Rappahannock County’s neighboring watershed in the Shenandoah Valley was recently sampled to have unsafe levels of bacteria in three-quarters of its waterways. But In Rappahannock, which is a part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, sustainable farming practices have helped the county to stay within healthy levels of bacteria, according to standards from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Seventy-six percent of Virginia Department of Environmental Quality sampling locations, 44 of 58, in Shenandoah waterways from Jan. 1 through July 12 had levels of E. coli that were unsafe for swimming or recreation, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project. In 2021, 60 percent of the water monitoring stations in the Shenandoah Valley did not meet the standard.
In Rappahannock County, all 10 water monitoring sites have shown levels of bacteria that are within the healthy standard set by the EPA, according to Bob Hurley, president of RappFLOW, an organization that works to protect and monitor water resources in Rappahannock. (Disclosure: Hurley also works as a reporter for Foothills Forum, a nonprofit that works closely with the Rappahannock News.)
High levels of E. coli in water is an indicator of sewage or animal waste contamination, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Sewage and animal waste can contain disease causing organisms, and consumption can result in severe illness.
According to data from the Environmental Integrity Project, about 160 million chickens, 16 million turkeys and 528,000 cows are raised annually in the Shenandoah Valley’s Augusta, Page, Shenandoah and Rockingham counties. The report said that the livestock and cattle manure in the Valley is spread on farmland as fertilizer, but contains more phosphorus than crops need for growth. The excess manure leaks pollutants into groundwater, creating agricultural runoff into surrounding streams.
The density of animals in the Valley is higher than in Rappahannock County, which has about 12,200 cows, according to 2021 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This number is still significantly higher than the county’s population, which is about 7,360.
“While we do not definitively know the extent to which cattle operations in Rappahannock are contributing to this issue, the growing enrollment of Rappahannock farmers in programs that keep cattle out of streams, such as the Culpeper Soil and Water Conservation District’s stream exclusion fencing cost share, is definitely good news for water quality in the area and further downstream,” Laura O’Brien, Rappahannock County’s field representative to the Piedmont Environmental Council, wrote in an email.
In 2019, an analysis from Friends of Rappahannock found unsafe levels of E. coli in parts of the Rush River at the Rappahannock County Park, and runoff from surrounding cattle operations was the largest source of waterborne bacteria in the county. Those bacteria levels have since dropped into safe ranges, according to water monitoring from RappFLOW.
Hurley and RappFLOW Vice President Rachel Bynum said it’s not clear what specifically changed that caused E. coli levels to drop, but Bynum said it could be based on a few houses near the Rush River that improved their septic systems, or less cattle walking through the waterway. Hurley said it could also be due to environmental factors this year like rainfall and water temperature that affects bacteria.
Bynum said that while Rappahannock County does have a robust cattle industry, the topography of Rappahannock is different from counties in the Shenandoah Valley, allowing less agricultural runoff into the waterways. She said Rappahannock has more riparian zones around waterways, or vegetation areas bordering bodies of water that protects soil from erosion. She said there’s been an effort in recent years to plant more trees along riparian zones and build stream fencing.
“Just the fact that [RappFLOW is] doing the monitoring, we’ll be able to tell if there’s a change, and that’s the first step, is just having the baseline knowledge of what things are like,” Bynum said.
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