The Long Creek Watershed will now be merged with the existing West Fork Crooked Creek Watershed. This will add 99,000 acres of land into West Fork and will allow Long Creek to become a Water Quality Initiative funded project. Olivia Krehbiel, the West Fork Crooked Creek and Long Creek Watershed coordinator, explained how this will help Long Creek landowners and producers, “This means that the land owners and producers in Long Creek will now qualify for more cost share opportunities, ones they might have missed out on before and that their neighbors in the West Fork Crooked Creek watershed qualified for. So now Long Creek will become a WQI funded project. And WQI is the Water Quality Initiative and it is an action plan for the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy..”

Krehbiel also announced a kickoff meeting that will be held at a later date. If you have any questions about the addition of Long Creek or the West Fork Crooked Creek Project, contact the Washington County USDA service center at 319-653-6654 or visit their office at 1621 East Washington Street in Washington.