Review of the New York City Watershed Protection Program (2020) / Chapter Skim
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5 Watershed Agricultural Program
5 Watershed Agricultural Program
Pages 135-164
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From page 135... ...
and Farm Service Agency, NYC DEP, and watershed producers. WAC has two primary missions: to protect water quality (with a focus on nutrients, microbial pathogens, sediment, and pesticides)
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From page 136... ...
. NYC DEP is the primary source of BMP funding, with the only other source being the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP)
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The landowner/farmer signs the Participation Funding Agreement and Whole Farm Plan agreement to implement their plan, following the BMP prioritization process and subject to WAP funding availability. The final Whole Farm Plan is presented to the WAC Agricultural Program Committee for approval.
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From page 138... ...
Field distance to Average of the distance to a watercourse for all fields on 50 ft 500 ft 10 watercourse farm, from NMP Farmstead proximity Distance of primary livestock housing location to a 300 ft 1,000 ft 20 to watercourse watercourse,b from planner a Nutrient management plans document all crop nutrient needs, soil test results, and application of all nutrients (including manure) to the fields in an attempt to balance soil nutrient inputs with crop requirements.
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From page 139... ...
Phosphorus Application Phosphorus application rates to a field should match rates recommended for a given crop provided by the Cornell Cooperative Extension as closely as possible. Phosphorus-based manure application rates are determined as a function of soil test recommendations or estimated phosphorus removal in harvested crop biomass based on guidance from the NRCS General Manual (NRCS, 2012, Title 190, Ecological Sciences, Part 402, Nutrient Management)
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PROGRAM EFFECTIVENESS Of critical importance to the Watershed Protection Program is the extent to which its individual programs address the overarching goals of the MOA to "maintain and enhance the quality of the New York City drinking water supply system and the economic vitality and social character of the Watershed communities." The WAP is typical of most of the Watershed Protection Programs in using a variety of metrics and methods to understand the effectiveness of the program, and yet it employs no direct measurements of water quality or community vitality. Thus, WAC does not directly conduct water quality monitoring at farms, although they have funded special studies that do.
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From page 141... ...
Annual status reviews track changes in animal units and acreage, newly identified pollutant issues, and BMP O&M issues, as well as any concerns the landowner may have with their Whole Farm Plan, but does not directly track water quality benefits. Number of Nutrient Management Plans Enrolled Another program metric is to maintain Nutrient Management Plans on 90 percent of all participating large farms.
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From page 142... ...
During 2011-2015, WAC conducted more than 140 farmer education programs that were attended by over 3,400 participants, of which 44 percent were watershed farmers, with the remainder being watershed residents or interested parties. Other Metrics: Committee's Analysis of Soil Phosphorus Data and Watershed Study Results To determine if Nutrient Management Plans are resulting in soil phosphorus reductions, the Committee conducted a statistical analysis of the trends in soil phosphorus1 levels over the period 2010 through 2018.
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From page 143... ...
from the Cannonsville Reservoir watershed. The dashed horizontal line is the lower limit of "very high" phosphorus values (39 lbs/ac)
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The characteristics of the fields sampled may have varied by year and this confounds the ability to see a temporal trend with these data (but see analysis in FIGURE 5-4 Topographic index map of the Cannonsville Reservoir watershed and associated soil wetness index classes representing the propensity of the landscape to saturate and generate surface runoff. Figure in color at https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25851/.
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The dashed horizontal line is the lower limit of "very high" phosphorus values (39 lbs/ac) and the dotted horizontal line is the lower limit of the "high" category of phosphorus values (9 lbs/ac)
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This combination of factors (high soil phosphorus on high soil wetness index classes) should drive prioritization for expenditures on BMPs for nutrient management.
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They evaluated changes in phosphorus loading attributable to implementation of BMPs that included manure management, rotational grazing, stream livestock exclusion, precision feeding, and improved barnyard infrastructure. Stream water monitoring provided data to calculate phosphorus loads from the 160-ha farm watershed for all runoff events during a two-year pretreatment period and a four-year post-treatment period.
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for farm vs. non-farm watersheds.
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Given that Precision Feed Management is an important BMP for the control of phosphorus in farming areas, WAC and NYC DEP would benefit from attempting to evaluate those data along with the original data used in the Bishop et al.
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The Committee was impressed with the very effective paired watershed, pre- and post-implementation design of this study and the use of analysis of covariance to make the study powerful enough to discern the treatment effect in the light of strong interannual variability. The NYC DEP should consider funding more studies of this general type to evaluate the effectiveness of any of their major pollution-reduction strategies.
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From page 151... ...
If such operations intend to support water quality goals, they must ensure that the products are used in accordance with a Nutrient Management Plan or processed and sold as commercial fertilizer where nutrients are needed. There are four heat-based processes for using manure to produce energy: combustion, gasification, pyrolysis, and torrefaction, each of which tends to be more appropriate for manure with a low moisture content,
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From page 152... ...
A public-private partnership to collect and treat animal wastes should be created and would bring substantial benefits to the NYC water supply and reduce the likelihood that a costly filtration system would be required in the future. The use of NYC DEP funds to support the collection and treatment of animal wastes (as is already the case with human wastes)
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A Role for Watershed Modeling Within the existing NYC DEP watershed modeling framework, two tools are utilized to predict water quality and how it is expected to change under various land management and BMP activities: VSLF (also referred to as GWLF-VSA, or GWLF, Schneiderman et al., 2007) and SWAT-HS (Hoang et al., 2017, 2019)
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Ultimately, both models are constrained by issues of scale. Both employ some derivative of the HRU watershed discretization scheme, where an HRU is an overlay of unique soil type, terrain class (soil wetness index class)
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BMP Performance Besides source pollutant reductions, BMP implementation stands at the center of NYC DEP's efforts to meet SWTR requirements. The Committee's examination in Chapter 4 of the recent history of reservoir phosphorus concentrations in Cannonsville shows that there is little progress being made in reducing these
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BMPs also vary widely in the complexity of the various factors involved in pollutant removal. WAC working with NYC DEP could identify some basic estimates on the probability distribution of BMP performance effectiveness (e.g., first and third quartiles or one standard deviation from the mean estimate, and an assessment of the shape of the distribution or skewness)
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From page 157... ...
First, the loads from these areas are not adequately reflected in the NYC DEP modeling approach and conventional BMPs are unlikely to overcome the mass balance issue, as very few are designed to bring the mass balance back into alignment. Second, nutrient loads from manure are not adequately reflected in analyses completed by WAP (except for the Precision Feed Management program)
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From page 158... ...
Increasing the collaboration between WAC and NYC DEP will result in more efficient allocation of resources, improved communication, and ultimately improved water quality. Several recommendations are made to improve the WAP suite of programs, some of which are relatively straightforward and easily implemented, and some of which will require more strategic and sustained effort and a reallocation of current resources or increased funding (as discussed further in Chapter 14)
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The Watershed Agricultural Council (WAC) and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYC DEP)
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Report to the Watershed Agricultural Program. Collick, A
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Presentation at Meeting 2 of the NASEM Committee to Re view the NYC DEP Watershed Protection Program. Rhinebeck, NY.
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WAP (Watershed Agricultural Program)
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Effects of extreme climatic events on estuarine water quality and ecology. Marine Pollution Bulletin 69(1–2)
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