Lamar County conservation agency shows off projects

By LYNN MONTGOMERY | East Texas Edition

The tour group listens to details of how a concrete block chute was installed at Chisum ISD to overset gully erosion. -- Staff photo by Montgomery

Sept. 23, 2004 - The Lamar County National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), with help from some other area NRCS offices, played host to 37 conservationalists from Logan County, Ky., during an all-day tour which began in Deport on Sept. 15.

Each year, the Logan County Conservation Districts visit other states to gather knowledge about conservation ideas that are helping, or not helping, in those states, according to group leader Dianna Penrod.

The Deport Creek Watershed Project was completed in 1980, former mayor Charles Foster told the group at the their first stop. The project was essential for the small town of Deport because every time it rained the town would flood.

"If it came a three-inch rain, you better start raising your doors up," Foster said.

The city maintains the NRCS-project lake and it is used for public fishing.

The tour was scheduled to visit the lake, but due to a one-inch rainfall the previous night, the bus was unable to travel up the dirt road to the site. Instead, the group visited the town area and saw where previous flooding had occurred.

The next stop was Rodger Allen's cotton crop operation, where many of the Kentuckians picked cotton for the first time. Cotton is grown in some areas of Kentucky, but not in the Logan County region.

It didn't take long for the tour group to realize why their bus wouldn't have been able to drive to the Deport Lake after trying to remove the blacklands soil, collected in the cotton field, from their shoes.

Allen said the rainfall that morning would slightly hurt his crop, which is close to harvesting, but he was expecting to yield about 750 pounds per acre. A bale of cotton weighs 500 pounds, so his yield would be about a bale-and-a-half per acre.

The tour also visited Chisum High School where they saw a concrete block chute which was designed to offset severe gully erosion.

The Kentuckians also toured a wooden toewall and rock riprap at North Lamar High School, filter strips, two grade stabilization structures, native grass planting, native hay meadow, and an aluminum toewall. Each project was detailed by NRCS officials.

Scheduled to return to Kentucky on Thursday, Sept. 16, many were concerned about the weather.

"We are leaving in the morning to go back to Kentucky and are hoping Ivan will go east of the Mobile (Alabama) area because if it goes the way it is looking, we will loose our crops," Penrod said.

Overall, the attendees were a "boisterous group," according to tour organizers, who were also told by the group members that they "had learned a lot during this tour."