Green is 2017 Conservation Farmer of the Year

The Washington County SWCD Board is proud to announce that Jerald Green has been selected as the 2017 Conservation Farmer of the Year. Jerald farms in Polk Township with his wife, Amy, and their three children. Jerald is a third-generation poultry and cattle farmer. He bought his first cows in 1998 and started growing 195,000 broilers for Tyson in 2006.  

Jerald actually started working with conservation practices as a heavy equipment operator with his dad upon graduation from high school in 1995. He now owns the contracting business and mainly installs conservation practices, excavating for building site preparation, concrete and sept tank installation. With this exposure to conservation practices early on in his life, he knew what he wanted to do on his own farm.

Jerald shared that he believes that you need to have pride in what you do. He feels that having a nice and clean farmstead and operation lets others know that you do care about your property. With this sense of pride in his farm, he began to address some of his concerns with his operation.  

Jerald has taken advantage of the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s technical assistance and financial programs including the Environmental Quality Incentive Program. He knew that he wanted to improve the quality of pastures for his 50 brood cows and calves. He converted approximately 50 acres of fescue grass to better grazing forage. He installed almost a mile of fence, including cross fences, to set up a rotational grazing system, to exclude cattle from a pond used to water the chickens, and an area of woods. He installed six watering facilities, pipeline, and heavy use area protection sites under the tanks, for feeding and to protect against leachate in surface waters. He installed an access road to the heavy use feeding area to reduce rutting and tracking of manure. He attached gutters on a cattle barn and directed the clean water away from the feeding area to prevent contamination. Jerald also runs a second 50 cow and calf herd on 80 acres of rented pasture acres.  

In addition, to address gully erosion in the pasture field and around his chicken houses, he installed almost an acre grass waterway; approximately 1300’ of rock lined waterway and two rock chutes.   While his poultry operation is a confined operation, Jerald composts the manure in the barn and sells it to an area farmer.   

In 2013, he had an energy audit completed on his operation to look for energy savings on the farm. Since that time, he has installed many of the recommendations in this plan including energy efficient heaters, lighting, attic insulation, tunnel doors on six barns and cooling cells. These practices will improve air quality while saving energy. 

The Board commends Jerald for his on-going conservation efforts to improve the natural resources on his operation.