Palouse Conservation District plans for next five years

Palouse Conservation District held its annual meeting Jan. 30 at the Gladish Community Center in Pullman.

The purpose of the annual meeting is to recap the 2019 year and to gain feedback on how to improve for 2020. Preregistration came from 115 people with 103 in attendance, including staff. Of all the events throughout the year, this is the conservation district's largest public event.

Unlike previous annual meetings, a different format was in place this year to allow more people to get engaged with the programs that the Conservation District offers.

"This is just time to get to know the staff and our programs," said Jodi Prout, education and outreach coordinator for the district.

"The people we are bringing in are either landowners, producers, general public and people who are interested in natural resource conservation. What's unique here in our district we have Pullman, which is a huge urban center, which brings in a lot of varied folks."

There are currently four conservation districts in Whitman County. The Palouse Conservation District covers the southeastern part of the county, dipping down to Uniontown and up to Garfield.

Prout said the whole point of this annual meeting is to help create the conservation district's long term vision for the next five years. Every conservation district, by law, has to have a long-range plan in place.

To form the new five-year vision, members of the staff, the board and the community will supply their ideas of what they feel the values and natural resource priorities are for the Palouse Conservation District.

"A lot of the major natural resource priority areas that have been identified by the staff are water quality, soil health and erosion control, education outreach and habitat restoration," Prout said. "Those are the four areas the staff narrowed down on and we are curious to see what the community has to say about that."

Jessica Self, grants and development manager, presented the staff's ideas at the meeting. She said as staff and supervisors, they are wanting to build this new plan from the ground up and that begins with community input.

From previous community surveys, the top four priority areas are soil health with 33 percent, water quality at 32 percent, replenishing the landscape at 15 percent and education and outreach at 15 percent. The remaining five percent are the remaining eight conservation resource concerns combined.

"It is still in the editing stage, but our staff has defined some goals for the next five year vision," Self said. "As a staff, we said by February 2024 Palouse Conservation District will establish five years of water quality data from all tributaries that we are currently monitoring."

Self added additional goals, for example, for soil health by 2025, 50,000 additional acres of conservation tillage will be implemented throughout the district. This year marks 80 years of the Palouse Conservation District. Formed in 1940, it was the first conservation district in Washington.

Prout mentioned that with conservation projects running since the organization was created, there has been a lot of changes. She said as they continue on they will keep trying to get more support from the public and get more conservation on the ground.

"Conservation districts, especially ones out in more rural areas, like we are, we are completely grant-funded," Self said. She added that there are currently 35 live grants and within those grants there is more than 100 projects.

"What's cool about the district being grant-funded, is we can really choose the way we want the vision to go, the district to go," Prout said. "If we can gather this input, from tonight, this input then feeds into applying for grants that are specific to these natural resource areas. If we get the funding to do it we can provide more conservation on the ground."

In 2019, the Palouse Conservation District was awarded USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service partner of the year in Washington.

"What we were able to accomplish, with the help of everyone, is we had 48 cost-share agreements signed by landowners, $1.68 million came out of those cost-shares and with that money we were able to put 12,805 acres of conservation practices on the ground and implemented," said Anthony Hatcher, conservation coordinator. "Of those 12,805 acres, 148 acres were riparian practices."

Assistance from the conservation district can range from free technical information and consultations to partnering with landowners on larger conservation projects, such as reduced till agriculture and livestock management.

Hatcher mentioned that the Palouse Conservation District also was one of 18 in the nation to get a renewal with the Palouse River Watershed Regional Conservation partnership program. There are 90 of these partnership programs nationwide.

"The Palouse River Watershed Regional Conservation partnership program is one of the biggest and exciting things we got going on," Hatcher said. "This is a partnership between 18 agencies in the area in the Palouse watershed."

In regards to education and outreach within the conservation district, in 2019 there were 53 events, 631 volunteers, those volunteers put in 1,912 hours of work and planted 17,866 plants and approximately 1,000 students were educated in K-12 programs in schools in between Whitman and Asotin counties.

"None of this work could be done without voluntary landowners and local citizens stepping up to volunteer to put conservation on the ground," said Jennifer Boie, Palouse Conservation District director. "Having folks showing up to an event like this really gives us the inspiration and drive for the direction we are going to go with district program services."