Read the full story in the Grand Forks Herald.
After years of fierce debate, political struggle and rewriting, Minnesota’s buffer law was finally implemented in November 2017 after being signed into law in 2015 by then Gov. Mark Dayton.
Buffers, sometimes referred to as riparian filter strips, are vegetated parcels of land next to rivers, lakes, streams or wetlands. They reduce erosion and help prevent water pollution by filtering out phosphorus, nitrogen and sediment before runoff reaches waterways, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
But many landowners and farmers bristled against the law’s mandate to set portions of their privately owned land aside to install 50-foot buffer zones on land along public waterways and 16-foot buffer zones on land along public ditches.
Unhappy as landowners might have been regarding the law, they are complying with it.
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