Lake Ontario: changing for the better over twenty five years

Cleaning up the Bay of Quinte, one shovelful at a time

You're driving down a rolling country road in Northumberland County, twenty kilometres from the Bay of Quinte. In the fields to your left herds of contented cattle tug the grass, and on the right a farmer operates some heavy machinery. It's a bucolic place, filled with greenery, fresh air and no worries about water quality.

Well, two out of three aren't bad.

In fact this area is a significant source of phosphorus and bacterial contamination to the neighbouring Bay of Quinte; so significant that Lower Trent Conservation has been operating a Rural Water Quality Program for the past four years.

The program is part of the Bay of Quinte Remedial Action Plan (RAP), a federal/provincial venture designed to improve the water quality of the Bay of Quinte watershed. Since the signing of the Canada/U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972, and the subsequent creation of the international RAP process, water quality has steadily improved. For example, phosphorus levels in the Bay have dropped due to the reduction of phosphates in household detergents. As well the redesign of point sources -- like sewage treatment plants and industrial operations -- has helped reduce phosphorous loadings from 215 kg per day in 1972 to 26 kg per day in 1991.

But the big problem in the Bay of Quinte, according to Barry Jones of Lower Trent Conservation, is phosphorus and bacteria from non-point sources that run-off into streams and rivers many miles from the Bay. "We're dealing with an 18,000 square kilometre watershed -- the biggest in Southern Ontario -- and because of that scale, small improvements are often hard to detect," says Jones.

Significant contamination comes from animal waste: livestock wandering in watercourses, manure stacks and liquefied manure used to fertilize fields. Other agricultural practices also contribute to the phosphorus problem, such as the use of chemical fertilizers, ploughing methods that encourage erosion and the waste water from sanitizing milking equipment. But Jones says non-farming rural residents also share some responsibility via faulty or poorly maintained household septic systems.

Jones and his colleagues have designed the Rural Water Quality Program as a hybrid of existing provincial and federal programs. "We've blended what works, and what people are used to, rather than reinventing the wheel." The program offers grants to improve manure storage and to treat milk house wash water waste; it also suggests techniques to keep cattle out of watercourses. But the Rural Water Quality Program also addresses soil and land management problems. "We offer grants toward the purchase of reduced tillage or no-till machinery, and try to encourage the retirement of land in erosion sensitive areas, such as along a watercourses or near significant ditches and drainage areas." Erosion control structures such as grassed waterways, are also emphasized.

Linking waste management and land management is not without its challenges, according to Barry Jones. "We don't just want to remedy an obvious problem only to create a less obvious source of contamination elsewhere. For example, you can help farmers create an environmentally sound collection system for his manure storage. But then they may go and spread that liquefied manure next to a drainage ditch, where it gets into the watercourse."

One solution to this problem involves injecting the manure into the soil rather than spreading it on the surface. But as Jones notes, "research in Ontario has shown that, while injecting manure can control surface water migration, manure contamination can then get into tile drainage systems and those usually drain into creeks. So you end up further masking the problem and making remediation less likely." A better solution is a technique which agitates the soil and closes the soil macropores before the manure injectors come along. This prevents the injected fertilizer from reaching the subsurface drainage tiles.

This approach to finding better solutions shows the creative thinking that guides the Rural Water Quality Program, but it also suggests something else. "This is a great example of the ecosystem approach," says Tony Wagner, a water resource specialist at the Waterfront Regeneration Trust. "It looks at the entire area and tries to anticipate all of the likely effects of a given action on the environment."

How well has the program worked? The short answer is that, because of the extent of the Quinte watershed, getting results from the Rural Water Quality Program is like pushing a rope. "The Bay of Quinte drainage area is so vast that we just don't have the resources to analyze those shifts in contaminant inputs to the bay. So we have to use computer modeling, as well as some water quality monitoring on a very broad basis." Jones and his colleagues would love to look in depth at a small watershed in the area and do water quality monitoring at its discharge point, but he says "the process is quite expensive, since you have to take a few years to compare the results between a control watershed and a demonstration watershed." Hence, while it's been easy to quantify reductions in phosphorus and bacteria levels at point sources like sewage treatment plants, the loading reductions from in-land farms and other non-point sources are really only estimates based on computer modeling.

What's the long term outlook for the program? Currently it is mainly funded through Environment Canada's Great Lakes Cleanup Fund, which is expected to end around the year 2000; this program would likely end at the same time unless new partners are found.

It's important to keep this type of funding program going, says Barry Jones. "We've discovered that, for every dollar governments invest, the program gets three dollars from the community and other partners." Case in point: in 1996, the Rural Water Quality Program facilitated the delivery of 72 water quality projects with a market value of $1.18 million, of which rural landowners contributed 77%. "Some people say 'why are you giving these people money -- they should be doing it anyway' but what they don't understand is that the program creates an incentive for people to reach deeper into their pockets. We need that seed money to lever the community investment."

For more information on the Bay of Quinte Rural Water Quality Program, contact Barry Jones (613) 394-3915 extension 13. If you would like information on Environment Canada's Great Lakes 2000 Cleanup Fund call John Shaw (905) 336-6276.

Switching channels in Black Creek (January 1997, Vol. 2, No. 4)
New Community Group Aims to Clean Up Toronto Bay (April 1997, Vol. 3 No. 1)