A group of farmers in Lenawee County who have implemented conservation practices for more than 20 years partnered with the local conservation district to host the Center for Excellence Field Day. The Bakerlad and Raymond and Stutzman Farms near Clayton have seen a lot of on-farm research in the past two decades, and thousands of farmers have walked their fields to learn about the latest environmental practices at work to reduce soil erosion and nutrient loading.

THE PROCESS: Lauren Lindemann with The Nature Conservancy explains the Bakerlad ditch during the Center for Excellence Field Day.

Blaine Baker of Bakerlad Farms said the foot traffic from the annual field day and their proximity to Lake Erie made the farm an ideal candidate to construct a two-stage ditch demonstration site with The Nature Conservancy. Western Lake Erie Basin Conservation Director Lauren Lindemann with The Nature Conservancy said building a two-stage ditch starts with partnerships and collaborative funding.

“We go through a whole design process, surveying and engineering, making sure that we know what the drainage watershed is and if it can handle the water that we want it to handle and not have a ditch that’s going to fail,” she said.

Reasons for 2-stage ditch

Two-stage ditches aren’t meant for every field, she said, but work well when traditional ditches are failing, and “the ditch banks are slumping, there’s erosion off the field, and they’re flooding multiple times into the field throughout the year.”

The most common place ditches are installed is up in the headwaters of a watershed, but they can be placed throughout watersheds if done properly. “Every half mile of a two-stage ditch is reducing annually 53 tons of sediment,” she said.

SYSTEM IN USE: A rain event at Les Seiler’s farm in Fulton County, Ohio, dumped 6 inches of rain over 12 hours.

Grasses installed are also meant to capture nutrient loading and are creating increased habitat. “If we’re in an area where there’s fresh water mussels, fish or even different insects, research is starting to show us the older the two-stage ditch is, the better system it is for everything,” she said.

Two-stage ditches are designed based on research of natural drainage systems and includes a floodplain zone that can slow the speed of the water and reduce soil erosion. Lindemann said a lot of thought goes into ditch placement, and each individual farmer’s management style is taken into consideration. “You’ve got to think about, Do you want to broadcast your seed? Do you want to add fertilizer? Do you want to hydroseed? There’s just a lot of things that you want to add to that thought process,” she said.

Grassy side slopes also improve water quality by reducing nutrient loading. “We’re trying to just reshape the ditch, add the benches, which are considered a floodplain, and redoing the slopes so they’re not as steep,” she said.

RIGHT SLOPE: The correct slope is verified during the ditch’s construction.

During construction, the original channel remains untouched. “We don’t work in the water that’s there, if the channel is 3 or 4 feet, we’re going to create a floodplain and to have something that’s from a toe of the bank to the new toe of the other side of the bank — that’s going to be 22 feet,” Lindermann said. The sides of the banks are then sloped at a 3-to-1 ratio.

Built on a small stream, about a half-mile long, Baker said their demonstration two-stage ditch was installed about a year ago and only took a week to complete. He said the two-stage ditch system doesn’t have to be installed on an area that floods to see the benefits. “The idea is to take the normal water flow going down to the ditch and take some of the nutrients out of it.”

Waiting for wet weather

For his particular system, the water level needs to rise about 8 inches before flooding. And with this year’s relatively dry growing season, Baker said it hasn’t been put to work quite yet. Overall the ditch should be easier to maintain, according to Baker.

“The channel in the very middle where the water is flowing today will stay cleaner with less sediment filling in than a normal creek because of the nature of how this thing operates,” he said.

Feeling the pressure to reduce their farm’s environmental impact in the Western Lake Erie Basin, Baker said the process is just one more tool to help them improve water quality. Testing is planned for next spring on the Bakerlad Farm to measure the effectiveness of the two-stage ditch and will be shared during future Center for Excellence Field Day events.

Heslip is the Michigan anchor and reporter for Brownfield Ag News.

COMPLETED: Here is the finished two-stage ditch on Bakerlad farm in the spring.