Water Quality Pollutant Trading in Idaho:

A Step-by-Step Agricultural Community Guide

Purpose of this Guide

	Download> Click here to download "Water Quality Pollutant Trading in Idaho" (pdf 309 kb, 20 pages)

This guide introduces an innovative way to help clean-up Idaho rivers and lakes and make, or save, money doing it. The guide will assist you, as a farm or irrigation system owner/operator, to understand and execute a Water Quality Pollutant trade.

This website provides detailed guidance on how to execute a Water Quality Pollutant trade for agricultural operators in a watershed with an established market. It provides agricultural operators in other watersheds with an understanding of how trading could operate and enables effective participation in any new market development efforts.

In 2001, the State of Idaho established a pollutant trading marketplace for agricultural, industrial, and municipal sources of phosphorus in the Lower Boise River Watershed. The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) developed the Lower Boise River pollutant trading marketplace in anticipation of the likely need to reduce phosphorus discharges in response to water quality concerns.

This guide uses the Lower Boise River marketplace to provide an example-based, step-by-step guide for how an agricultural operator can trade with an industrial or municipal facility that holds a water quality permit. If you operate in a different watershed, this guide equips you to understand if and when your watershed may develop a marketplace and your opportunities if one were to emerge. If the market focuses on nutrients (such as phosphorus or nitrogen) or sediment, farm and irrigation system owner/operators may have an opportunity to trade.

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