Decent flooding last night, luckily the only thing that washed away was my pig watering trough. The 1st pic and video show my normal crossing point.
You can see from the flattened grass that the creek came up and out of it. This shows the importance of riparian areas that are only lightly grazed once or twice yearly to clean them up. 
I also believe this proves my thesis that having trees within 5 feet of stream banks is retarded and leads to more erosion. #permaculture
There are countless natural streams here, far away from humans, where trees grow along banks, and they're not eroding. 🤷🏻♂️
Theres not actively eroding*
When the big trees are left to grow on stream banks, the creek cuts into that spot and then you get one massive erosion event when the tree falls and the root wad falls in. I can send you pictures of the various stages of this if you'd like, as i was only able to cut some down.
Also consider some degree of erosion is in fact natural. It's the prevention of erosion contributed by humans and industrial ag production systems that should be the focus regarding the preservation of topsoil for civilizations sake IMO (Wendell Berry stuff).
I agree, but on my particular property, the riparian zone is the only area of erosion that needs work (other than pig spots which is much more of a game). In all honesty, the bank needs to be graded and have 2-3 check dams installed, but i have to decide if i think its worth violating federal law to implement that. My main thesis tho is that shrubs and forbes withing 5 ft of a stream bank are ideal
Interesting that you think grading the stream bank would violate federal law. Not saying you're right or wrong, personally I don't care about federal law and we've contacted state EPA recently without any response so enforcement is laughable at best depending upon location.
Our conservation office did a public event on our farm years ago and recommended grading stream banks for areas on our farm and said cost sharing was available if we wanted to do that. We didn't care to incur costs for non revenue generating projects, as any business should, but were open to pursuing if they wanted a demo site--didn't end up happening.
The head of my township also recently texted me saying landowners are allowed to move dirt on their property without permit/approval 🤷 ... Holding on to that text 😏
Lol yeah i mean i will probably do it eventually anyways but with the amount of drainage thst goes into our creek, its jurisdiction is under the army co(r)ps. I dont think i would ever actually be reported, but because i approached nrcs about cost share I want to get some time between that and when i do it so i have some claim that i didn't do anything. Nrcs is a scam for new farmers imo. Its basically for existing farms to get revenue to fix their farms, not for new entrants to add those practices to their farms.
