The Mackinaw River on Franklin Demonstration Farm in central Illinois. Photo © Cristina Rutter for The Nature Conservancy
In the heart of the Midwest’s Corn Belt, a family farm is experimenting with ways to keep its nearby rivers clean. On a farm in the heart of Illinois, nearly a decade and a half of experiments are unfolding.
For six generations, the land’s owners, the Franklin family, have farmed their 250 acres along the Mackinaw River—a tributary to the Illinois River, which itself joins the Mississippi. The Mississippi has long struggled as fertilizer runoff from farms polluted its water and fed dead zones downstream in the Gulf of the Mexico. Since 2014, the Franklin family has worked with researchers from The Nature Conservancy, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and elsewhere to test ways to reduce the amount of fertilizer washing into local rivers.
Krista Kirkham, an aquatic ecologist for TNC in Illinois, talks about discoveries made there. A version of this article ran in Nature Conservancy magazine’s Spring 2018 issue, which focused on how food can be produced more sustainably. Read more food and conservation stories here. — NCM Krista Kirkham Krista is the assistant aquatic ecologist for […]
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