When Water Became the Work

After nearly five decades in public service, Chuck Farrey has seen the full range of county work. Town board nights. County board debates. Budget cycles that come and go. “You start out naive,” he said. “But you meet a lot of good people.”

For most of those years, water quality was just one concern among many. It mattered, but it was not the center of everything. “I was simply a younger supervisor at the time,” he said. “Everything was pretty much boilerplate.”

That began to change when he joined the Land Conservation Committee. He stayed there on purpose. He watched projects move from ideas to dirt. He worked with farmers and landowners who genuinely wanted to do the right thing but struggled to afford it. He also watched Fox-Wolf step in to support education, coordination, and regional grant work that the county could not take on by itself. Slowly, the issue sharpened. “As you grow on the committee,” he said, “you understand more in depth the significance of what we are doing.”

The moment that brought it into focus came on a small farm he had known for years. He knew the family had been living with an old, imperfect setup for a long time. “They were running milk center wash and waste water through a conduit system that went to the lake,” he said. Everyone knew it needed to change, but the cost kept the fix out of reach.

Those years of delay stayed with him. Chuck knew the barrier was not willingness, it was affordability. It is why he backed expanded conservation funding and why he pushed for the county to increase its cost share. When that shift finally happened, farmers across the county suddenly had access to support that matched the size of their challenges.

Once the project wrapped up, Chuck went out to that farm, the same spot he had stood many times before. This time the place looked different. Fresh earth. New piping. The old conduit sealed. Clean pathways guiding water where it needed to go. A problem that had sat on the landscape for years was finally gone, made possible by the support it had always needed. Standing there, he felt the weight of it. The lake would be better for it.

“That has all been corrected,” he said. He paused on those words. This was conservation at ground level. Quiet work that most people will never see, but still protects the water moving toward the lake.

“You realize the effect of the water and the quality of the water in this region is really the dominant issue you need to address,” he said. “The question is not letting it get any worse.”

Looking back, he calls this work the most satisfying part of his time on the county board. “I have been part of something really important here,” he said.

He thinks about it whenever he drives past the places that define his community. The quiet farm fields after harvest. The long stretch of shoreline where the lake changes color with the wind. The river bends that carry everything downstream. These are the places shaped by choices people make, one project at a time. And for Chuck, knowing water will move through this landscape a little cleaner is what makes the work worthwhile.

WATCH: Chuck Farrey’s Watershed Impact Award

In 2025, Chuck Farrey was honored with a Fox-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award for the decades of conservation work that helped strengthen water quality throughout the watershed.