Ten farms in Onondaga County have received $644,371 in grant funding from the New York State Environmental Protection Fund. The grants will go toward practices that improve water quality in area watersheds.

Mark Burger, executive director of the Onondaga County Soil and Water Conservation District, said the grants were awarded to farms in the following watersheds:

• Five farms in the Onondaga Lake/Otisco Lake/Nine Mile Creek watershed

• Four farms in the Seneca River watershed

• One farm in the Upper Tioughnioga River watershed, which is connected to the Chesapeake Bay watershed in Maryland

“The farmers are intimately invested in this whole process,” Burger said.

The farmers must contribute 60 percent of the cost of their conservation practices, while the grant covers 40 percent.

“It’ll mean helping to sustain clean water for a long time into the future. It’ll help to keep the farmer to be a good neighbor. It’ll help us to safely have good locally grown safely produced food for our eating habits three times a day,” Burger said of the grant’s impact.

Local farmers will use the funds for practices such as milk house waste management, silage leachate management, water and sediment control basins, planting cover crops and improving manure storage.

“Every farm is different and every farm has unique needs or considerations so that’s why there’s many best management practices that can be used to keep clean water clean on and around the farms,” Burger said.

Some of the conservation practices begin improving water quality immediately by reducing sediment or creating buffers to shade and cool bodies of water. Keeping the temperature down leads to more dissolved oxygen in the water, allowing fish and other aquatic populations to flourish.

Burger said weather trends of the last 10 to 15 years have led to soil erosion, which in turn can affect water quality.

“We’re having a lot higher intensity rainfalls with a lot more volume and velocity,” he said. “What has been typical for us is no longer typical. We’re out of our rhythm weather-wise and season-wise.”

As for what the average citizen can do to improve local soil and water quality, Burger said homeowners should look to farmers as an example of “stewardship of the land.”

“These farmers are soil scientists, animal doctors, they’re bankers, mechanics, contractors, crop advisers and they are businessmen and women. They wear about 20 different hats,” Burger said.

Burger suggested that homeowners conduct soil tests before applying fertilizer or other chemicals to their lawns and gardens. People should take care to follow the directions and consider designating a special mixing area for chemicals to avoid spilling them onto the ground.

“The farmers are doing that; that’s something that homeowners should do before calling a lawn service. We need to be very careful about herbicides and pesticides,” Burger said. “That should be similar for any of us whether we live in a housing tract or if we have five acres in the country.”