Soil Health in Progress - Pipe Creek Watershed Project Updates

Pipe Creek – What’s happening:

Zach Laughlin, Watershed Coordinator with Fond du Lac County, provided an update about our farmers from the Pipe Creek Watershed project.

Dave Simon of Prairie Rock Farms: With the dry weather, Dave hit the ground running early on in the planting season, with his rye cover crop helping to mellow out the soil and creating weed-free fields. Inspired by a soil health conference this winter, Dave is doing some biomass samples to figure out what kind of nutrients are available to his cash crops from his rye. This testing is being done in collaboration with Country Visions Cooperative and Fond du Lac Land and Water Conservation Department. We look forward to sharing the results.

Chad Tasch of Tasch’s Custom, LLC: Chad has been busy both farming his own land, as well as running his custom farming business. Chad applied manure this spring to one of the GLRI fields, and then no-tilled soybeans into the field a few days later—a first for that particular field. We are curious to see how this field performs—a very explicit reason why we are doing this project! Chad’s corn planter was featured on the front page of a recent article about the GLRI project in the Fond du Lac Reporter (click here for the article)!

Now that we know what the farmers have been up to, here is an update about Zach’s work:

Zach Laughlin: Zach is the Watershed Outreach Coordinator. This means that when Dave and Chad are out in the field, Zach is usually close by with either his drone controller or gimbal in hand. Zach’s role specializes in sharing the work that Dave & Chad are doing both on Fond du Lac Land and Water’s social media spaces, but also with news organizations such as with “The Farm Babe,” Pam Jahnke, and the Fond du Lac Reporter. When Zach isn’t out with Dave or Chad, he is busy contributing to Fond du Lac County’s own soil health program.

In addition to the work taking place on the farms, Zach has also been working with Korin from Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance to begin the Soil Health in Progress initiative. These signs were just recently printed and will begin showing up at fields across the watershed to identify fields that have conservation practices in action. The website is under construction and will be available to showcase soon!

About the project:

The efforts of Dave, Chad, Zach, and Korin are part of a Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance GLRI funded project in Pipe Creek. The goals of the grant project are twofold:

1.) To get adoption on the land of the best management practices within a dairy system—no tillage, cover crops, and low disturbance manure; and
2.) To have farmers in the watershed to serve as pioneers to test out the practices and innovate in order to find solutions that are applicable to the local community.

Learn more about the project and the partnerships in place that are making this project possible: CLICK HERE