Rick Juchems

What are you doing to practice and promote soil and water quality?

Right now, I am working on cover crops for the fall, we have worked with 9-10 farmers in the area and I locate the seed, provide the service at the airport, line up all the flights, we load the plane, everything to promote cover crops in the fall. I’ve been planting cover crops for 16-17 years. I have a core group of about 5-6 guys who have been doing it now for about 10 years and we have some that are doing it some for the first time, so we do our best to promote conservation.

What is being done in your county to support soil and water quality?

I think there’s actually quite a few more acres going into cover crops, a lot of our county is no-till, we have filter strips, waterways, we have several bioreactors in the county and we do have some CREP wetlands in the county. We’ve worked hard at trying to get conservation out there, it’s to the point where the late adopters are slow to adopt.

What could be done with more public funding for soil and water quality?

I think there is enough funding at this point to cover the people that are actually doing the conservation. I would like to see the one cent sales tax get passed so that that funding could be used to further conservation within then state, we still have a long way to go on our water quality projects.