Appomattox County farm does its part to keep Bay clean

Five years ago, cloudy water flowed in a tiny Appomattox County stream. A brown fuzz of algae and silt lined the bottom.

Nutrient pollution
One of the most significant pollution issues affecting area waterways and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay is an infusion of excess nutrients running off the land.

When flowing in the proper balance, nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen sustain ecosystems by helping the right mix of algae to grow in healthy amounts.

Excess nutrients, however, fuel explosive algal blooms that cause a myriad of problems, including clouding the water, displacing healthy microorganisms and even causing dead zones as algal blooms decompose and suck the oxygen out of the water, killing fish and other animals.

The overabundance of those nutrients comes from a variety of sources, including urban storm- water runoff, wastewater treatment plants and, most significantly, agricultural runoff containing fertilizer and manures.

Urban runoff contributes about 15 to 20 percent of excess nutrients, but fixing that could cost billions of dollars. Agricultural runoff contributes up to 70 percent of the problem. Solutions are simpler, but have to be monitored and maintained frequently.

—Sarah Watson

The stream, which drains a small section of a 900-acre farm, looked like most rural creeks in Central Virginia that bear scars from agricultural and livestock runoff.

Today, about 110 acres of that farm have been converted from nutrient-polluting cattle land to water-cleansing forest and hay field. Now the creek flows clear, with bottom rocks clean, as it meets a larger, still murky stream on its way to the James River.

That clear water is the result of years of transformation on John and Phillip Harrison’s land. The effort has placed the farm at the forefront of statewide legislation to improve water quality.

The land is the first in Virginia to help clean our streams, creeks and rivers through a pioneering combination of private business enterprise and two generations of land stewardship.

The final piece fell into place last month when the General Assembly signed off on a first-of-its-kind setup to, in effect, allow developers to fund the farm’s water-cleansing efforts. Starting July 1, those payments can be used to help meet storm-water requirements for projects near and far.

The program, which gained support from environmentalists and developers alike, provides a new prescription to help our ailing waterways and, by extension, the Chesapeake Bay.

* * *

Growing water quality woes in the Chesapeake Bay have long frustrated both environmentalists and government regulators.

The combination of urban sprawl, storm-water runoff and agricultural pollution is exacerbated by the size of the bay’s watershed, which stretches from Central New York through Virginia.

“It seems like every two steps forward, we are knocked back three,” said Preston Bryant, Virginia’s Secretary of Natural Resources and a former delegate from Lynchburg. “…It’s precisely why innovative initiatives like (the Appomattox farm) are so important.”

The Harrisons worked with a Richmond-based company called Earth Source Solutions and its principal, Brent Fults, to develop the concept called a nutrient offset bank.

Its premise has three main parts. First is the change in land use from cattle farm to forest or hayfield, which greatly reduces the amount of nutrients running into nearby steams. Second is a certification from the Department of Environmental Quality on the size of that nutrient reduction. And third is a developer, who can purchase what are known as credits based on the nutrient reduction to help its project meet storm-water standards.

The idea of offsets isn’t to focus on lowering the nutrient amounts in a tiny tributary, Fults said, but to reduce the overall load flowing into the James River and, ultimately, the Chesapeake Bay.

That’s where the Harrison farm came into play.

* * *

John Harrison and his brother Phillip are in their 60s. Their children have moved away, and only John still farms. The brothers wanted to preserve their land for the family, who want the farm, but don’t know how to make money to keep it.

Calculating credits
Under nutrient offset regulations, how many credits created on a particular site is based on a complex formula that takes into account, among many things, what types of improvements were done and where the site is located in proximity to rivers and the Chesapeake Bay.

It also looks at how particular nutrients move through a river ecosystem on the way to the bay, said Allan Brockenbrough, the Department of Environmental Quality’s water quality trading coordinator.

For example, excess nutrients from a cornfield that wash into an Albemarle County tributary would be better absorbed in a river ecosystem than those that are dumped from a Surry County cattle farm that abuts the James River, because that’s much closer to the bay.

Appomattox’s Wildwood Farm is the state’s only certified nutrient bank and Brockenbrough said he has not heard of any others currently in the works.

In its essence, the nutrient banking program is a business deal between a company, a farmer and the state. How much money changes hands ultimately depends on the market need for credits that are in the right location.

There’s no way to tell exactly how much a nutrient credit will cost. That’s because none have been sold.

—Sarah Watson

The brothers were raised in a farming environment that stressed land stewardship. Their father worked for what later became the Robert E. Lee Soil and Water Conservation District, covering Appomattox, Campbell and Amherst counties.

“I remember as kids, he would tell us, ‘we’re stewards of the land, we didn’t own this land.’ He said, ‘I want to leave this land in better shape than I found it,’” John Harrison said.

