Have you ever wondered what the Oxford County Soil and Water Conservation

District is or what the people working for it do?

        The Oxford County Soil & Water Conservation District (OCSWCD) is one of 16 districts in Maine that help people conserve land, water, and forests.  While each district has different focuses, we are united by a single goal: to assist locally-led conservation.  We work with local stakeholders to identify local natural resource conservation problems, develop solutions, and assist in applying the solutions to the land.

Soil and Water Conservation Districts arose as a result of the environmental disaster of the 1930’s known as the Dust Bowl.  This event brought the nation’s attention to the fact that soil is not a renewable resource as it takes approximately 100 years for only 1 inch of topsoil to form. During the 1930’s, farmers were losing about 3 to 5 inches of topsoil per year.  As this life-giving soil rained down on Washington D.C. there was a federal call to action by soil scientist Hugh Hammond Bennett to create laws to  provided the basis for local conservation districts. Maine joined in by ratifying the authorizing legislation in 1941.  Today, we are losing topsoil to erosion at the rate of about 5 tons per acre a year, or about the thickness of a dime. The function of conservation districts was, and still is, to address the needs within the district for maintaining or improving soil and water quality. 

  Besides local people, we work with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and other state and federal agencies. We are funded by state and county sources, private donations, and state and federal grants, and are governed by a volunteer Board of Supervisors.  While we are a state agency, we operate more like a non-profit organization and we do not enforce any regulations.