Scott Peiffer is a landscaper. But he's also in the business of planting the seeds of environmental action in young minds.

Every fall for the last five years, the 50-year-old landscape contractor from Quarryville, Pa., has been working with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's  Susquehanna Watershed Education Program to teach students at Smith Middle School the value of planting strips of trees along streams on farmland.

(Photo: Scott Peiffer teaching Smith Middle School students how to plant.)

Most recently on November 7, CBF educators headed out with Peiffer and 18 eighth graders to a dairy farm on a tributary to Octoraro Creek in Lancaster County. In the morning, the educators taught the students how to check the health of the stream by dipping nets to survey for fish and sampling for nitrogen pollution.

Then in the afternoon, Peiffer taught the students how to plant oak, maple, and other trees along the waterway. "The trees remove the nutrient pollution before it gets to the stream. They act as an uptake filter, so the nitrogen won't flow down in to the Chesapeake Bay," Peiffer said. "And of course, the trees are also an excellent wildlife habitat."

Since 2001, Peiffer has worked with CBF and the Pennsylvania Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program—which provides much of the funding—to plant about 100,000 trees in roughly 100 different projects across the commonwealth. "That's a lot of trees, and a lot of holes to dig," Peiffer said. "No wonder I'm tired." His company, SEPCOM, also performs a wide variety of other landscape contracting work, from commercial to residential.

Peiffer said he is motivated by a sense of mission to protect the streams he loves. But he also finds working with his hands enjoyable. "I find it very peaceful, out working in nature, away from cities and towns and stuff. It's very fulfilling, feeling that you are contributing to the environment and saving the Bay. It's good to look back over a five or six acre area buffer you've created and say, 'Wow, that's a lot of trees and protections for the streams.' "

Sally Schach, an manager of SWEP, said Peiffer is committed to raising awareness about watershed health among students.

"He is positive and engaging, and he is dedicated to getting young people involved in community activities," said Schach. "He is really the key to making the whole thing happen."

Restoration projects like the ones Peiffer works on also often include raising fences along streams to keep cattle out of the waterways, so their waste doesn't flow downstream. Fencing often requires the construction of alternative water supplies for the cattle.

The projects center around the planting of forested buffer strips. Not only do the trees that Peiffer plants filter out runoff and sediment, but also to cool the streams and stimulate chemical processes in the creeks that remove nitrogen pollution.

Peiffer's 15-year-old daughter, Marla, for years has been going out on her father's educational field trips with other middle school students. Now she is so interested in her father's work that she is testing it.

As part of a school science project, in November she will be checking nitrogen levels upstream and downstream from a buffer strip that her father planted a few years ago, to see if her father's trees are really reducing pollution.

"I think she respects my work," Peiffer said.

Dave Wise, Pennsylvania restoration manager for CBF, said it's rare to find a contractor who goes so far beyond expectations. He noted that Peiffer volunteers to do things like present educational slide shows about stream health to community groups.

"His heart is in this in a big way," Wise said.

For more information, visit the CBF/Pennsylvania website.

11/29/2008