Latest News - Prairie Rivers of Iowa

Prairie Rivers of Iowa Welcomes Tina VanDyk as New Business Manager and Development Director

by Prairie Rivers of Iowa | Dec 4, 2024

Prairie Rivers of Iowa is excited to announce that Tina VanDyk has joined the organization as its new Business Manager and Development Director. In this role, she will oversee fundraising, donor relations, grant development, and operational management, contributing to Prairie Rivers of Iowa’s mission to conserve and restore Iowa’s natural, cultural, and historical resources.

Tina holds a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Massachusetts and brings experience in nonprofit leadership, strategy, and fundraising. Before joining Prairie Rivers of Iowa, she served as the Business Manager and Development Coordinator at Story Theater Company in Ames, where she also contributed as a long-standing member of the executive board.

VanDyk is eager to expand Prairie Rivers of Iowa’s current partnerships while fostering new relationships to further the organization’s mission. “I am excited to be part of Prairie Rivers of Iowa and to support its meaningful work in conservation and community development,” she said. “I look forward to building on the organization’s strong foundation and helping to ensure its continued impact.”

Rick Dietz, Board Vice-President, shared: “The team at Prairie Rivers of Iowa is equally enthusiastic about Tina’s arrival, and the Board is thrilled to welcome her to our staff of dedicated professionals. Tina will bring a new perspective to the organization, in addition to her skills and expertise in managing a non-profit. We’re all excited for our future!”

Originally from New England, Tina appreciates the beauty of the big sky and open spaces of Iowa. In her free time, she enjoys historical fiction, a good cup of black coffee, and spending time with her larger-than-average family.

Farm District on the Lincoln Highway is in Danger of Losing National Status

by Jeanie Hau | Apr 16, 2024

The Meyer’s Farmstead Historic District is located one block north of the Lincoln Highway Heritage Byway in Lisbon. The Farm District is part of the Pleasant Grove Heritage Park. It is a two block walk from Lincoln Square Park which is located in the heart of the Lisbon Main Street Historic District. The Farmstead, the Lincoln Highway Heritage Byway, and the Main Street Historic District are all nationally recognized as significant to the history of development in America. Iowa’s travel industry is focusing on Agritourism in 2024. It is more important than ever to realize the value of our history, our stories, and how they are being told.

Google maps with Meyers Farmstead Historic District, the Lincoln Highway, and Lisbon Main St Historic District

15.33 acres of the Meyer farm was sold to the City of Lisbon for the development of a park in 2019. For the next six years the City of Lisbon, the Lisbon Historic Preservation Commission (LHPC), and the Lisbon Parks and Recreation have been developing the Heritage Area. From a catch-and-release pond to tours of the farmstead, the plan is in motion.

Lincoln Square Park Lisbon Main St Historic District

The fence post, water trough, and 3 historic barns are significant to the historic property.

A top priority for the Preservation Commission was to get the Meyers Farmstead listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The farmstead collective was deemed significant for important agricultural trends of livestock and dairy farming in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was listed in 2021. The agricultural buildings are significant as they represent the rarity of buildings still existing from that time period. They are also significant representives of adaptive uses as the industry changed (NRHP listing for Meyers Farmstead).

Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the Preservation Commission was now looking for help and partners. In August of 2023, the Pleasant Grove Heritage Park including the Meyers Farmstead Historic District was named an emerging site with the Silos & Smokestacks National Heritage Area (SSNHA). The SSNHA is an organization under the umbrella of the National Park Service. The SSNHA’s mission is “to preserve and tell the story of American agriculture and its global significance.” They connect partners and resources with the goal of creating a consistent professional preservation and interpretation standard. This was exactly what the Preservation Commission needed.

The plan for the natural landscape at the Heritage Park progressed quickly when a REAP grant was awarded last November. The grant will be used to reconstruct 10 acres of diverse tallgrass prairie. The prairie will contribute to the farm’s story from prairie to farm. It will also improve water quality and wildlife habitat. The planting is scheduled for May 2024.

