Our Green Farms, Clean Rivers Program had a major development this week, with Agricultural Project Manager Alan Lehman reporting that he has surveyed his 1,000th farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Alan has surveyed roughly one out of every eight farms in the Valley, and is a leading expert in Shenandoah Valley agricultural practices. Nobody has done more extensive research and knows the range of farm conditions better (my words, not Alan's).

Impressive, right? And the kicker is: he hasn't even been at it for two years.

During that short time, Alan and Shenandoah Riverkeeper Jeff Kelble have gone "site by site," surveying farms and starting a dialogue with farmers aimed at improving bad practices like allowing manure from feedlots to runoff into streams and letting cattle...um...relieve themselves in waters that drain into the Shenandoah River.

If Alan doesn't see visible pollution problems at a given site, he moves on to the next site. The goal is to respect farmers' privacy by limiting Alan's work only to the most obviously polluted sites, and from there limiting the more stringent measures to the worst sites in the bunch.

Probably the most stringent measure in Alan and Jeff's repertoire is the Agricultural Stewardship Act (ASA). The ASA is a tool available to the general public and in place so residents can report pollution and call on Virginia's Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) to investigate further.

Alan says Jeff recently filed 7 ASA reports and all of them were classified as "founded." In layman's terms, it means that the few bad farms reported were, in fact, bad (read: currently polluting or likely to pollute in the near future). VDACS will now require remediation at those farms to fix the problems.

We're happy to see that Alan is making such good use of the public participation tools that strengthen our democracy and improve our water supply. Thanks Alan!