Organizations explore topics that could impact conservation and farming in the future
COSHOCTON − Agriculture is still the leading industry in Coshocton County and organizations geared toward helping farmers are looking to how to best use resources.
The Coshocton Soil and Water Conservation District, United States Department of Agriculture and the Ohio Farm Bureau are just three that work together to address local conservation and agriculture issues. Focus areas include technical assistance, conservation education, financial assistance and urban assistance.
When it comes to land use in Coshocton County, 152,000 acres, or 42%, is woodland, 101,500 acres, or 28%, is cropland and 65,000 acres, or 18%, is pastureland.
Resource concerns include soil erosion, water quality and quantity, air quality, plant health, animal habitat and management, human element and energy.
A workgroup meeting was recently held to review past accomplishments and to come up with other topics to look at in the future. Some ideas included increasing solar arrays in the area, how the Intel plant being built in Licking County might affect farmers and available farm land and how H2Ohio funding can have an impact on local projects.
"We do this in partnership, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because we're all having the same conversations," said Kayla Jones of the Ohio Farm Bureau. "We pride ourselves on being a grassroots organization and many of our policies started with conversations just like this, talking to the folks who are living and breathing it everyday."
Financial assistance
Since the last farm bill was passed in 2018, with funding distributed from 2019 to 2024, more than $2 million has come into Coshocton County, according to the USDA. The top funding divisions has been $495,150 to waste storage facilities, $375,053 for brush management and $355,704 for roofs and covers.
Since 1997, about $5.8 million has come into Coshocton County from the National Resources Conservation Service, impacting 43,297 acres of local farmland. About 58% of funding applications have been fulfilled, or 450 of 771. District Conservationist Josh Britton said that's a pretty solid number.
"We're going to have things come down from our national and state offices that give us directions and give us dollars, but we have some flexibility in how we advertise that, how we push a program or how we choose to outreach on a program in our community," Britton said.
Conservation education
In order to keep farming and agriculture vibrant, local officials and stakeholders know that education of the general public, particularly youth, is key.
Programming in the past year has included education in classrooms, an ag awareness day for fourth-graders, First Farm Friday in August, planting of a tree for Arbor Day with students at Coshocton Elementary School and an Earth Day event at Wills Creek with elementary students across the county.
For adults there have been various tours and pasture walks with the Fall Foliage and Farm Tour being popular for more than 50 years.
"There are still a handful of counties that still do it across the state. We still try to keep it fairly ag base. We want to see the foliage and we want to see the farms," Coshocton SWCD Administrator Ryan Medley said about the annual tour.
Urban assistance
Agriculture organizations aren't just concerned with farmland, urban assistance is doing what they can for cities and villages. A big division there is storm water management activities, such as helping to formulate plans, mapping storm drains and hosting rain barrel workshops.
While the focus is often on the City of Coshocton, Medley said they're seeing more housing crop up out in the county. Once you get five or six houses together on the same road, they start to have some of the same issues any municipality would have where it relates to soil erosion and storm water.
"Sometimes, maybe, we focus too much on the City of Coshocton, but we also have to think of those urbanized areas that are starting to become grouped out in the rural landscape," Medley said.