There might be different levels of permitting also.
I know in my case my big pond is just under acre foot capacity where greater permitting would have kicked in. That was by design on my part.
I also know in Kansas at least, once the watershed gets to a certain size of if the water flow is enough to be marked in blue on official maps the Corps and perhaps more agencies would become involved. I kept everything I did so that I only had to answer to local authorities.
I had a waterway I wanted to put in on one of my farms. Basically straighten up a dry creek (only runs when it rains) and make it into a grass water way so we can farm back and forth over it by raising equipment instead of having two small fields. It took in a little bit too much watershed so the local NRCS guy said we would have to get Corps approval and they would be involved in the required design. What should have been a simple job I could have done in a day with my dozer and scraper they wanted to make a grassed area hundreds of feet wide. Overkill by a long shot. So it is still a natural wash.
Point is there are breaking points in regulations where once you get to a certain level lots more sometimes very picky people get involved. Read picky as expensive. Every state has their own rules then there is the national stuff. I keep my ponds such that they stay within the jurisdiction of the local and state. But each to his own. If you want larger BOW's or damming up flowing water, be prepared to jump through more hoops, perhaps spend anywhere from a little to a lot of money on permitting, and get an education on bureaucratic hierarchies and pecking order.
I gotta tell this story. Once upon a time when we raised turkeys commercially for Butterball we decided to build a litter storage building (building to store turkey poop in). Keeping the litter under cover is both an environmental precaution and it also makes the poop more uniform in moisture, holds on to its nutrients better (better fertilizer) and spreads out of the truck much better. Your and my government (our tax dollars at work) had some incentives and cost share for farmers to build such sheds on the environmental end to encourage them to do so. Of course there were lots of hoops to jump through including to agreeing on sample testing, soil testing and other requirements for something like 10 years, but those are best management practices anyway so no big deal. So I checked into it. They would cost share as I recall 50% on the building. Great. So I apply. Have to have a plan. Ok so I come up with some building bids and concrete bids. Not good enough. Has to be engineered. Ok, none of my building guys want to touch it but some state guys would help out with the plans. Great. They come back with the plans. The plans have very specific bending requirements on the rebar and it looks as if we are building a Wal-Mart instead of a shit shed. Get a quote to get all this fancy stuff done and it is 4 times what I was originally going to spend on a building. Same size building. To store poop to keep the rain off. With the cost share it is still twice as much as it would cost me to build my own building which was way more than adequate and as good as any litter shed on any farm I had ever seen. So I said keep your plans and I built something myself the way I wanted it. No hoops to jump through either.
Sometimes it boggles the mind just how much money can be wasted when you get high enough up the bureaucratic ladder.
Just a warning if you get the upper upty ups involved.
Last edited by snrub; 05/05/17 09:53 PM.
