LoudounNow LOUDOUN COUNTY’S COMMUNITY-OWNED NEWS SOURCE
[ Vol. 2, No. 31 ]
[ loudounnow.com ]
TIME TO CHOOSE: Primary guide inside
June 8 – 14, 2017 ]
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Rural Leaders Launch New Ag School BY DANIELLE NADLER
Renss Greene/Loudoun Now
Young volunteers use tweezers to help find and count the bugs in the South Fork of Catoctin Creek. Tracking insects in local streams is a way to monitor the overall health of the county’s waterways.
Water Critters Gauge Stream Health BY RENSS GREENE
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f you want to know if the water’s any good, ask the bugs. It’s why an array of environmentally conscious organizations and school-aged helpers were wading into the mud in the South Fork of Catoctin Creek on Saturday. At a water monitoring demonstration organized by Amie Ware and Nature Generation, they lowered a yellow net into the stream, sieved the burbling creek, rubbed creepy-crawlies off the rocks on the bottom, and counted what they found. “It’s not completely clear to me what the best way to monitor water quality is, because water flows,” said volunteer stream monitor Sarah Ali. From one moment to the next, conditions in streams
change—storms can bring influxes of runoff, or drought conditions can bring water levels down. And there are many measures of stream health: gauging the amount of e. coli bacteria, phosphates, oxygenation, or a variety of other tools. “The reason the critters are seen as sort of the best proxy for water quality right now is, even if you have those big events like a storm, those critters are still there, surviving or not,” Ali said. Some creatures—like caddisflies and stoneflies— are more sensitive to pollution, acting like canaries in the coal mine. Others— like leeches, flatworms, and midges—are hardy to polluted waters. By counting the number of different types of species, monitors can get an idea of the overall health of the stream. Volunteer stream monitors across
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Loudoun and across the state use a testing protocol set out by the Izaak Walton League’s Save Our Streams program to get reliable data over years and track the changing health of the streams. The data they collect are also sent to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to target particular streams for cleanup. Ali said events like Saturday’s are also a great way to pique children’s natural scientific curiosity. “The thing about kids is their innocence and just natural curiosity, identifying and sorting,” Ali said. “Children just naturally like to identify and sort things, and that is actually the basic principal of scientific research.” And they were. Kids at the stream WATER MONITORING >> 8
How to best protect the area’s thousands of acres of farmland from development has been a decades-long debate in Loudoun County, often battled out in board rooms and late-night committee meetings. Now, the men and women who lead some of the county’s most successful rural businesses say that part of the solution is found in raising up the next generation of farmers. This week, they announced the New Ag School, a tuition-free certificate program that will provide mentorship to farm employees, as well as hands-on training in everything from horticulture to hospitality to prepare them to grow Loudoun County’s rural economy. “We are teaching people that you don’t have to stare at a computer all day to make a living,” said Doug Fabbioli, New Ag School board member and owner of Fabbioli Cellars. “We are teaching farming.” Loudoun’s agriculture economy includes 1,400 farms and rural businesses, such as breweries, wineries and niche farms that offer beef, lamb, poultry, eggs, dairy products, flowers, herbs, vegetables, Christmas trees and even alpaca products. Kellie Hinkle, also a New Ag School board member and agriculture development officer for Loudoun County Department of Economic Development, said county leaders’ strategy to protect Loudoun’s open space has changed in recent years. It used to be about preserving as many acres as possible, but now it’s about creating agribusinesses that will make that land viable. “It’s not about preserving acreage anymore just for preserving acreage,” she said. “It’s about building businesses on those acres.” Fabbioli’s vision to train up the next generation of farmers in a school without walls—which came to him in a literal dream almost 10 years ago—sets that AG SCHOOL >> 30
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