Courses help ranchers, farmers mitigate water-quality impacts

Courses help ranchers, farmers mitigate water-quality impacts coming,” says Melvin George, UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE) rangeland management specialist. In 1994, the UCCE Rangeland Watershed Program began working with ranchers and state agencies to develop the Ranch Water Quality Management Planning Shortcourse, which helps ranchers develop voluntary plans for managing water quality on their land. “The beauty of it is that landowners can make their own decisions so they don’t have a regulatory agency come and tell them what to do,” says George, who helped develop the short course. Landowners in watersheds with rivers listed as impaired by the EPA must help meet total maximum daily load (TMDL) regulations, which stipulate how much pollution bodies of water can receive and still meet water-quality standards. The ranch water-quality short course entails about 10 to 15 hours of classroom and field instruction, including clean water laws; monitoring pollution sources; and management of nonpoint source pollution, such as sediment from cattle grazing and trampling, heat from decreased riparian vegetation, and nutrients and pathogens from manure. The short course culminates in developing individualized ranch water-quality management plans that identify and prioritize water-quality problems and outline how to address them. The short course has had more than 60 sessions attended by more than 800 ranchers from 31 counties, and by mid-2004 had resulted in plans covering 1.3 million acres of rangeland. A 2002 survey of participants showed that 60% had completed a plan in class and 67% had implemented at least one and Agriculture, local mosquito and vector control districts, and other agencies on a statewide surveillance program for WNV. The UCD/CVB biocontainment laboratory tests tissues from all reported dead birds, blood from sentinel chickens (in 232 flocks of 10 each), and pools of 50 mosquitoes each gathered from nearly 3,000 traps around the state (see figure, page 133). The risk of serious illness from WNV in humans is low, with the elderly, the young and those with compromised immune systems at greatest risk. While most infected individuals will not experience any illness or only mild symptoms, some of those infected will develop serious neurological symptoms such as encephalitis or meningitis. In 2003,