After years of slow and steady work to improve water quality, the leader of the Mower County Soil and Water Conservation District and Cedar River Watershed District is looking to leave the office better equipped to track and show its progress.

Before Bev Nordby retires as the SWCD’s district manager and the CRWD’s administrator on Nov. 13, she’s working to upgrade the office’s technology to equip resource specialists to better track water and soil data.

“It should be really nice for the guys and it will be nice for the office, because they’ll be able to collect all sorts of good stuff so we can actually show our success,” Nordby said.

One of Nordby’s last big projects is to secure iPads for the joint SWCD and CRWD office so resource specialists can track field samples, water information and an assortment of other data to enter it into a database. They’ll also take before shots of projects.

To date, Nordby admits it’s been difficult to track and highlight the success of their projects. This new software and data, along with the county’s hydrologic and hydraulic model — commonly called H&H modeling — which estimates the water impacts of projects, will help the office measure and highlight its successes.

Through the software and the new iPad technology, the office will be able to track projects over time and see what the effects are on the waterways.

“We can put in all these conservation practices, but we want to be able to tell the public a story of what this accomplished, and we can’t do that unless we collect what we’re doing,” Nordby said.

Resource Specialist Justin Hanson, who will replace Nordby, said the technology will also make them more efficient.

“Once it’s done, she can leave us in a better spot,” Hanson said.

Simply taking soil and water samples on any given day can be deceiving, as Nordby said weather and conditions can affect and taint the samples.

“You can have a really good year of putting practices on the ground, but we’ve got to think about the weather too,” she said.

That means that when monitoring a watershed, it takes at least 10 years of data to track trends.

Nordby hopes to have the technology update just about ready by the time she leaves so it can be implemented next spring. She’s also working on bringing older information into the system, like all their conservation easement sites.

The technology upgrades come at a good time. Last week, The Hormel Foundation announced it would pay half the $6.4 million Accelerated Results Plan to compete 25 water retention projects on the Cedar River and Dobbins Creek. Those projects are expected to kick off next spring.

CRWD leaders admit the public can get a bit impatient looking for proof of the success of CRWD projects, especially after there have been flood events since the watershed formed in 2007.

“The whole community needs to realize that it’s a little bit at a time,” CRWD Board Manager Mike Merten said. “It’s small steps if you’re going to do it right and do it effectively.”

CRWD Board Chair Sue Olson said people need to remember there is no instant, blanket fix to waterways issues.

“If there was one big thing we would have done it already,” Olson said.

Jim Gebhardt, who serves on both the SWCD and CRWD boards, noted that the projects they’re doing don’t just happen overnight. They take engineering, contractors, design and more.

“There’s a lot that goes into those projects,” Gebhardt said.

Instead of quick fixes, the SWCD and CRWD boards have both taken a slow and steady approach, completing many small projects over the years to help retain water and reduce flows during peak flood events. CRWD say they’ve relied on the expertise of staff for projects in taking a gradual approach.

“That comes from the science,” Olson said. “It’s the science behind it. We rely on our staff to know the science of the best way to do the treatment plans to get the work that we want to get done.”

Though leaders say it’s been effective, the CRWD’s and SWCD’s slow, steady approach to improving water quality hasn’t always been easy to explain to the public.

“That is so hard to explain to the public that it’s baby steps going forward, but we’re not going backwards,” Nordby said. “We’re hopefully going forwards, but it takes time.”

Now, leaders say 25 projects of the Accelerated Results Plan will continue the same approach, but it will ramp up those efforts into larger projects.