improving soil retention and water conservation.
Since 2016, the group has been part of the Producer-Led Water Shed Program. It's a state-wide initiative that gives farmers money to implement different farming methods.
"Farmers are great stewards of their land," DATCP Secretary Randy Romanski said.
Romanski recently went to several Ozaukee County farms to see how the grants are working firsthand.
"The good work that the farm families and the farm groups have done is really showing that the program works as intended," Romanski explained.
For the last few years, through this program, farmers like Winkler and Bob Roden stopped tilling their land. It is a century-old method that turns over soil.
"We were always doing a lot of tillage, and the more you disrupt the ground, and the more tillage you do, the more soil loss you have, and that's the number one thing here is to save the soil, keep the soil on the land. If you keep the soil on the land, keep the pollution out of the waters," Roden said.
Roden's been tilling his more than 2,500 acres of land for decades. With state funding, he and others switched to cover crops instead. Those are crops planted during the off-season to cover the soil instead of being harvested, which farmers said better retains the quality of the soil.
"With our cover crops, we seem to have a lot less soil erosion. By having the cover crops, we can surface supply the manure, not disrupting the soil, and the crop is growing and taking up the nutrients rather than not having a crop, putting that manure on the field, with the possibility of running into your streams and rivers and that stuff getting into your lakes," Roden explained.
You can see the two methods right off Highway 57 in Saulkville. Farmers tell the I-Team, with better soil comes better water retention.
"Conventional tilled ground will only infiltrate about a quarter inch of rain an hour. This farm here, we had it tested last year, we're infiltrating two inches of water an hour," Winkler said.
A massive change in farming that helps farmers and prevents contaminated run-off from getting into your drinking water.
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