By Rep. Paul Anderson
A joint hearing before a standing-room audience was held last week at the State Capitol. The Ag. Policy and Environment and Natural Resources Committees heard four hours of testimony from state agencies and others concerned about Minnesota’s buffer law, which was enacted two years ago.
I’m concerned about several aspects of the legislation, which mandates buffer strips of perennial vegetation along public waters and public ditches.
First is the timeline of when these buffers are supposed to be in place. Public waters need to be buffered by November of this year and public ditches by November of next year. Because the scope of “alternative practices” that will be allowed in place of buffers has not been determined yet, and with the discovery in seed mixes of a nasty invasive weed in southern Minnesota known as Palmer amaranth, I think we need to push back the enforcement dates of implementing buffers by at least one year. Counties and local watersheds are also concerned as no funding has been appropriated yet that would allow them to take on the enforcement duties of the law.
The Board of Water and Soil Resources, one of the state agencies working to implement buffers, testified that the alternative practices should be made public sometime in March. As of now, the only such practice allowed in place of buffers is enrollment in a program called Ag. Water Quality Certification. This program looks at the entire farming operation and scores the various practices employed. If the score is high enough, the farm becomes certified and receives a 10-year certification of compliance with state law.
Farmers, however, need other approaches to improving water quality, such as grassed waterways, ditches with back slopes that fall away from the ditch, along with various conservation tillage practices and crop rotations. Spring is not that far away – we hope – and farmers need time to plan for these various practices.
The DNR was given the task of mapping all public waters and ditches that require buffers. Since releasing their first map last July, 4,000 change requests have been received from local units of government and DNR staff. There have been over 2,500 map updates, most of which have been very small, according to DNR testimony. To date, they have removed 120 water features from the buffer map and have added 50.
Another of the sticking points of the current legislation is one requiring 50 foot buffers along all public waters. About 80 landowners have requested removal from the public waters inventory because a public watercourse on their property is also a private ditch. If it’s a ditch, no buffer is required, but if it’s public water, the wider buffer is mandated. Along the entire length of a quarter section of land, for example, just over six acres that would be taken out of production with 50-foot buffers.
This is where the biggest problem lies. Since that inventory was done in the 1970s and early ‘80s, there have been many changes to the landscape. I visited with a farmer who was surprised that a public water designation showed up on the map of his farm. The area in question was a low “draw” through the field, but it had been tiled years ago by his father. There was no grass, or any other evidence of a ditch, just an area through the field a few feet lower in elevation.
In other, similar, cases, what shows on the map as public water, is being totally farmed. The ditch banks may have been plowed shut and there is little or no evidence of a ditch, let alone a public watercourse. These issues need to be resolved so farmers can plan how to comply with the law.
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