Prestile Stream restoration project continues
Conservation organizations are making progress in the long struggle to make the Prestile Stream hospitable enough for healthy trout populations.
Once a class A stream renowned for its trout fishing, today the Prestile Stream flows from Easton through Mars Hill and into Canada as a class C stream, after impacts from starch factories in the 1950s and 1960s and subsequent decades of erosion and agricultural nutrient runoff.
Now, though, conservation advocates, towns and landowners are working together to solve lingering problems. Over the next two years, the Central Aroostook Soil and Water Conservation District will be working with farmers, landowners and towns in the Prestile Stream watershed to make the most of a $61,000 Environmental Protection Agency grant.
“Our main goal is to get the water quality back to where it once was,” said Kathryn Michaud, executive director of the Central Aroostook SWCD, a part of the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. “It was pristine, really.”
The two-year grant is part of a long-term effort to restore the Prestile that’s showing early benefits. In 2012, the conservation district led a project planting trees and shrubs along the stream’s banks, to prevent erosion.
A conservation zone with spruce trees planted by McCain Foods around the Christina Reservoir, a part of the Prestile’s headwaters, has already helped lower the amount of nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment flowing through the rest of the watershed, Michaud said.
The new $61,000 grant program offers cost-sharing agreements for best management practices with towns and landowners, who pay 45 percent of the costs of the changes, whether cover crops, buffers or new ditches, while the grant pays 55 percent.
Along the main stem of the Prestile in Easton on a drizzly afternoon, Michaud explained how the conservation district “chose the sites with the highest impact” for the two year grant program.
The district has agreements with the towns of Easton and Westfield to implement best management practices for erosion and runoff control. In Easton, along the Fry Pan Road leading to a public works location and and an ATV trail there will be a “superelevation” project with bigger boulders and better gravel that both narrows the ATV trail and prevents erosion and rutting, Michaud said.
“It kind of keeps the ATVing kids from spinning around,” Michaud said, of the narrowing of the trail. A kind of a geotextile along with a heavy rock material also helps for the gravel road, she said. “Good gravel is a big thing.”
Easton and Westfield are also working on re-ditching projects, to reshape and armor ditches to slow and capture the sediment that would go into streams in the Prestile watershed.
The other part of the focus is on agreements with farmers. After this year’s harvest, Michaud and officials from the conservation district are going to be working with farmers to promote cover crops and rotations.
Planting grains such as oats after the fall harvest as a way to both prevent erosion and retain nutrients is “getting more well known and farmers are doing it more than they used to,” Michaud said.
The economics of potato farming have historically made investments in those kinds of cover crops or rotations difficult. “But now they’re finding that adding more rotations and species of crops actually does keep your soil more stable and is able to infiltrate the water,” Michaud said.
