Orange County Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors: Kane Foreman

Name: Kane Alexander Foreman

Age: 24

Party affiliation: Unaffiliated

Campaign website: N/A

Occupation & employer: Landscaper/Owner at Foreman Grounds Management LLC

Years lived in the area: 22

1. Why are you running for the position of Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor? In your answer, please explain your understanding of the role and why it is important.

I’m 24, born in Chapel Hill, and I make my living on this county’s land. The problems this district exists to solve are the problems I deal with every day. Every week I see topsoil washing out of yards into ditches, creek banks eating sections of turf season after season, and properties gone over completely to invasive plants. 

The district isn’t a regulator, it’s a board of five that oversees a budget, works with district staff who provide technical assistance to landowners, and decides where a modest pot of cost-share money goes. Nobody gets fined by the district. Landowners volunteer, and the district’s job is to make doing the right thing affordable enough that they say yes. These programs can cover a large share of the cost of responsible stewardship, and in my experience most people who own land here have no idea they exist. That’s a solvable problem, and it’s most of why I’m running.

I’m not a soil scientist; I run my own soil tests. I don’t have decades on this board; I’m a working operator who’s earning his credentials. What I do have is horizon. At 24, I’m not looking at one term, I’m looking at how I can serve this county for the next forty years.

2. What are the three most pressing issues facing the Conservation District and Board of Supervisors? How do you plan to address these issues? Please be specific.

“1. Everyone talks about farmland being developed, but there’s an angle I don’t see discussed as much. Over the last three decades, the number of farms in Orange County has gone up, from 433 in 1992 to 687 in 2022, meanwhile the acreage has gone down, from 56,555 acres in 2012 to 53,068 in 2022. Land isn’t just being lost, it’s fragmenting. Working farms are becoming smaller plots, which are harder to farm profitably and easier for developers to swallow.

The county has good tools here, namely VAD and EVAD. But there is a difference between the two. A standard VAD member can revoke the conservation agreement in writing if they decide to sell, while the Enhanced VAD agreement is irrevocable for ten years and conveys with the land. Neither program is run by the Soil and Water board. But enrolling farmland requires a conservation plan, and district staff are the ones who help prepare it. That makes the district a natural first point of contact, because it’s already sitting across the table from these landowners. It should use that position deliberately and work to move VAD farms up to EVAD, as well as getting in front of farms at the point of generational transfer.

2. Orange County carries two nutrient reduction obligations at once, and holds Chapel Hill’s drinking water. The watershed divide runs through this county, which means we’re required to meet both the Falls Lake rules and the Jordan Lake rules. The Falls rules require nitrogen and phosphorus loads be cut from a 2006 baseline, and Stage II of it calls for additional reductions in the upper watershed. Orange County is in that upper watershed. Jordan Lake, meanwhile, has rated eutrophic essentially since it was filled.

Closer to home, OWASA supplies drinking water to roughly 70,000 people in Chapel Hill and Carrboro from University Lake and Cane Creek Reservoir, and about 90 percent of those watersheds sit inside Orange County. What happens on our land comes out of our taps.

The district isn’t the enforcement mechanism for any of that. But it is the voluntary, incentive-based side of the same problem, which is the side that I find works. Typically 75 percent cost-share assistance is available to install best management practices, and the board sets funding priorities annually. Those priorities should follow the obligation, so we’re putting money where the Stage II reductions actually have to come from, and where runoff reaches the reservoirs we drink out of.

3. Who owns our land is changing. This is the one I see every single week. An Orange County property, maybe five acres, bought by someone who wanted to move out to the country. There’s a creek in the back with a failing bank, invasives taking the treeline, and they have no idea the district exists. This isn’t a gap in the district’s effort. This is a gap between who the programs were designed for and who increasingly owns the land now. I’d work to reach these owners through the channels they use: realtors at closing, county permitting, and town newsletters.”

3. As the Triangle continues to grow, what steps does the region need to take to ensure adequate water supply going forward? What role should the Board of Supervisors play in long-term water supply and conservation planning?

