Timm Johnson came at his understanding of the need to protect Wisconsin waters in his past life as a dairy farmer. He hooked up with other farmers in the early 1990s when amendments to the Clean Water Act began to spotlight the way farm practices affect water quality. Johnson knows that whatever comes onto the farm (for dairy farms, that’s animal feed and fertilizers) ultimately leaves it one way or another: as meat, milk, manure—or runoff into surface and groundwater.

Denny Caneff knows that many Wisconsin rivers are in trouble because he sees the evidence firsthand. “I’m a canoeist,” Caneff says, which he has been ever since he took a 1975 trip down the Mississippi. “Whatever’s going on, you can see the results, good or bad, when you’re in the water.”

Now Johnson, who heads the Wisconsin Agricultural Stewardship Initiative, and Caneff, who runs the River Alliance of Wisconsin, are both working to help farmers be good environmental stewards and to minimize the impact that Wisconsin’s ever-larger dairy operations can have on the state’s waters.

For the River Alliance, the agricultural focus is part of a broader agenda. Its recent report Caught in the Cross Currents documents a litany of threats that face the state’s rivers. They include runoff from farms, roads, and construction sites; pollution from industrial sites and sewage facilities; blockage by dams; overpumping of groundwater; erosion of shorelines by boaters; invasive species; airborne mercury that settles on the waters and poisons the fish. Most of the same dangers threaten the Great Lakes, into which many Wisconsin river systems drain. Just as troubling, the Alliance found, is that the state Department of Natural Resources, charged with protecting the rivers, must juggle many competing priorities with a declining budget.

Caneff believes that, if the DNR isn’t getting the job done, the best way to protect the rivers is to engage people who care about them. With a Joyce grant of $110,000, his group will organize and train local citizens to collect samples of river water for testing by state laboratories, and to gather data essential for classifying rivers under the Clean Water Act (which generally prohibits degrading river water quality—and thus requires analysis to determine the current status that must be maintained).

In addition, the River Alliance will press for reorganization of DNR to make protecting watersheds a priority, and for changes in the state’s agriculture policy to give farmers the incentive and the resources to adopt practices that minimize or eliminate the chance of farm runoff hitting the water.

Whatever the problems at DNR, Caneff believes protecting the state’s waters is a deep value for Wisconsinites. Against polluters who claim property rights, he cites the state’s constitutional principle that the waters of Wisconsin belong to the people, as well as the 2003 referendum enacted by the state’s voters asserting a “constitutional right to fish.” The River Alliance will draw on those values to engage citizens in protecting their local waters, both the rivers and the lakes into which they flow.

Johnson’s group, too, sees citizen engagement as the most promising way to address environmental impacts of Wisconsin’s dairy farming industry. Like the river group, the Agricultural Initiative has a broader agenda: to enable dairy farming to survive, and to remain economically and environmentally sustainable, in a part of the state where it faces increasing pressure from urban development and tourism.

The Initiative’s Dairy Gateway Project is organized in three northeast counties, including Door County, the beautiful land of orchards, dairy farms, and summer resorts that juts into Lake Michigan. The project, which is supported by a Joyce grant of $250,000, brings together farmers, researchers, environmental groups, and local residents to identify problems that arise where farms and residential development collide and to find mutually satisfactory ways to address them.

The project has its own volunteers out monitoring water quality, and it has built alliances with groups along the Lake Michigan shoreline and with local river protection groups. It also enlists the help of University of Wisconsin researchers to find the best ways to manage farm inputs and outputs. One important priority is identifying ways to keep manure out of cracked bedrock (karst) that’s common in the region; from there, chemicals and pathogens in manure can seep into groundwater and wellwater.

More broadly, the project works to help farmers not just to meet regulations but to find their own best ways to manage the environmental impacts of their operations, and to profit as a result.

Wisconsin dairy farming—like farming everywhere—is increasingly consolidating into larger and larger operations. Driving the change are factors over which farmers have little control (Johnson notes, for example, that at an average cost of $15,000 a year, it takes 30 cows just to buy health insurance for a farm family). “People are moving from owner-operators to owner-managers, from the romantic two-story red barn to much larger operations. They’re increasingly looking at the business side of things.” Wise environmental practices, supported with the right incentives and properly implemented and marketed, can build good relationships with local residents and pay off economically as well, Johnson argues.

“In a global economy, Wisconsin farmers won’t be the cheapest, so we need to find some way to differentiate our product to consumers. If you want to know where your food came from, if you want to know that this product came from a green producer, if you want to know that your food dollar goes to support this operation, this family—we can offer that.” Ultimately, Johnson is convinced, “dairy farmers can meet the economic, regulatory, and social challenges in a way that provides economic stability for producers and protects surface and groundwater.”

Both Johnson and Caneff agree that critical changes are needed in the nation’s farm policy to support environmentally sustainable dairy farming. The huge commodity subsidies enacted under the 2002 farm bill are increasingly recognized as incompatible with everything from trade policy to budget constraints to simple equity. Much better, Caneff, Johnson, and others argue, to shift subsidies from commodity production to conservation practices. With farm policy up for review next year toward a renewal of the legislation in 2007, the Joyce Foundation is awarding grants totaling $2,710,000 to seven groups that will develop and advocate farm policies that support conservation.

Timm Johnson, Wisconsin Agricultural Stewardship Initiative, 608.224.4653

Denny Caneff, River Alliance of Wisconsin, 608.257.2424