Lake Champlain Direct

NMP Planning

Through a grant from VACD the Otter Creek District is doing outreach to have 8 farmers from the Lake Champlain Direct watershed to participate in winter 2018 Nutrient Management classes. OCNRCD staff will complete soil sampling for those farms.

Required Agricultural Practices

Through a grant from Vermont Agency of Agriculture the Otter Creek NRCD is doing outreach and education on the Required Agriculture Practices regulation in the South Lake Champlain Direct and the Lewis Creek.

South Lake Champlain Fund

A recent county wide resource inventory identified Phosphorous runoff concerns in Shoreham, in particular, impacting water quality in the Lake Street area and the fishing access.  This project would identify remedial projects, funding to mitigate and implementation in the second year.

The project would identify a suite of practices which when applied will reduce runoff to the Lake.  Working with conservation partners, landowners will be enlisted to participate in trialing and or implementing practices i.e. cover crops, riparian buffer planting, sediment ponds and filters.   The Town of Shoreham could also be a partner and participant as well private landowners.

Measures can be acres treated with cover crops, stream feet planted with trees, feet of ditches planted with grass, number of sediment ponds and filters.

Project will have a positive environmental impact on the southern Lake Champlain. This project will use experts, landowners, and municipalities in the southern Lake Champlain region.

Organization History

The OCNRCD organized in 1941 to ‘exercise public powers in connection with soil conservation and erosion control’.   The District has been active for those seventy four years working with landowners to voluntarily change their practices in a manner which will reduce erosion. In the last fifteen plus years the OCNRCD has supported 1,000 acres of planted riparian buffer with animal exclusion.  These accomplishments have results from working effectively with conservation partners.