The region already has a planning structure for this, and this board isn’t in it. Triangle utilities have been collaborating on supply planning since 2009. That work produced the Triangle Regional Water Supply Plan, which identified allocations from Jordan Lake and other sources to meet each utility’s needs through 2060. The Western Intake Partnership is building toward a new intake on the west side of Jordan Lake to make

Under that plan, both Hillsborough and Orange County need Jordan Lake allocations to meet their long-term needs. Our existing supply is also more fragile than it appears. Hillsborough draws from the Eno, with the West Fork Eno Reservoir upstream to keep the flow up in dry stretches. OWASA depends heavily on Cane Creek Reservoir, which holds about 3 billion gallons but collects from a watershed of only 32 square miles. That’s a lot of storage fed by a small catchment, which is why it can take over a year to refill once it’s drawn down. OWASA has also concluded there are no large, cost-effective conservation opportunities left on the demand side. The region’s remaining levers are new sources, interconnection, and protecting the yield of what we already have.

That last one is the district’s area. Protecting reservoir capacity is soil work. University Lake holds roughly 450 million gallons and drains a thirty-square-mile watershed. For a reservoir that small, sediment coming off Orange County land is a direct subtraction from storage. Erosion control and stream-bank stabilization are the cheapest water supply lever we can pull, because storage you don’t lose is storage you don’t have to build in the future. I’d want the board to consider that when it sets funding priorities.

4. This year’s drought heavily affected farmers. What should the Board of Supervisors do to support farmers in recovering from the drought and associated losses, and going forward as climate change increases the likelihood of worsening drought?

Orange County went into moderate drought in late November, was under a severe classification by early January, and by late summer was in exceptional drought while most of the state sat in extreme to severe. Alex Kissinger, the Cooperative Extension livestock and forage specialist for Orange and Alamance, reported hay yields at fractions of what they should be, forcing cattle farmers to cull herds or sell animals off. Jonathan Smith, who leads the extension offices for our two counties, said the heat and dry weather hit local tobacco and strawberry growers, and that even farmers who irrigated found the ponds they draw from running low.

On the recovery side, this board doesn’t write disaster payments. However, Orange County was included in the federal drought disaster designation this spring, which opens emergency loans, and pasture-based livestock producers here qualify for the Livestock Forage Disaster Program because we hit extreme drought. The District sits alongside NRCS, and for a lot of landowners it’s the practical front door to federal assistance they wouldn’t have navigated otherwise. Making sure every affected producer in this county actually got connected to what they qualified for is concrete, and unglamorous, but it’s important and it doesn’t cost the district funds. 

Farmers who irrigated and watched their ponds go low paid a hefty premium this year for an expensive lesson, and 2027 is the year they’ll act on it. Pond construction and repair, irrigation improvements, and farm water supply work are exactly what the Agricultural Water Resources Assistance Program funds, and the district administers it. That program should be pushed hard right now, while the lesson is fresh.

Going forward, if dry years are going to be more frequent, the district’s real tool isn’t water, it’s soil. Soil with structure and organic matter holds more of the rain it gets and gives it back to the crop slowly. Cover crops, reduced tillage, and the soil health practices are drought infrastructure, and they’re cheaper than any storage anyone could build. 

The board needs to weigh drought resilience explicitly when it sets annual funding priorities. This year is not an anomaly we recover from and move past. And I’d want us tracking whether the money reached the operations that got hurt the worst. Cattle and hay producers took the sharpest losses here, and they should show up in the next round of cost-share.

5. Climate change is also contributing to worse inland flooding, like the Triangle saw from Tropical Storm Chantal in 2025. How can the board support the county’s climate resilience?

Chantal was a local event. Over ten inches of rain fell on Hillsborough in about twelve hours. The Eno crested at 23.04 feet near Huckleberry Springs. In Hillsborough the river peaked at more than 1,400 times the previous day’s flow, and the gage itself was destroyed in the process. The county reported 448 homes directly impacted.

Directly, most of this isn’t the board’s jurisdiction. The worst problems showed up when Hillsborough’s water treatment facility and a wastewater pump station flooded, leaving residents under no-water, conserve, and boil advisories across five days. That’s a town utility and emergency management problem. Storm-water regulation and floodplain management run through the county ordinance. None of that is the Soil and Water board. What the district does own is the land between the rain and the river.
No soil on earth absorbs ten inches in twelve hours, and soil health practices would not have stopped Chantal. What they do decide is how much of the county’s ordinary rainfall becomes runoff, and that’s most of the rain we get. Soil with structure and organic matter takes water in instead of shedding it, which is the same reason it holds moisture through a dry June. 

