Proceedings - Teaching and Learning Centre - Simon Fraser ...

Fraser River Action Plan 3rd Research Workshop
Fraser River Action Plan -Agricultural Pollution Abatement Update
G. Derksen
Environment Canada
The Fraser River Action Plan (FRAP) is a six-year program established by the federal government to reduce
the pollution source inputs to the Fraser River and restore the natural productivity of the Fraser River basin.
The primary goal of the agricultural component of FRAP is to develop and implement a strategy to reduce the
loading of nutrients, bacteria and agrochemicals from agricultural operations to ground and surface waters.
Qver the course of the program, various projects in cooperation with provincial and federal agencies and the
private sector have been completed or are in progress in order to develop a better understanding of the issues
in the basin, develop means to address them and develop a basis for measuring progress.
Items of particular interest include:
� development of an inventory and model to estimate where nutrient surpluses exist in twenty
Agricultural Waste Management Zones (AWMZs) in the lower Fraser Valley (Figure I) and test
management scenarios to deal with the surpluses (Figure 1a);
� development of an Environmental Sustainability Parameter (ESP) to rank current on-farm practices
(Figure 2) and measure the distribution of other indicators of farming activity such as Milk Cow
Equivalents (MCEs) in two watersheds (Figure 2a); and,
� use the model to estimate the partitioning of nutrients into ground and surface waters by AWMZ
(Figure 3) to identify high risk zones and measure current surface water conditions in several tributary
streams (Figure 3a and Figure 4).
Activities also include the support of ongoing initiatives in the Cariboo and Thompson regions (Table 1) to
evaluate ranching practices and the lower Fraser Valley to evaluate on-farms problems. Several research and
educational programs are being supported to improve on-farm farm operations (Table 2).
Fig. 1 : SURPLUS NITROGEN
FRASER VALLEY AGRICULTURAL WASTE MANAGEMENT ZONES
AWMZ
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