Portage River Farm

Two nights ago, I attended a meeting of the Huron River Watershed Council. They were holding a special meeting to kick off an effort to educate and mobilize individuals in our area to work at a grass-roots level to improve and protect the health of Portage Creek.

The waterway that flows through our valley is called "Portage Creek" for much of its length. The lower portion of the creek flows through the nearby town of Hell, Michigan, where it picks up the name "Hell Creek". The very lowest portion of the waterway, nearest to us, has also been called "Portage River". It empties into Portage Lake a few miles further downstream and then into the Huron River. From there it flows into Lake Erie, over Niagara Falls and ultimately through the St. Lawrence Seaway, past Montreal and Quebec, into the North Atlantic near Newfoundland.

The Huron Watershed Council is a non-profit organization that has been instrumental in promoting environmental awareness and local action to protect the health of the river. They have been working in each of the tributary watersheds and are now working on the last, that of Portage Creek. They have been collecting data on insect species, water conductivity, seasonal water levels and bottom silt sampling at two points in the creek for the past decade.

The Portage Creek watershed is very healthy for a number of reasons. It is very rural and a fair percentage of the land is state-owned nature preserve and recreational area. There are some problems in the upper reaches of the watershed from more intensive agriculture and there is one lake in the system that has a mercury problem that is slated for cleanup.

Our farm is at the extreme lower end of the watershed. Although the river passes only 200 yards to the south of us, our land actually drains through a large wetland that starts in our backyard, flows parallel to the river for more than a mile and empties directly into Portage Lake.

The meeting was well attended and informative. I met lots of nice people from the area and we discussed measures that we hope to take to make sure that the present health of our creek is preserved and improved. We plan to look into the master development plans of our local communities, work to educate landowners on the importance of maintaining buffer strips of vegetation to filter out sediment and approach the county road commission with concerns about siltation from erosion where our dirt roads cross the creek. I look forward to working with this group in the future and getting my kids involved as well.

(The photo is a bend in the mostly snow and ice-covered creek about 1/4 mile upstream of our farm.)