I recently had the opportunity to spend some time at Disney World. While walking through EPCOT, I found myself doing something I probably would not have expected to do on a family trip: I was watching people. I watched people from all over the world, young and old, families and grandparents, children and adults, people speaking different languages and coming from completely different cultures, all sharing the same space, laughing, learning, helping one another, and experiencing something together. There was something pretty awesome about watching all of those different people come together. As I walked, I began thinking about how much that simple experience reminded me of the work I have spent so much of my life doing.
It made me think about water.
Water is one of those things that connect every one of us, whether we think about it or not. It doesn’t matter where we were born, what language we speak, what we do for a living, where we live, or what our property lines look like. It falls from the sky, lands on a roof, moves across a parking lot, soaks into a farm field, travels through soil, enters a tile, moves through a ditch or a creek, and eventually becomes part of something much bigger than any one of us.
I’ve spent most of my life around the land, and I’ve learned that water has a mind of its own. As a farmer, I’ve watched a good rain come across a field and wondered whether it was going to be just what the crop needed or whether it was going to be more than the soil could handle. I’ve watched water move across bare ground and carry soil with it, and I’ve watched the difference a living cover can make when the same rain falls on ground protected by roots and residue. I’ve watched ditches rise, creeks flood, and tile lines move water through the landscape, and over the years I’ve learned something that seems pretty simple but has taken a lifetime to understand: you can’t control water; you must learn how to work with it.
The older I get, the more I realize that may be true about life as well.
We don’t always get to decide where our journey takes us, and sometimes the road takes a turn we didn’t expect, but we learn to adapt; we learn from our mistakes, we repair what needs repairing, we change direction when we need to, and, if we are fortunate, we become a little wiser with every step along the way.
That is the journey of water, and I believe it is also the journey of conservation.
Water doesn’t recognize the boundaries we draw on a map. It doesn’t know whether it came from a farm field, a construction site, a subdivision, a business parking lot, or someone’s backyard. It simply moves, and as it moves, it carries with it the results of the decisions we make.
That realization has become a big part of why the work we are doing through the Elkhart County Soil & Water Conservation District is so important to me.
When we developed our Water Quality of Life Manual, we weren’t simply creating another document to sit on a shelf. We were creating a way for people to understand that water quality is connected to everyday life, whether you are farming a thousand acres, building a home, designing a subdivision, managing a business, maintaining a backyard, or simply raising a family in the community. The water that leaves one property eventually becomes part of somebody else’s story, and understanding that connection is where conservation begins.
That same idea is what I see in Pay Dirt.
Pay Dirt has grown into much more than an event for me because it gives us a chance to bring people together who don’t always find themselves sitting at the same table. Farmers, contractors, engineers, developers, conservation professionals, students, landowners, and community leaders may approach the land from very different perspectives, but when it rains, we are all standing in the same watershed, and the water doesn’t stop to ask which profession we belong to before it starts moving.
A farmer planting a cover crop is part of that water journey. A contractor stabilizing a construction site is part of that journey. An engineer designing a stormwater system is part of it. A homeowner putting in a rain garden, a landowner protecting a waterway, a community improving drainage, and a student learning how a watershed works are all part of the same story.
Conservation. I have come to believe that our field demonstrations, our county fair outreach, our STEM programs, our landowner conversations, our conservation events, and even the simple conversations we have with someone who stops and asks a question are much more important than they may seem at the time.
Because change doesn’t always begin with a major program or a large investment.
Sometimes it begins with a conversation. Sometimes it is a farmer saying, “I’ll try it.” Sometimes it is a contractor realizing there is a better way to protect a site. Sometimes it is an engineer looking at stormwater from a different perspective. Sometimes it is a student standing over a watershed model and suddenly realizing that the water doesn’t just disappear. And sometimes it is simply someone who sees the world a little differently than they did five minutes earlier.
I’ve learned through my years in conservation that I don’t have all the answers, and neither does anyone else. I have also learned that when we are willing to listen to one another, share what we know, and respect the experiences that each person brings to the table, we can usually find a better answer together than any one of us could find alone.
That may have been the part of EPCOT that stayed with me the most.
I was watching people who were different from one another share an experience, and it reminded me that we don’t have to be the same to work toward the same future.
My own journey has taken me from farming to conservation and into a life of working with landowners, engineers, contractors, educators, students, businesses, government, and community leaders, and along that journey I have learned that conservation isn’t about getting everything right the first time.
It is about progress.
It is about being willing to learn from what didn’t work, being willing to try something different, and being willing to admit that someone else may have a better idea.
Most of all, it is about understanding that none of us is really traveling this journey alone. The farmer needs the engineer. The engineer needs the contractor. The contractor needs the landowner. The community needs the farmer. The student needs the teacher. And all of us need clean water.
The water leaving my farm isn’t just my water. The water leaving a construction site isn’t just the contractor’s water. The water moving through our community isn’t just the government’s responsibility. It is our water. And that makes it our responsibility.
I’ve spent a lifetime working on the land, and the longer I do it, the more I understand that conservation isn’t about perfection. It is about stewardship, about taking what we have been given and doing our best with it, about recognizing that the decisions we make today become part of someone else’s life tomorrow.
The next generation may never know about the meetings we attended, the grants we wrote, the demonstrations we held, or the programs we created, but they will live with the results of the choices we make.
That is why this journey matters.
When I think back to that walk-through EPCOT, I don’t really think about Disney World anymore. I think about the people I watched, and how different we can be while still sharing something incredibly important.
I think about water.
I think about the farm.
I think about conservation.
And I think about the responsibility we have to keep moving forward.
Water keeps moving, and so do we. It moves through our farms, our communities, and our lives, connecting one person to another and one generation to the next. And perhaps our job is not to control that journey, but to influence it in a way that leaves the next person downstream with something better than what we were given.
That is what I want my journey to leave behind.
Cleaner water.
Healthier soil.
Stronger communities.
People who are willing to work together.
And a landscape that is a little more resilient than the one I inherited.
I don’t know exactly where my journey will take me from here, but I know what I want to leave along the way, and I am grateful for every farmer who has taught me something, every landowner who has trusted us, every student who has asked a good question, every partner who has challenged us to think differently and every person who has been willing to take one more step toward a better future.
Because in the end, maybe the journey of water really is the journey of us.
Water keeps moving. Life keeps moving. And our opportunity is to make sure that where the journey goes next is better because we were part of it.