Protection of wetlands could come down to farmers, says a new report

This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

Tucked about a mile offshore from Lake Michigan, in northern Michigan’s Charlevoix County, sits Norwood Centennial Farms. Besides some 300 cows that live there, a creek and underground springs make up a wetland on the property — one that’s perilously close to the manure pit.

“A concern for us is making sure that the manure stays in the pit, that there’s no seepage,” said Sarah Roy, who helps run the farm with her family. 

To protect the area, they’ve worked with federal and state authorities on manure control, earning four state sustainability certificates. Roy noted that their farm is relatively small — which makes balancing agricultural production and wetlands protection less fraught than elsewhere in the Midwest, where regulating an industry many people’s livelihoods depend on can be much more complicated.

A new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS, called “Wetlands in Peril,” argues that farmers can play a key role in protecting and restoring wetlands in the Upper Midwest, even as federal policy has paved the way for industrial agriculture to degrade and destroy wetlands in recent decades. 

Wetlands are critical to the health of the region and the planet. Along with providing critical habitat for many species, they help mitigate the impacts of floods and other extreme weather events, act as filters that improve water and soil quality, and store massive amounts of carbon dioxide. They’re important to Indigenous communities; in northern Michigan and other areas around the Great Lakes, for example, wetlands are necessary habitat for manomin, or wild rice. 

But they’re increasingly rare: Around half of wetlands in the continental United States have vanished since the 1780s, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the rate of loss has gone up in recent years. The expansion of large-scale agriculture is among the leading forces that have driven this decline, especially in places like the heavily agricultural Upper Midwest.

Stacy Woods, the author and research director for food and environment at UCS, decided to look into the intersection of agriculture and wetlands after the Supreme Court ruled last year in favor of an Idaho couple who were filling in wetlands on their property. The case, Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, narrowed the definition under which wetlands could be protected under the Clean Water Act and fundamentally changed their protections, even as risks posed by climate change means they’re more vital than ever. 

“At the same time that we will be relying on wetlands to protect our communities from flooding, the Clean Water Act has changed, so these wetlands have lost those protections, and now many of them are at risk of being destroyed by agriculture and other industries,” Woods said. 

A key solution lies in the farm bill, Woods said — specifically, in strengthening policies that encourage farmers to take part in conservation, restoration, and sustainability efforts. The report says initiatives like the Farmable Wetlands Program, which pays farmers to restore wetlands on their property, and the Conservation Stewardship Program, which helps farmers expand on existing conservation practices like planting cover crops, help improve the environment and make it more resilient to climate-driven flooding. 

“Healthy soil acts like a sponge,” Woods said. “It sucks up and holds onto excess fertilizer and pesticides and manure and all of those things that can become pollution if it runs off of this agricultural land and into waterways.”

Conserving wetlands could have enormous financial benefits, saving the region between $323 billion and $754 billion in flood mitigation in the long term, the report says, “only a fraction of the total benefits that wetlands offer to the Upper Midwest — and what will be lost if they are destroyed.”

Such consequences were seen when floods swept across the Midwest in 2019, Woods said, after which over 2,000 claims from the region were filed with the National Flood Insurance Program. 

“In that way, we all pay when wetlands are destroyed and when homes get damaged by the resulting increase in flooding,” she said.

Steven Hall, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches agriculture and the environment and was not involved in the report, agreed that supporting conservation programs in the farm bill can help with wetlands restoration. 

But in practice, he said, it’s important to distinguish between protection and restoration — a differentiation that the report neglected. “For me, they were sort of conflating them,” Hall said. “In some areas, there’s nothing left to protect, because it’s all gone. And so the question is, well, how do we bring it back, versus areas with less degradation, where the key point is to protect those existing wetlands.”

The push and pull between agriculture and environmental efforts is complicated, and opinions about wetlands pollution and protection range widely in the farming community. Programs have to establish trust with farmers — and connect the dots between helping wetlands and saving them money. 

“There’s oftentimes an overlap between economic benefit and environmental benefit,” he said. “In many cases, we can show that these poorly drained parts of the landscape are money pits year after year because of the frequency of crop failure or low productivity.”

It’s been a tough couple years for federal agricultural policy, and support for many of the programs recommended in the report is far from certain. Congress is supposed to renew the farm bill every five years, but lawmakers weren’t able to agree on a new version in 2023, and extended the 2018 law for a year. That extension expired at the end of September, and it’s unlikely a new bill will pass anytime soon; a version recently put forward by outgoing Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow prioritized support for “climate-smart” practices but was roundly rejected by Republicans. 

Grist has previously reported on how federal initiatives, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, have been flashpoints in debates over the relationship between agriculture and climate change. 

Next year, lawmakers will likely go back to the drawing board. When the farm bill extension expired, enrollment for the Conservation Reserve Program was paused. Environmental advocates are also bracing for the incoming presidential administration; during his first term, Donald Trump rolled back federal protection for wetlands. And with Republicans soon to control the House, Senate, and presidency, it’s possible programs the report supports could get cut entirely.

A spokesperson with the Michigan Farm Bureau declined to comment on the UCS report or its recommendations for the next farm bill, and the American Farm Bureau Federation didn’t respond to requests for comment in time for this story.  

Joy Zedler, a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin Madison, grew up on a farm in South Dakota and worked in wetlands conservation for decades, and described the dynamic between development and wetland protection as a “tug-of-war.”

“At the moment, the conservationists are losing,” she said. “It’s unfortunate, because we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. We depend on wetlands for clean water.”

Federal programs can be one way forward, she said, but they don’t happen in a vacuum; it takes connecting to community leaders to figure out how to sell these initiatives to farmers and make them work in practice. 

Despite the tense political environment, Woods believes the benefits of wetland conservation programs have the power to span political ideologies. 

“No matter how you voted in the recent election, you don’t want your home to flood,” she said. 

On her farm in Charlevoix, Sarah Roy said, the main draw to pursue environmental certificates was simply to be good stewards of the environment around them, though getting some financial assistance didn’t hurt. 

“I do think that farms, to some extent, get a bad rap about just not being good for the environment,” she said. “It really helps show that we are doing as much as we can to be good stewards of the land and the environment in our community.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Protection of wetlands could come down to farmers, says a new report on Dec 4, 2024.