Narration: Quail by the Creek Farm is in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. When Bill King first bought the farm, it was in pretty bad shape.

Bill King: You could hardly take a step without stepping on an old oil bottle or an old tractor oil filter, trash everywhere, hypodermic needles for inoculating cows and pigs, empty vials, you could not take a step without stepping on some sort of trash, so things are getting a lot better, we’ve made a lot of progress. I can walk around without inoculating myself against some cattle disease.

Narration: Long before the cattle farmers, Civil War soldiers marched through this rural Virginia property.

Bill King: It has some history, it was some degree involved in Battle of New Market, it’s a little over 58 acres. It takes in a little more than ¾ of a mile of Smith Creek.

Narration: Smith Creek runs all the way from these...
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Promo: In our next installment of Tales from Urban Forests, we head to the base of the Appalachian Mountains, to witness one landowner’s mission to convert his farmland to forest.

Intro: In Maryland, Virginia and Washington, DC, partners are trying to address the health of the Chesapeake Bay, the country’s largest estuary. There’s a lot of pollution in the Bay and solutions along the shores of the Bay are obvious. What’s not so obvious are solutions 105 miles inland, but that’s where there’s a real success story. Katie Gott from SOUNDPRINT reports.

Outro: Runoff from farms can be full of pollutants. But storm water runoff from streets in cities can also be saturated with harmful substances such as gasoline, oil and trash. In our next program, we head to the inner city of Baltimore where partners have joined forces to clean up the runoff flowing into the harbor and into the Chesapeake Bay. This program is part of the ongoing series, Tales from Urban Forests. The series is produced by the SOUNDPRINT Media Center, and supported in part by American Forests and the U.S. Forest Service. For more information on the series, please visit trees.soundprint.org.