17^th Annual Enviro-Fest

The 17^th Annual Enviro-Fest was held at the Dale and Marie Katterhagen Farm outside of Browerville on September 22.  Enviro Fest is an outdoor, hands-on educational day for all 6^th grade students in Todd County.  188 students from 7 schools participated in the day.  Topics covered included:  Bubbleology, Wetlands, Electricity, Forestry, Black Bears, Invasive Species, Bee Keeping, Minnesota State Symbols, Wildlife Habitat, Birds and Soils.  Students also participated in activities including:  Watershed Jeopardy, What Water Would You Drink? and a Farm Tour.  The Science Museum of Minnesota also put on a presentation about Water.

U of M offers tips to prevent septic systems from freezing

12/22/11 9:23 PM

Freezing problems with septic systems may be more common this year because a lack of snow cover across Minnesota exposes existing system inadequacies as temperatures dip lower.

Snow serves as an insulating blanket over septic tanks and soil treatment areas. According to Extension staff at the University of Minnesota Onsite Sewage Treatment program, lack of snow allows frost to go deeper into the ground, potentially freezing system components. The good news is that frost depths are still fairly shallow statewide.

The most important concern is cold air entry into the system. Open, broken and uncapped risers or inspection pipes allow cold air into the system and can cause the system to freeze. Other causes of a frozen septic system include outdated or overloaded systems, the absence of vegetative cover over the system, slow leaking plumbing fixtures, compacted soils, and irregular water use.

Follow these tips if you are concerned about your system freezing:

• Place an 8- to 12-inch layer of mulch over the pipes, tank and soil treatment area to provide extra insulation.

• Make sure all access points to your system are covered. Sealing them and adding insulation is a good practice.

• Use water, the warmer the better during cold snaps. Run the dishwasher. Take a hot bath. Spread your warm laundry schedule to one load a day instead of doing it all once a week. Do not leave water running; this will hydraulically overload your system.

• Fix any leaky plumbing fixtures or appliances in your home. This will help prevent freezing problems and increase the longevity of your septic system.

If you experience a frozen septic system, contact a Minnesota licensed septic system professional immediately to identify the cause of freezing and provide relief. Many maintainers and installers operate steamers and high-pressure jetters to thaw system piping. Other methods used to help fix a freezing problem include adding heat tape and/or tank heaters.

Cameras can be sent down the pipes to determine where the freezing is occurring and if repairs are needed. If the soil treatment system is full of ice, or there is evidence of leaking, there is no need to thaw the lines leading to the treatment area, as it cannot accept liquid until the area is thawed in spring. Unless the cause of freezing is corrected, the system is likely to refreeze next winter, so it is essential to identify and correct the problem.

In the long term, having a properly designed, installed, maintained and operated system is your best insurance against freezing issues. Do not put off repairing your system if you know of problems. The current lack of snow cover may expose these problems and create costly and difficult circumstances.

To find a licensed septic system professional, visit the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency website at http://bit.ly/tA8RtQ.

Find more information about winter septic systems problems at www.septic.umn.edu/factsheets/freezingproblems Other septic system information is available at www.septic.umn.edu.

Economist tries to place a dollar value on nature

1/9/12 9:41 AM

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Scientists in Minnesota are trying to do something that may be impossible: put a dollar value on nature.

Nature performs many important functions that benefit humans — not just offering beauty but cleaning water, taming floods and pollinating crops. Some researchers think it's time to put a dollar value on those natural processes.

University of Minnesota economic researcher Steve Polasky is building on ideas first presented in the field of applied economics back in the 1960s. The idea is kind of a merger of ecology and economics to identify services that nature provides, and assign a monetary value to those services.

Polasky's approach, which he calls "full-cost accounting," involves tracking all the consequences of a particular activity, not just the intended results.

The way he looks at it, nature has assets — he calls it "natural capital" — like minerals and timber. But Polasky said it's time to focus on something less obvious: the processes inherent in nature that provide benefits for people.

"Say the way ecosystems filter nutrients out of water to provide clean water downstream, or to provide habitat for species that we value, either because we fish or hunt them or because we enjoy seeing them or knowing they exist," Polasky said.

First, Polasky identifies how we use nature, then he assigns a dollar value to those services. For example, if wetlands were not filtering water and we had to build more sophisticated water treatment plants, that would cost money. Because we've turned so many wetlands into farm fields, we try to control floods with huge levees — and that costs money.

This kind of thinking can have practical uses. Polasky calculated that a 10 percent increase in tree cover increases the sale price of an average home by nearly $1,400, or a half-percent of the total value.

One of his studies concluded that when the DNR buys land for conservation, it increases the ecosystem services provided by the land by between $1.70 and $4.40 per $1 invested.

Polasky is a big fan of incentives: he said they can discourage behavior that's harmful to nature, and encourage behavior that helps.

He points to the federal Conservation Reserve Program, an incentive program that pays farmers to convert fragile land from row crops to grasses. That not only improves water quality downstream and provides habitat, but it may even clean the air and provide carbon storage.

Polasky and some colleagues are trying to identify specific consequences of specific actions that farmers are taking in the Minnesota River Valley.

"The science is improving here, but if you can actually demonstrate that causal link, that doing an action here actually leads to these kinds of benefits, the next logical step is could we actually figure out payments that the people who provide these ecosystem services actually get paid for doing so," Polasky said.

Or, conversely, could we design better incentives to prevent harms to ecosystems?

Polasky is just beginning a study of the costs and benefits of proposed copper-nickel mining in northeastern Minnesota — a highly controversial issue, given the claims and counter-claims of advocates and opponents.

While Polasky tries to meld nature and economics, John Pastor approaches economics as a student of nature. And that makes him wary of Polasky's market-based techniques.

"Nature is never going to win — never — if you say, 'what is the dollar value of nature versus payroll?'" said Pastor, who researches and teaches ecosystems ecology at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

He said we need to flip our thinking, and put nature first. It's impossible to live without nature, so we should re-design our economic systems to protect it.

Pastor has been studying wild rice for several years, including potential impacts pollution from mines may have on Minnesota's traditional wild rice beds. It's one of the hot-button issues related to proposed copper-nickel mining.

He said using his approach, we could decide to have both — the minerals and the environment — as long as we're willing to pay a higher price for copper.

"If we're not willing to pay the price, then we're going to keep chipping away and chipping away and chipping away at nature, and finally sometime in the next lifetime we're going to wake up and say, 'oh shoot, it's all gone; now what are we going to do?'" Pastor said.

According to Polasky's approach, we could avoid that problem if we start now assigning a value to Minnesota's natural resources.

Information from: Minnesota Public Radio News, http://www.mpr.org

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.