The Division of Soil and Water Conservation in NCDA&CS has a new – yet familiar – leader in its Engineering Services Section. Rachel Smith was promoted to the section chief position this summer.
Generally speaking, her job entails overseeing the regional engineers throughout the state. Those engineers provide technical assistance to local soil and water conservation districts when those districts have projects that need engineering design.
There are eleven regional engineer positions (although four are vacant right now), three engineering technicians and two other support positions in the section, for a total of 15.
“My job is to manage all of those people and the workload that comes in from the 96 districts to be sure we get the work completed,” Smith said.
In casual conversation, Smith can easily showcase her vast knowledge of the engineering assistance the division provides to local districts. She explained that the regional engineers she now oversees provide design for two types of projects – those related to water quantity and those related to water quality. Quantity-related projects include water storage ponds for crop irrigation or livestock. The ponds help with resiliency to drought.
Water quality projects can be related to agriculture (the Agricultural Cost Share Program (ASCP)) or related to areas outside of agriculture (Community Conservation Assistance Program (CCAP)). Examples of agricultural water quality projects include (1.) concrete pads at livestock feeding areas that reduce runoff and erosion, (2.) a dry stack to compost manure at a poultry house, (3.) streambank or shoreline protection, (4.) stabilization structures to reduce erosion, (5.) building or closing animal waste lagoons, (6.) facilities to safely handle and contain agricultural chemicals. Community water quality projects are more related to homes, businesses or even government facilities such as schools. Some examples include rain gardens, abandoned well closures, permeable pavement, stream restoration or streambank and shoreline protection (again, for non-agricultural areas).
“…we can really see the impact we have on that small scale, but when you aggregate all of that together with all of the projects we do you can see the much bigger impact we have.”
Smith’s work aligns pretty well with interests she developed early in life. She grew up in western North Carolina on what she says people these days would call a gentleman’s farm. Her dad was originally from Swain County and had a burley tobacco allotment that he leased out when she was a child, and they had about ten head of cattle. Her mother was from eastern North Carolina, having grown up with family in the Henderson area (Vance County) where soybeans and other row crops are more common.
“I was always around agriculture – not huge production agriculture but more of the sustaining for our family type of agriculture,” Smith said. “When I went to college, I thought I wanted to be an aerospace engineer, but I realized pretty quickly that that was not what I wanted to do.”
A class at N.C. State University introduced her to other potential paths. Since she’d been a very environmentally conscious teenager, she looked into environmental engineering through the civil department, but she found it focused on things such as petroleum and industrial or municipal wastewater.
“I really wanted to be on a smaller scale than that,” Smith said. “I was more interested in what people could do just within their immediate surroundings. So that’s where I discovered bio and ag engineering, and it was just something I felt really drawn to.”
She became particularly interested in stream restoration as an undergraduate. That’s something that has been a primary focus in her engineering career and something she says led her to where she is now. After working in private consulting doing stream restoration for several years, she transitioned to the public sector, working as an engineer with the Henderson (County) Soil and Water Conservation District.
In 2017, she started work in the Division of Soil and Water Conservation as a regional engineer (the type she now manages) covering 18 counties in western North Carolina. Then in 2022, she became the supervisor for the division’s western engineering team – a role she held until the recent promotion.
“I much prefer working with the individuals, as far as the farmers and others, and providing them with the help that they need versus the big corporations,” Smith said. “The job allows me to grow professionally while also maintaining relationships and the ability to see the results of what I’m doing on a close personal level instead of being so detached from the work that I do and the impact that it has.”
Smith said she also enjoys a good work-life balance in the division, which enables her to stick with the work and continue helping people.
“We’re doing work on a small scale, sometimes on an acre of land,” Smith said. “So we can really see the impact we have on that small scale, but when you aggregate all of that together with all of the projects we do you can see the much bigger impact we have.”