Izaak Walton League of America

On April 18, the House Agriculture Committee voted to advance its version of a 2018 Farm Bill. The bill is a mixed bag when it comes to IWLA water and wildlife conservation priorities. Full story

Fishing line can cause major problems for wildlife if it is not disposed of correctly. (Monofilament fishing line in particular is made to last: it takes roughly 600 years to decompose!) Monofilament recycling stations are easy to build and provide a place for fisherman to throw away used fishing line. Full story

All across America, rivers, lakes, and wetlands suffer from the runoff of fertilizers, pesticides, and manure. And downstream communities have to deal with the pollution to provide safe, clean drinking water. Full story

Baseline data on water quality helps us track changes in stream health over time. Essentially, you can’t know if water quality has changed – for better or worse – without a starting point. Full story

American farms lose 6 pounds of soil for every pound of food produced. The health of our soil is critical to our future food supply and to the health of our rivers, lakes, and wetlands. The 2018 Farm Bill needs to ensure that farmers, ranchers, and communities have the tools they need to restore soil health and protect water quality. Full story

America’s fish and wildlife depend on America’s farms and ranches for critical habitat. The 2018 Farm Bill needs to ensure that farmers and ranchers have the tools they need to make a place for wildlife through wildlife-friendly practices and innovative farming and ranching systems. Full story

There are countless ways to assess the health of a stream. The Izaak Walton League finds sampling benthic aquatic macroinvertebrates to be an accurate indicator of stream health – one that any citizen scientist can tackle. Much as foresters judge a forest by its diversity of trees, we judge streams by the diversity of life within it. Full story

Right now is a critical time for America's wetlands, which provide irreplaceable values for wildlife habitat, recharge groundwater, and filter runoff before it hits our streams and rivers. Full story

The last thing on my mind during February's unseasonably warm days was road salt – that is, until the League launched our Winter Salt Watch. It turns out that the threat to water quality from excess road salt is highest after the weather warms up! Full story

The League has proposed a pilot federal program to offer crop insur­ance discounts to farmers who adopt some combination of practices that will build soil health, including plant­ing cover crops, using more diverse crop rotations, and converting to “no tillage” methods that protect the soil. Full story