There isn’t any getting around having an area or two on the farm that is often used heavily or overused by livestock. The reason why this happens is one of both convenience and necessity. After all, it is convenient to feed livestock in a manner that is efficient of a farmer’s time and effort, and it is necessary to feed livestock. As a convenience of circumstance heavy use areas are usually in those locations that are most easily accessible to farmers and where livestock most often frequent for food and water. Heavy use areas may most easily be recognized by their characteristic lack of vegetative cover and presence of exposed bare soil.
It is this lack of vegetative cover that can often lead to problems associated with farm production and the environment when wet weather conditions occur and persist. During wet weather these heavy use areas often become a soft and gooey mix of mud, manure, urine and water that can contribute to livestock health problems, extra labor for farmers, and nutrient and sediment runoff.
The focus of this article will be about the no-cost to low-cost reduction of the potentially negative environmental impacts from heavy use areas. Although it may not be possible to eliminate these areas on a farm, it is possible to minimize the impacts of these areas on the environment.
The first step in preventing the environmental impacts of heavy use areas is to reduce the amount of clean water that enters and passes through them. A reduction of water that enters and passes through the area means that less sediment and nutrients will get carried off. Another step is to place or slope those heavy use areas in a way that the water entering these areas is allowed to drain into the soil but not runoff. A good way to do this is to make sure that your heavy use area is not located next to or uphill from a draw, branch, or stream. Finally, a vegetative filter strip can be used downhill from your heavy use area to filter sediment and nutrients out of the runoff water.
Of course, the easiest way to prevent water from running into a heavy use area is to make sure that storm water runoff from rooftops, gutters and ditches on your farm isn’t flowing through the area before it is ever utilized for heavy use. If the heavy use area is already in place and storm water runoff does flow through the heavy use area this water can often be diverted away from the heavy use area with relative ease.
Since there will almost always be runoff water leaving a heavy use area during a heavy rain, this water should be treated as it leaves the heavy use area of the farm by utilizing vegetative filter strips. Filter strips are non-harvested bands of vegetation that are often located downhill of heavy use areas, at the edge of pastures, and next to farm drainages. The use of these strips encourage sediment and other solids to settle out of runoff water, allow more water infiltration into the soil, and provide opportunities for the plants and soil to process and use nutrients that would otherwise be lost to surrounding streams or ponds.
John Pennington is a County Extension Agent with the University of Arkansas, specializing in Agriculture and Water Quality.
