Congratulations to our 2018 Watershed Hero Impact Awardees. We appreciate all of our 2018 nominations. The Watershed Hero nomination committee had many worthy candidates to select from.
Watershed Hero nominations are open to any group, program, organization, business, or individual located and working on the protection, restoration, and sustainability of the water resources of the Fox-Wolf River Basin in Northeast Wisconsin. The Watershed Heroes Impact Award recognizes individuals and organizations who have lived or worked within the Fox-Wolf watershed communities and who have excelled in any one of the following areas:
- Providing leadership in working towards sustainable development of our economies and resources.
- Inspiring the work of others, including our youth, to foster the health of the Fox-Wolf watershed’s communities, economies, and cultures.
- Extraordinary focus on improving agriculture land use decisions to restore and protect our watershed.
- Utilizing innovative strategies or outstanding effort to achieve significant results in furthering sustainable development within the watershed.
- Demonstrating a lasting commitment to the health and management of our watershed resources.
Congratulations to our 2018 Watershed Heroes!
New Horizons Dairy
New Horizons Dairy Farm is committed to improving soil health and water quality. Over the past year, they have taken their operation to the next level. Dave Van De Hey and his sons Matthew and Derek, have fully embraced conservation practices, including cover crops and no-till planting. They understand how their actions on the land impact our local water resources, which has led them to go all in on conservation. In their first full season as a Fox Demo Farm, New Horizons Dairy have converted more than 1,000 acres to 100 percent no-till and cover crops. This far exceeds the 200-acre commitment they made when they signed on to be a Demo Farm. For the Van de Heys, seeing a conventional tilled field is no longer acceptable and they are determined to implement conservation practices on their entire operation.
John P. Moyles III
John has worked with the WI Sea Grant, establishing a surrender network for unwanted aquatics plants and animals. He is currently working with Illinois/Indiana Sea Grant on a similar project to keep unwanted species out of our waterways. He has volunteered countless hours in effort to bring the focus of this cause to a national level. He also focuses on educating the public on proper fish and aquatic species handling. He has a strong presence on social media in effort to educate people on what invasive species are and open the surrender network to people that feel they have no re-homing option for aquatic species.
John created a surrender network first with Green Bay Aquarium Society which created a viable option for people to locally surrender their unwanted fish and other aquatic species. This event has grown and is now coordinated with other rescues and clubs to encourage proper animal surrendering. These efforts are not just limited to aquatic species. These surrender events are now coordinated to allow for the surrendering of birds, reptiles, cats, dogs and exotics. His efforts are helping prevent non-native species from entering and disrupting our ecosystems.
Lower Fox River Watershed Monitoring Program
The Lower Fox River Monitoring Program is a network of teachers and students from eleven area high schools that monitor seven environmentally impaired streams in the Fox River watershed for water quality and ecological health. The students and teachers take on the role of scientists and explore local streams and waterways, in partnership with the scientific community. Standardized methods and annual teacher training
sessions allow our students to collect quality-assured data in their watersheds. The data provides a measurement of pollution that flows to the Fox River and Bay of Green Bay. This runoff pollution is the type of pollution that contributes to the much publicized “dead zone” in the bay of Green Bay.
Beyond the innovative educational benefits our program provides for our students, we also provide the community with crucial data about our water quality that can be used to assess long-term trends and evaluate restoration efforts.
The school monitoring network is administered by the Department of Natural and Applied Sciences and the Cofrin Center for Biodiversity at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. The program, launched in 2003 is celebrating its 15 year this year. Currently, eleven high schools, including 17 teachers and over 80 students participate in the program. More than 600 students have participated in the program since 2003.
Pat Koehnke
As the host of Outagamie County’s Conservation Field Days, Pat Koehnke has been an instrumental in conservation education and environmental awareness for youth and educators in Outagamie County. In the 15 years that the event has been held at Pat’s farm, the popularity of it has grown exponentially.
Over 15 years, nearly 13,000 fifth and sixth grade students and numerous teachers and parent chaperones from Outagamie County have learned about conservation, wildlife, soil and water, food production, recycling, and numerous other topics which positively affect our natural resources in the long run. The opportunity has hopefully helped to create a conservation ethic among countless numbers of youth. For many youths, this is the first time they have been exposed to multiple conservation topics, or even explored their environment. When asked why she’s continued to work so hard for the event each year, she simply responds: “It’s for the kids.”
Heart of the Valley Metropolitan Sewerage District
Facing increased permit requirements for total suspended solids, Heart of the Valley Metropolitan Sewerage District explored their options to upgrade their plant or utilize one of the WDNR’s alternate compliance options to meet the new water quality based effluent limits in its wastewater permit.Despite water quality trading having never been done in Wisconsin for TSS or for compliance in a TMDL watershed, HOV MSD decided what was best for their rate payers and for the watershed was to explore utilizing Water Quality Trading as the tool to achieve permit compliance.
Over the past year, HOV MSD has worked with Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance, Outagamie County Land Conservation Department and WDNR to advance a water quality trading plan to meet their TSS goals. The plan includes installing and maintaining Conservation Cover on a 3.6 acre field as well as a building and maintaining a Sediment Basin enhanced with Wetland Vegetation that will capture sediment from an additional 12.8 acre field within the Plum Creek Sub-watershed.
The practices HOV installed for water quality trading are reducing an average of 7,978 lbs of sediment year or 3.989 tons a year, generating an average of 2,440 credit year for HOV. Because HOV MSD choose to explore a compliance avenue that was full of unknowns, they aided in advancing a compliance option, making it easier for other permitted entities to do in the future. More importantly, they saved their rate payers money and decreased the overall TSS loading to the Fox River!
Our five winners will were honored at the 2018 Watershed Celebration at Lambeau in Green Bay on Tuesday, March 6th.
Agenda
6:00 – 6:30 p.m. – Watershed Hero Impact Award Presentation
6:30 – 7:15 p.m. – Dinner
7:15 – 8:00 p.m. – Fox-2-O: A Water Quality Documentary showing
and discussion with the film’s creators
