After more than 17 years of helping local farmers improve pasture land, office manager/technician Cindy Mannis retired from the Missouri Soil and Water Conservation District office in Salem at the end of May.
During her tenure, the SWC’s Cost-Share program grew to $1 million or more the last two years. That growth will continue under her replacement, Myra Swyers, and longtime technician Chris Jones, board chairman Paul Heithold said.
“When we hired Cindy we were doing approximately $30,000 of business through state cost-share,” he said. “The last couple of years we’ve been doing right at a million or a little over a million dollars. That’s money that comes directly into Dent County.”
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The Missouri Soil and Water Conservation Program supports a soil and water conservation district in each of Missouri’s 114 counties. Each district provides technical and financial assistance, education and best practices to local farmers and landowners.
The program assists farmers and landowners with soil and water conservation by providing partial reimbursement for a number of management practices. These voluntary practices are designed to address areas such as grazing, irrigation, woodland, pest and nutrient management, animal waste, ground and surface water and soil erosion.
When Mannis started, a farmer was limited to $5,000 in improvements.
“Now we do contracts up to maybe $35,000 for one person in a year,” she said. “That way they can get everything done at once,” including seeding programs, pest management and development of a grazing system.
Those efforts have borne fruit.
“There should be some really great grazing systems out there in Dent County now,” she said. “I think people’s pastures have improved, the farms have improved.”
She noted that often people from St. Louis retire and buy an old farm here.
“They don’t know where to start,” she said. “They come to us and we get them going, get a plan for them and go from there.”
The farmers work primarily with technician Chris Jones.
“He’s excellent at his job and a very good employee,” Mannis said. “The new employee, Myra Swyers, she’s very orientated to agriculture. She has a farm and knows a lot of people in the county so she’s a big asset to the district.”
Heithold said Swyers is responsible for getting improvements programmed through the state and offered to the landowners, and is in charge of making sure the paperwork is done. That might include pasture renovations, fencing off streams or adding clover to fields, for example, he said.
Mannis pointed to the Dent County office as one of only 11 standalone district offices of the 114 in the state.
“The others are in a USDA facility where they don’t have to pay rent,” she said. “For a standalone office to do over a million dollars, I’m proud of that. I’m proud of the team work. That’s a lot of contracts and landowners.”
She’s seen many changes over the years, with more programs added and the ability to make so many improvements in a single year.
“It’s a big asset to the landowner,” she said. “They don’t have to wait three years to get a grazing system in. They can do it in one year.”
The Soil and Water Conservation Program is funded by the Parks, Soils and Water sales tax which has been voter-approved for over 30 years. Since the initial passage of the sales tax, Missouri has prevented more than 179 million tons of soil erosion, improving the state’s water quality and keeping farmland productive, according to state figures.
Now that she’s retired, Mannis is looking forward to a more relaxed lifestyle.
“I want every day to be a Saturday,” she laughed. “I can sit on my porch in the morning and have coffee and just work out on the farm and enjoy it now instead of not being able to get to it.”
Since the passing of her husband, Rick, three years ago, she and her daughter have been working the farm.
Mannis has fond memories of her time at the district office.
“I enjoyed working there, enjoyed the people, the landowners,” she said. “It was a rewarding job because you saw progress on people’s farms. That was good to see.”
