2024 was the second summer that the Nepco Lake District was responsible for aquatic plant harvesting on Nepco Lake. This summer there were three harvester operators guiding our two 30 year old harvesting machines on the lake – one on each side of the Hwy 13 bridge. Like last summer, we again used a rented pickup truck and rented trailer to transport harvested plants to our disposal sites.
We start this year by moving the machines into the lake in late May. Harvesting operations started on June 10th of 2024, and continued through September 1, 2024. During this period a total of 515,450 pounds of aquatic plants were removed from the lake in 186 trailer loads, with 64% of the plants coming from the West side of the lake and 36% from the East side of the lake. The plants on the West side of the lake were unloaded in the far NW corner of the lake off Highway Z. Thanks to Wood County for allowing us to haul loads despite the construction on Highway Z this summer. The plants on the East side of the lake were unloaded at the boat launch at the Nepco Lake County Park, same as last year, and again thanks to Wood County Parks for allowing us that access.
Eel grass plants (also called celery weed), which is the predominant plant throughout the lake, represented 85% of the plants removed. We also removed water star grass plants (10% of plants removed) and removed some Eurasian Milfoil plants (5%).
We were very fortunate this year that we were able to dispose of nearly all of the plants from the lake at the WDNR Nursery site on Griffith Avenue. This location was a great benefit for us, in that it was a much shorter drive to unload compared to our locations used last year. We were also fortunate in that the sites used last year were not available early this year due to the exceptionally wet spring that we had.
This was our first year of doing lab testing on the plants removed from the lake. The testing allows us to verify the amount of nutrients and other elements that were removed from the lake, and to verify how the soil at the disposal locations was enriched.
All in all, we consider our 2024 harvesting efforts to be a success. We heard many compliments from people using the lake that the navigation and fishing lanes created by harvesting were a dramatic improvement compared to a few years ago, when there was no harvesting on the lake.
That said, we had some harvesting challenges, and we continue to learn from our experience with hopes of improving next year. The main hydraulic pump on the East machine failed, and was quickly repaired and back in service at a cost about $4,000. We had a few other hydraulic hose failures and other breakdowns, but the machines ran nearly every day possible based on weather conditions. We had a few complaints about excess floating plants drifting onto shorelines, and we did our best to respond. We hope everyone understands our operators do their best to collect floating plants, but not all floating plants are from the harvesters, and we can’t possibly remove them all. Our thanks to Jeff Manor for his leadership to supervise our harvesting operations, and for Jeff’s efforts to complete all the repairs on the machines.
Both machines are again back out of the lake, and moving these large machines is no easy feat. The much needed repairs and rebuild of the rusty metal on the front of the East machine was completed in the weeks after it was removed from the lake. These repairs should extend the life of this machine for many years.
Based on our learnings from this year, we hope to improve our harvesting operations again in 2025.