All of us have a stake in water quality.  To recognize the intimate connection between the quality of our lives and the quality of our water is to recognize the necessity of taking the task of protecting our water and making it our own.

In the Midwest, home of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River’s headwaters, water quality is affected by municipalities and agriculture, and they both are responsible for protecting it.  This belief led Sand County Foundation, in cooperation with the Johnson Foundation, the Bradley Fund for the Environment and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD), to call together leaders from the municipal water treatment and agricultural communities in the Midwest for the Wingspread Summit on Midwest Water Quality Partnerships, held at the Johnson Foundation’s Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin on 20-22 July.

The summit revealed that shared stewardship of water resources is possible in the Midwest.  Kevin Shafer of MMSD and former Wisconsin Governor Tony Earl demonstrated the progress that has already been made in improving water quality, while Emily Stanley of the University of Wisconsin –Madison’s Limnology Department outlined how much remains to be done, particularly with respect to nutrients that come from agricultural land runoff.  Improving farmers’ land management practices is an obvious step forward, but this is often expensive for farmers to do on their own.

Is it less expensive for regulated municipal water authorities to bear some of the cost of nutrient management on agricultural land than it is for them to treat water so that it meets quality standards?  The Wingspread Summit examined various aspects of this question.

• Chris Jones of the De Moines Water Works provided perspective from a municipality that has long partnered with agriculture in an area with severe water quality challenges
  
  
• Rick Twait of the City of Bloomington, Illinois discussed the issues involved in water quality monitoring, which is essential to evaluate the effectiveness of nutrient management practices
  
  
• Larry Antosch of the Ohio Farm Bureau led a discussion on using markets as a policy tool

The Wingspread Summit considered an idea suggested by Sand County Foundation, called the Discovery Watershed Network, which involves coordinated watershed-scale nutrient management projects designed and operated under similar principles.  Through demonstrations of the water quality improvements possible when farmers cooperate actively to apply nutrient management practices throughout a watershed, this network could generate data to support the establishment of working relationships between groups of farmers and downstream municipalities looking to limit their water treatment costs.

Shared stewardship among landowners and other parties dependent on water is the best way to preserve that resource.  The critical discussion about how to implement that principle began at Wingspread.