5-9-11

Today felt like it went by much faster than it normally does, probably due to the fact that the morning was spent in the office and the 2nd half of the day was done in the field. I worked in the office making some Soil Survey maps for upcoming field visits. Recently, a lot of the maps have been difficult to create because they aren’t off a road, or the entire property is forested. Until you have been out to the property it is hard to know exactly where the boundaries are. I also helped Angie with a couple HEL forms. She had just recently found out a better way of doing this from the office by creating a layer that had topographic lines which you could control the intervals in which they are placed. From there you can figure out the length and do rise over run to find the slope of the field, without going into the field. We were mostly focusing on one of the HEL determinations we had gone out into the field to do, because the FSA had made his entire farm one field, rather than splitting it by his various fields. We were determining if maybe he wouldn’t be classified as High Erosion Level if they had split the fields. Unfortunately, that was not the case. There was also issues with the fact that the tenant was the one that asked us to do an HEL not the landowner. This meant the landowner was now liable for creating a conservation plan with the NRCS to avoid farming with the high hazard of erosion. I also spent some time working on modifying 2004 and 2006 plans. Apparently modifications of plans change a lot, especially to keep your funding. That requires changing the expected dates of practices so that people are labeled as behind and dropped from the program. It used to be a few years ago, Rich encouraged everyone to sign up for everything they thought they could achieve. Now people are having difficulty finishing them so practices have to be deleted.

The field visit today was a bit interesting. The property was above a pretty severe cliff face drop with a meandering river at the bottom. The property owner had redwoods at the back of the property as well as a deck. The problem was due to lot of drainage going through the deck and then falling down the cliff to cause a slide. There was also the fact that the redwoods have increased weight on the top of the slide and were in danger of falling, as they are a shallow rooted tree. The client wanted Rich’s opinion on cutting the redwoods and using them to make a slope stabilization structure at the bottom to stop the river from meandering too much. The danger was that the client wanted to do this without getting permitting. Without permitting means that he could actually cause great harm because no one would ensure it was done correctly, and if something did occur, the project would have to be removed and/or a fine would be given. Overall, I didn’t feel comfortable that someone was going to be making this big of a change without any oversight. I also don’t think I enjoyed the meeting because the client wanted us to abseil down the cliff by holding onto a rope tied to his deck. I had a sprained ankle; definitely wasn’t going to happen. Thankfully, Rich told him we didn’t have time.