LANSING – A state initiative that provides grants to promote conservation and prevent pollution appears to be effective but the Michigan Department of Agriculture should adopt better ways to evaluate its impact, a new report said.

The three environmental stewardship programs distribute grants for such purposes as technical aid and education for farmers, other landowners and local communities.

The programs’ goal is to encourage voluntary conservation practices to protect groundwater, forest resources, soil and wildlife habitats, the state Auditor General’s office said. The office is a nonpartisan investigative arm of the Legislature.

The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program is limited to three watersheds: River Raisin in Southeast Michigan, Lake Macatawa in  West Michigan and Saginaw Bay in the Thumb and Lake Huron area. It distributes about $1 million a year in state funds and another $7 million in federal money.

The multimillion-dollar Groundwater Stewardship and Forestry Assistance programs operate statewide.

The review examined Agriculture’s Environmental Stewardship Division, which makes grants to county drain commissioners, local soil and water conservation districts, such organizations as the Michigan Turfgrass Foundation and individual farmers.

Division Director Gordon Wenk said the department already has taken steps to improve how its field staff documents the monitoring of grants.

But Wenk questioned the need for the report’s recommendations for enhanced evaluation systems. “If the purpose (of the programs) is to implement risk reduction and implement pollution prevention,” then they’re successful, he said.

The report said, “We could not determine what effect, if any, the division’s promotional efforts had on the conservation of natural resources because the division had not collected outcome data needed to evaluate program effectiveness,” the report said.

It said the division doesn’t know whether programs actually “reduced the level of groundwater contamination or provided for better management and protection of forestland.”

For example, it said that while focusing on farming conservation practices to reduce such risks, the division didn’t test groundwater contamination levels before and after such practices were implemented. Therefore, the division couldn’t “confirm that the practices had a positive impact on Michigan’s Environment.”

The manager of Michigan Farm Bureau’s agricultural ecology department saidthe stewardship programs are highly successful.

For example, Scott Piggott said, the groundwater program has helped close more than 5,000 abandoned wells. “They’re direct conduits into the groundwater, so there’s no pollution going down them.”

Piggott also said federal researchers have found that the practices which the programs promote do prevent pollution.

And he questioned that recommendation from the auditor general: “The idea is how do you measure environmental impacts when you stop pollution from happening in the first place? It’s counting widgets.”

Agriculture told the auditor general that the scope of Michigan’s programs and their impact on natural resources make it “technically infeasible and cost prohibitive to actively measure these types of outcomes,” the report noted.