“Of course that was in the days when farmers would plow from hedgerow to hedgerow and you’d get massive runoffs (of sediment). They would do strip cropping. That was one of the things he really pushed among farmers in Appomattox County and Campbell County where he worked.”

That conservation mindset further blossomed after a chance meeting with Fults in a Farmville log yard 10 years ago.

Fults, a landscape architect, long had wanted to develop private enterprise solutions to fix larger environmental problems.

He found a ready partner with John Harrison. By 2005, they had established the state’s first stream bank on Harrison’s Wildwood Farm, which cleaned up streams for credits that then are sold to developers. The nutrient offset bank came next. It’s a more complicated concept with greater potential to meet the family’s goal of generating money to keep the farm.

It would provide a strong revenue stream while credits were sold and then the pine forest could be harvested every few decades and replanted, providing income from logging.

“My brother and I were thinking ahead to the next generation,” Harrison said. “All of our kids are employed elsewhere, but yet they like to come back here. They like the place, but yet on 900 acres the real estate taxes are significant. Would they want to take money out of their pockets and pay real estate taxes and raise their families?”

* * *

Of course the plan only works if it finds a ready market among developers who want to pur-chase the credits generated by the farm.

Fults is confident on that point.

Most construction projects must have storm-water permits from the state that calculate how many nutrients will come off the property. The permits require developers to put in features to reduce that pollution.

That’s usually done through building storm-water ponds or wetlands on site to create a natural filter. But as standards tighten — as they are expected to do in the next two years, said Jack Frye with the Department of Conservation and Recreation — removing the last small amount of nutrients becomes more difficult and expensive.

Allowing developers to use offsets, Bryant said, gives them more flexibility in meeting require-ments through a market-based approach.

“Ultimately, that helps the Chesapeake Bay, it helps the environment and it allows the person to continue with the development,” said Del. Watkins Abbitt, I-Appomattox, who sponsored the legis-lation approved last month. “I hope it gives the opportunity to some of the farmers in the rural areas to improve their land and sell their credits.”

The bill allows credits to be sold, but with significant restrictions. Local governments must ap-prove offset use on a case-by-case basis and only after developers have taken every reasonable step can it be considered, said Frye, director of DCR’s soil and conservation division.

Additionally, using offsets can’t harm local water quality, he added, and can only be purchased in the same watershed. Credits from the Harrison farm, for example, can only be sold to developers in the James River watershed.

Allowing flexibility in meeting requirements is how the James River Association has felt water quality standards should be met, said executive director Bill Street.

“That’s been our approach. We would like to see strong performance standards, but provide flexibility to meet those standards and base those standards on what the need of the river is,” Street said.

With laws in place, Fults said his company now is working with a handful of landowners in dif-ferent watersheds. He hopes to certify up to 10,000 acres in the next five years as nutrient banks.

But it all started in Appomattox County, on Harrison’s Wildwood Farm.

* * * *

When Fults first visited, he found creeks with cattle walking through them, a problem many farmers overlook.

“All of that has been instilled in me over the years, that we’re stewards of the land and not es-sentially owners of the land,” Harrison said. “One of the last concepts — we didn’t really think about it, but Brent did once he drove up on the farm — was cattle in the streams.”

As cattle walk in waterways, not only do their steps erode the banks and stream bottoms, but they drop large quantities of nutrients and bacteria directly in the water.

Compared to other farms, Fults said, Wildwood Farm was in pretty good shape. Cropland and hayfields had been planted in ways that reduced erosion and Harrison kept fewer cattle so not to overgraze. Still, he said, the best way to improve the land and generate offset credits was to plant trees.

So that’s what they did — planting more than 75,000 hardwood trees for the 261-acre stream bank and more than 54,000 pine trees on 91 acres for the nutrient bank. They also converted 19 acres from cropland to hayfields.

The state certification requires the company to monitor how the trees grow and replant if needed. As part of the transformation, Fults said, the family wanted to preserve open land views that had been on the farm for more than 100 years.

Pines planted two years ago now are chest high. Those planted last year are knee high. The hardwoods — including oaks, sycamores and poplars — take much longer to grow and still are seedlings. In a few decades, much of Harrison’s land will be thick with forest.

On an early March day, as Harrison and Scott Reed, an environmental specialist with Fults’ company, stood at the bottom of a hill watching workers plant several thousand seedlings, Reed reflected on the changes seen in the land since work began in 2005.

“It’s been amazing to me to watch it come back in just a couple years’ time, how the scars from the cattle paths and the stream banks have healed up. You got stuff growing everywhere, where before you did have some bare patches,” Reed said.

“It’s amazing how well nature will heal itself if given a chance.”