Minnesota River Best Management Practices BMPs


Best Management Practices Many landowners across the watershed are working to help reduce the amount of sediment and nutrients entering the waterways. There are many approaches that landowners can take. The overarching concept for all of these techniques is to slow the flow of water and increase its residence time on the landscape. Holding the water on the landscape longer has many benefits. It reduces the "flashy" flow pattern and the water's erosive power by reducing flow volume and velocity during floods. The sediment and attached phosphorus is able to settle out rather than continuing downstream. Increasing residence time also enables aquatic plants and organisms to consume some of the dissolved contaminants. Here are some of the techniques, called best management practices.
	Buffer strips can be used to line cultivated fields, the banks of open ditches and streams, or border wetlands. Buffer zones are strips of grass or other naturally occurring plants, whose root systems hold the soil together to prevent erosion while the stalks trap sediment.
	Grassed waterways are strips of uncultivated grass running through a cultivated field. They are natural or constructed channels intended to transport water without erosion.
	A rock inlet is a structure that provides a filter on top of a tile intake. As opposed to the tile line emerging at the surface, it is buried beneath a pile of gravel. Sediment caught up in overland flow makes its way across the field and encounters the rock inlet. Water is able to percolate down through the gravel and into the tile line, but soil, phosphorus, and other debris gets caught up.
	A closed intake fits over the mouth of a tile line intake located in the middle of a cultivated field and traps sediment. The orange column has holes big enough to allow water to pass through at a sufficient rate during a flooding event, but it does not allow a pit to develop that soil can pour down into. It also has a greater ability to retain debris (you can see that the bottom holes are clogged) than the orange basket mounted on the open intake.
	The Farmable Wetlands Project has been created to provide an incentive to farmers to re-establish wetlands in the watershed. Wetlands increase the residence time needed to naturally clean contaminated water. Funds are available through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) for enrolling wetlands and land along ditches.
Other techniques to reduce sediment and nutrients running into the waterways include Close Pattern Tiling, Nutrient Management, and Conservation Tillage, Gully control structures, Terraces, among many others. Learn more about BMPs by visiting the links below: Water Related BMPs in the Landscape - Watershed Science Institute, Natural Resource Conservation Service Conservation Programs and Options - Minnesota Department of Agriculture Agriculture Best Management Practices (BMP) Loan Program - Minnesota Department of Agriculture Conservation Technology Information Center Conservation Tillage – University of Minnesota Extension Service Soil Nutrient Management – University of Minnesota Extension Service Tillage Best Management Practices for the Minnesota River Basin based on Soils, Landscape, Climate, Crops, and Economics - University of Minnesota Extension Service Natural Resource Conservation Service Conservation Programs Photos and summary courtesy of Brown Nicollet Cottonwood Water Quality Board
back mrbdc home This page was last updated 1/05 Minnesota River Basin Data Center Minnesota State University, Mankato 184 Trafton Science Center S, Mankato, MN 56001 Phone: (507)389-5492 FAX: (507)389-5493 Email: mrbdc@mnsu.edu