Between 2009 and 2015, American ranchers, farmers and forest landowners planned and implemented conservation practices on more than 130 million hectares (320 million acres) of working lands. These practices have cleaned and conserved water, improved air quality, enhanced wildlife habitat and made agricultural operations more resilient.
A fact sheet released by the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) documents the impact of these conservation practices on water sources and highlights its role in cleaning water supplies in the U.S. The fact sheet outlines a list of USDA achievements in connection to water quality improvements. These include:
- A reduction in the loss of nutrients from farm fields, specifically reducing losses of nitrogen by 47,310 tonnes (104.3 million pounds) per year and phosphorus by 7,983 tonnes (17.6 million pounds) per year.
- Brought clean drinking water and better waste water management to 19.5 million rural residents through nearly 6,000 loans and grants for water and waste water community infrastructure projects.
- Invested € 115 million ($103 million) in the Emergency Watershed Protection Program for recovery projects in 19 states.
- Re-established valuable land cover to help improve water quality, prevent soil erosion, and reduce loss of wildlife habitat through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). Nitrogen and phosphorus intercepted by CRP buffers are 95 and 85 percent less, respectively, compared to land that is cropped. Soil erosion has been reduced by an annual average rate of 295 million tonnes (325 million tons) or 8.16 billion tonnes (9 billion tons) since the program started in 1985. That is equivalent to 600 million heavy duty trucks of soil, enough trucks lined up to reach around the world 160 times.