Management of Drainage Waters: New Practice Standards.

Agricultural drainage waters are one of the most important vectors moving nutrients from the field where they are essential to production to our waters where they become an environmental liability. Inadequate attention to this vector has been given in the past to address water quality and other environmental issues. Managing drainage waters is also one of the most cost effective strategies to reduce nutrient loss (nitrogen in particular.)

To overcome this shortfall the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has worked with a series of agricultural, conservation and industry partners to develop a new set of practice standards to place an emphasis on managing drainage waters in locations where those practices are cost effective.

This set of practices will be integrated into a systems approach to nutrient management being adopted by NRCS. The specifics of how the program will operate, incentives to landowners, targets for implementation and evaluation criteria will be presented in this forum.