Where the district can act directly on flooding is the streambank. After Chantal the Eno ran the color of chocolate milk. That’s a devastating loss of soil, for the landowner it came off of and for the reservoir space it fills downstream. Stream-bank stabilization and riparian buffers slow water, hold banks, and keep soil on the land. The district already provides the technical assistance and the cost-share to install them.

6. Most candidates in this race have listed protecting farmland as a priority. What steps can and should the Board of Supervisors take in protecting farmland, and how would you balance that goal with the pressures of growth and development?

My view on this is straightforward, and it’s shaped by running a business.
Farmland is lost because farming stops paying. Farmers who want to keep farming don’t sell land they don’t have to. The acreage of farmland in Orange County tracks the margins of the farmers who work it. This is an economic problem before it’s a land use problem. 

That means the highest-leverage farmland protection this board does is the ordinary work already in front of it. It’s the cost-share that lets a producer install practices that keep them solvent, it’s the technical assistance from people who genuinely care, and it’s the conservation planning by genuine stewards. Every year a farm stays profitable is a year it stays off the market.

That property that doesn’t need an easement, which can’t alone be the answer. The county’s Lands Legacy program does great work and I support it, but buying development rights means paying something close to development value, which is why it moves in dozens of acres a year against losses measured in thousands per decade. You can’t outbid a developer on price. What you can do is change what the land earns while it’s still in production, so the owner isn’t looking for the exit in the first place.
On balancing that against growth, I don’t think this board should be an obstacle to development. It isn’t a land use body, it has no zoning authority, and Orange County has real housing pressure that pretending otherwise doesn’t solve. A conservation board that positions itself as anti-growth is spending credibility it needs for the work it can actually do.

But there’s a supply constraint here that I don’t think always gets weighted properly. Not all land is interchangeable. Prime agricultural soils are a small fraction of the county’s acreage, they took geologic time to form, and no amount of money makes more of them once they’re under the pavement. If the county has to grow, and it does, then the question worth asking is whether a project has to sit on irreplaceable soil, or whether it could sit two hundred yards over on ground that isn’t. I’d argue for growth that treats prime soil as the finite asset it is. 

7. What steps should the county take to prevent water pollution, whether from runoff or chemicals like PFAS? What role should the Board of Supervisors play in safeguarding clean water?

“Runoff is the district’s work. Nutrients, sediment, and bacteria reaching our streams come off land, and the district exists to change how land is managed. This shows up as riparian buffers, streambank stabilization, livestock exclusion from creeks, nutrient management planning, and soil health practices that keep rainfall in the field instead of in the ditch. The county’s part is the regulatory side, through its stormwater ordinance and erosion control. Those are county functions, not the districts. The district’s part is making the voluntary path so accessible that landowners take it before anyone has to make them. When the board sets funding priorities, I’d want them pointed at the subwatersheds where the county’s Falls and Jordan obligations sit.

PFAS is a different animal, and I don’t believe this board alone can solve it. It isn’t produced by land management, it isn’t removed by a grassed waterway, and the authority to require testing, set discharge limits, and enforce against polluters sits with DEQ. Locally the response is already underway and expensive. OWASA has been treating with powdered activated carbon and reports finished drinking water at or below EPA’s limits. Every dollar OWASA spends on carbon protects households on the utility. Unfortunately a substantial share of this county is on private wells, and those households have no treatment plant. The district works directly with rural landowners and has standing relationships out there. I’d want the district used as a channel for helping people know what testing exists and where to go with results, in coordination with Environmental Health, which holds the authority on wells.”

8. Are there any other issues you would like to address?

I own a grounds management company that works on land in this county. This board allocates cost-share funding that pays landowners to install conservation practices and those landowners hire contractors to do the installing. So here is my commitment, and I’m putting it in writing before the election rather than after: 

Foreman Grounds Management will not accept work paid for in whole or in part by Orange County Soil and Water Conservation District cost-share funds for as long as I hold this seat. I will file a written disclosure of my business interests with the board at the start of my term. I will recuse myself from any vote involving a current client of my company. I will not apply for district cost-share on property I own or my family owns while serving.