Finally, in November of last year, the The Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun reported that the Lisbon City Council approved a contract between the Lisbon Historic Preservation Commission (LHPC) and the City of Lisbon with OPN Architects. The contract is to prepare a preservation plan for the barns in the Historic District. Rebecca Hess from LHPC described perfectly what the barns had endured, “The two barns and corncrib/hog house survived the tornado of 1908, the derecho of 2020, and the F2 tornado of 2023. Our goal is to ensure their structural integrity in order to preserve them for future generations.” Under the preservation plan, each of the three historic barns would have its own plan for rehabilitation created by professionals in historic preservation following historic preservation standards. Progress for the development of the park was coming together.

Meyers Farmstead Historic District inside damaged barn

Fast forward to mid-March of this year. The City of Lisbon and the Lisbon Historic Preservation Commission (LHPC) were told by the city’s insurance company to demolish two of the barns and fence the third one. The barns would no longer be covered for liability by the insurance company. No one disputes that the barns should be fenced off from public access until they can be fully rehabilitated. If the barns are demolished, the Meyers Farmstead Historic District will lose the designation of National Historic Register status, the Silos & Smokestacks support, and the means to receive any grants to help rehabilitate any of the barns. This would be a huge setback for the development of the Heritage Park.

Marc Mohn from the Preservation Commission sums up the current status of the Historic District on their Facebook page: “The Lisbon Historic Preservation Commission (LHPC) is working closely with the City of Lisbon to find a solution for the insurance issues presented by the barns at the Pleasant Grove Heritage Park. The commission is meeting with city officials and contractors to gather and communicate information to stakeholders in a tireless effort to preserve and protect these unique structures, along with the history and character they bring to our community. Our goal has always been and will continue to be the preservation of Lisbon History to draw visitors, revenue, and strengthen the community’s sense of identity and place.”

The City Council meets on May 13 to decide the fate of these barns. The location of the Meyer Farmstead Historic District along the Historic Lincoln Highway and blocks from the Lisbon Main St Historic District is ideal for telling the Agritourism story. The story will be incomplete without them. If you would like to voice your support for rehabilitation of the three nationally significant barns in Lisbon you can email the mayor and city council members directly. You can also plan on attending the May 13 Council meeting at Lisbon City Hall. You can comment here as well.

Thank you to The Lisbon Historic Preservation Commission for the photos and information, to the “Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun” for their responsive reporting on preservation efforts, to the Silos & Smokestacks organization for their support and logo use, and to all of those who support the Lincoln Highway Heritage Byway and Agricultural Heritage locally, regionally, or nationally. –See you on the byway!

A Letter from Our Executive Director

by Penny Brown Huber | Nov 1, 2021

As 2021 begins to wind down, Prairie Rivers of Iowa has much to share regarding our water quality and water monitoring efforts. Because we know you care about the environment and support our efforts, we wanted to share in this letter an in-depth look at our work this year.

Understanding and Solving Problems
The journey to understanding and solving a problem is very fluid and changes as we gain more clarity and understanding. Prairie Rivers has worked at developing watershed organizations, watershed plans, worked with landowners to implement nutrient reduction strategies and developed partnerships to assist in water quality improvements. In 2019, I began to realize all the work, all the money and all the research in the world were not making a difference. We began to ask ourselves were we focused on the “right” problem, and then did we have the “right” solutions?

This is when our staff began investigating to understand where, why and how was water monitoring making a difference? What does water monitoring really mean? Is there one process or concept that determines good water quality? Why do we often only see water monitoring data after several years, and why isn’t the data being utilized in “real” time? Are we too focused on nutrient reduction strategies because of an Iowa initiative, and is it the “right” focus?

Discovery
As we analyze current water monitoring practices, we began to understand better why the monitoring tools are not helping us make decisions to implement improvements in Iowa’s water quality. A few things we discovered:

None of the electronic water monitors in our streams actually talk to each other.
None of the monitors data comes in one language making it hard to make comparisons in testing results.
The volunteer water monitoring program at the state level had been discontinued leaving few ways that citizens could participate in monitoring.
There are many more pollutants in our water being monitored from municipalities than just nitrates and phosphorus and those are cause for concern as well.
E coli was most likely the #1 problem in all the streams in Iowa and it had very little money to solve it.
Many streams could be placed on the TMDL (total maximum daily load) list because they exceed recommended loads, but the state does not have enough people, time or money to monitor all streams.

