A completed wetland mitigation project in Calhoun County. (Photo courtesy of Iowa Agricultural Mitigation)
Iowa Agricultural Mitigation Inc. is restoring wetlands in Iowa and offsetting the costs by selling the credits back to farmers who farm wetland acres on their farms.
Recently the nonprofit was awarded just under $1 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to restore 75 acres of wetland in Wright County as part of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Wetland Mitigation Banking Program.
Eric Rector, the Wright County Conservation Board director, said he wanted to start a water quality project in his county because he doesn’t think “the needle is moving very fast on those statewide.”
According to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, 11% of Iowa’s surface area was wetland prior to European settlement of the state. Since then, 95% of wetlands have been drained in the state, and a recent study from the Union of Concerned Scientists reported Iowa has 640,000 acres of wetlands.
The same report found that wetlands in Iowa alone could mitigate $477 million worth of flood damage to residential areas, if the ecological systems are protected from agricultural practices that drain, fill or divert water from the wetlands.
The project in Wright County would restore 75 acres of wetlands and stock the Iowa Agricultural Mitigation bank with wetland credits for farmers to purchase and offset affected wetlands on their properties.
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Wetland banking
Kevin Griggs, the program manager for Iowa Agricultural Mitigation, has been part of the project since its inception in 2010. Griggs said the nonprofit was founded with a mission to restore wetlands in Iowa and generate mitigation credits for farmers at a low cost.
A wetland conservation provision of the 1985 Farm Bill, commonly called “swampbuster” discourages agricultural production on wetlands by restricting a farmer’s ability to receive USDA benefits if they engage in any activities that alter the wetland.
Farmers who have drained or altered wetlands on their property to create more productive farmland can purchase credits from the wetland mitigation bank, acre-for-acre, to stay in compliance with swampbuster.
“They’re able to solve an important issue that they’ve got in their farming operation by simply writing a check and filling out a form,” Griggs said.
Farmers always have the option to restore wetlands on their own property, but Griggs said the farmed and tilled acres are usually “low quality” wetlands.
“Our intent all along was, well, maybe it’s okay to replace those low quality wetlands with high quality wetlands someplace else,” Griggs said.
Griggs looks for areas that could result in a more substantial wetland. Most of the time, that’s in north central Iowa, also known as the Des Moines lobe, where the majority of tile drainage occurs in the state.
“That’s the most common place to find the need for mitigation credits, so appropriately, that is where most of our mitigation sites are located,” Griggs said.
The mitigation bank aims to restore wetlands that are in the same watershed as the farmers who are buying the mitigation credits, but has accommodated some credit-purchasers who aren’t directly in the same watershed.
“Until we have established mitigation sites in multiple watersheds across the state, (NRCS) are allowing us to mitigate wetlands from other places, at the existing sites,” Griggs said.
A spokesperson for NRCS said in a statement landowners “play an important role in restoring and protecting wetland health on working agricultural lands” and wetland mitigation banking “provides an alternative option to agricultural producers looking to compensate for impacts to wetlands on their lands.”
To generate a mitigation credit, a wetland site has to be improved. For example, Griggs explained an easy project would be to take a historically wet field and remove or plug any drainage systems installed by a farmer in order to “restore the natural hydrologic regime of that landscape.”
Other projects are more intensive and require some construction to restore the landscape and seed native wetland plants. Landowners are paid for a permanent easement, meaning once the wetland is established, “it has to remain wetland forever.”
He said most of the landowners the bank works with are looking for a way to restore their land and have been happy to work with the mitigation bank program.
The payments farmers make for the credits go straight to the next mitigation project, which is why Griggs said they decided to run the organization as a nonprofit.
“The fear was that if it was run as a commercial operation, that the credit prices would deter people from using the program,” Griggs said. “So the goal of the project is to keep our credit prices as low as we can so that we get more people to participate.”
To date, Griggs said the mitigation bank has over 10 “bank sites” or restored wetlands, and has sold credits to more than 300 farmers in Iowa.
Iowa Agricultural Mitigation was recently a partner in a large project with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship to close the last remaining agricultural drainage wells, and redirect drainage to a restored wetland site.
Griggs said the organization provided most of the construction costs for the restored wetland and in return will sell the mitigation credits.
“And that just continues to perpetuate the ability that we have to find the next site and produce more credits and restore more wetlands,” Griggs said.
A wetland restoration project in Humboldt County. Kevin Griggs said he looks forward to the spring when the newly transformed site will be green and full of water. (Photo courtesy or Iowa Agricultural Mitigation)
Wright County project
Iowa Agricultural Mitigation has made use of several grants from USDA. The nonprofit was the only Iowa project in the recent $7 million allocation from the department. Other winning projects were in Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin.
Griggs said the goal of the project is to restore wetland in an area between Lake Cornelia and Elm Lake in Wright County. A goal is to eventually include a connection to Elm Lake, which is on the Department of Natural Resources’ list of impaired waters for high algal growth and turbidity.
“So that’s exciting for us in a number of ways, because we can see another big water quality success story,” Griggs said.
Rector, in Wright County, said the project is just beginning.
As of early December, he did not have commitments from landowners for the proposed 75-acre site which is currently used as crop land.
“We can expand a little bit and move out away from this area, as long as it provides the same type of results or more,” Rector said regarding the potential of landowners who are unwilling to sell for the project.
Rector said the wetland restoration project would “kill a lot of birds with a few stones” because it would give Iowans another area for outdoor recreation in the county and help improve the quality of the lakes, which prior to recent conservation efforts, weren’t “worth a darn” for fishing.
Rector said he hopes folks in his county will see the importance of projects like this that will improve water quality issues.
“Instead of hanging back and letting everybody else do it, let’s take a proactive approach instead of reactive approach,” Rector said. “Our water is polluted with nitrogen and chemicals, and our soil is blowing away every year, and we need to do something about it now, instead of later.”
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