SWCS view

Excerpt

Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee: The Soil and Water Conservation Society (WCS) appreciates this opportunity to offer its views on USDA's small watershed program and the four proposals to amend Public Law 83–566 that have been referred to this subcommittee.

SWCS is extremely concerned about the future of the small watershed program, a 40-year-old program now being called into question for budget and other reasons. The small watershed program is the only USDA program designed to respond to natural resource management problems that extend beyond individual properties—on a watershed basis.

The benefits of completed small watershed projects are many. They include flood-damage reduction, increased agricultural productivity, and enhancement of fish, wildlife, and recreational values. The importance and effectiveness of installed projects was verified when officials reviewed experience with the 1993 floods in the Midwest and this year's floods in Georgia and Alabama. In each case, flood damages were greatly reduced in those upstream watersheds where land treatment measures had been installed under the small watershed program.

P.L. 566 was enacted as a USDA program to complement the larger, downstream activities of other federal agencies. This work, in