Portions of three lakes this season will have hand harvesting of Eurasian Water Milfoil (EWM) according to information from the Lower Eagle River Chain of Lakes Commission in Wisconsin. The affected area is composed of seven acres.
Since 2008, the commission has treated 1,117 acres of milfoil at a cost of $1.53 million. It took 8 years of herbicide management to bring the milfoil down to the current level.
Not wanting to abandon management and simply wait for EWM populations to reach levels that are again applicable for herbicide control, the Commission used a professional-based hand-harvesting program to keep the milfoil at a manageable level in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
Hand removal of invasive plants is the most intuitive of control methods. It is labor intensive as it involves removing and bagging the entire plant by hand. During hand harvesting, divers manually remove milfoil plants from the lake bottom, with care taken to remove the entire root crown and not to create fragments.