Prairie Rivers of Iowa isn’t limited to working in one part of the state, and wherever we work, we form partnerships with local governments, businesses, and civic organizations. So, when we think about solving water quality problems, we’re not just thinking about the impacts on the Gulf of Mexico, or costs and benefits for an individual farm or a community, we’re also thinking about how to restore the environment and benefit people in the local area. Water monitoring has been an essential part of our process for understanding the state of water quality and finding local solutions.

Example of Thinking Through a Problem
Here is an example from Story County on how we began brainstorming with several partners on creating a ten-year water monitoring program.

What are the issues? In Story County, we haven’t seen toxic algae blooms or threats to drinking water, but we have seen high e. coli levels that make it less safe to enjoy our recreational waters. The average citizen is not aware of these issues, and we thought they should get more attention.
Where is it an issue? coli is an issue all over Story County, exceeding the primary contact recreation standard in 14/15 sites we tested last year! Because we have roots in the community, we know where children play and where people go kayaking/canoeing — regardless of how things get categorized in state databases!
When is it an issue? In the South Skunk River, e. coli exceeds the state standards when the river is running high, but in Ioway Creek, it’s almost always dirty. Understanding this helps us find the right solutions—some management practices have a bigger impact during wet weather, others in dry weather.
How do you test for it? This year, many creeks dried up and there was very little runoff from agricultural areas. So, we learned to use some new equipment for collecting samples of stormwater runoff from Ames and Nevada—and yes, there’s a lot of e. coli! We also wanted tools that could tell us if and where sewage could be getting into a creek, so we’ve been bringing water samples to an Iowa State University chemistry professor to try out a possible tracer—optical brighteners found in laundry detergent.
How do we fix it? coli can come from wildlife, livestock, pets, or people, but “it could be anything” isn’t a good enough answer! With infrastructure on the national agenda, we’d like to steer more resources to addressing aging sanitary and storm sewers and helping homeowners fix up not-to-code septic systems. We’re seeing evidence that these are an important sources of e. coli, and it’s something that our local partners have a track record of finding and fixing. These kinds of insights came out of many conversations with stakeholders, experts, exploration of the data, and sampling our creeks. It’s not always straightforward, but it’s valuable work.

New Insights

We now know that when comparing water monitoring information, we should always consider if the samples were taken in a “dry” or “wet” period. Putting all the years and samples together, gives us poor information.
We consistently have seen that e coli is our #1 issue in-stream. These large levels of e coli may be coming from birds, wastewater pipes broken, human or animal interactions in the stream. More research will help us make determinations.
From our monitoring, we can quickly identify when a change has occurred in the water quality and alert the local jurisdiction to a problem, in turn putting the local jurisdiction people to look for what is causing an increase in poor water quality and help us solve the problem.
We are beginning to have a common water quality/monitoring language so we can all agree to what we are discussing.
We understand that the land under any river or stream in Iowa belongs to the landowner, but the water belongs to the public.

As you may be aware, September 30 – October 2 we had a celebration of water. In particular, on Saturday, October 2nd we had a river clean up in Ioway Creek that runs through Ames. Twenty-nine people worked over three hours pulling out 2,500 pounds of trash from the stream. We invite you to watch a short video that celebrates these volunteers and to see what it was like cleaning up an Iowa river. You can view this video here. We hope you enjoy it!

The Work Ahead
Our future work will focus on: (1) building our knowledge of water monitoring across the state; (2) engaging with new stakeholders in helping them understand their local water quality problems; (3) bringing more people to an understanding of how we need to clean up our waters; and (4) help people engage more on our rivers for recreation and personal enjoyment.

All this work can be more robust with your support. If you agree and would like to help us continue understanding and improving water quality, please consider making a gift of at least $100.00 this year. Please visit here to make a gift.

I know you care about Iowa’s natural resources. There is much to do, but with our strategic thinking and commitment to educating the public, we can change the water quality in Iowa and improve what should be one of the greatest resources we have in Iowa.

Thank you.

Best wishes,

Penny L. Brown Huber
Executive Director
pbrownhuber@prrcd.org
515.232.0048

Visit Here to Read Our Entire Fall 2021 Newsletter