NRCS Helps Kentucky Farmer Save Wetlands

For decades in this country, bogs, swamps and other wetlands were something to be eradicated; now the government is spending millions of dollars a year to put back what many worked so hard to destroy.

Deep in the rural heart of south-central Kentucky near the Butler-Logan county line, there are 125 acres on Mud River now dedicated to wildlife and preservation of that wetland environment.

As local recognition of Earth Day, several Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife officials, and local members of a national environmental group, The Nature Conservancy, joined officials with the Natural Resource Conservation Service to show off their teamwork in producing a restored wetland on the farm of Paul Hines.

The NRCS’s Wetlands Reserve Program purchased a permanent easement on the property, which the government paid Hines for, before flooding all of his bottom land. The amount paid for the easement was not readily available.

“We built a dike along the tree line to hold flood waters on the land,” said Jacob Kuhn, the assistant state conservationist for the NRCS. “We want to hold water on the property longer, not permanently.”

He said the dike plugs up the drainage ditches that were constructed years ago to run water off the property. Uneven lower areas were created to provide a range of water depths for the needs of different wildlife as well as two islands for safe nesting space for the birds.

He said all this work is needed not only to counter the years of farming on the land, but also to make up for the 27 flood-control structures and 22 miles of dredging and channeling the USDA did years ago on the Mud River in support of bottomland farming.

Birds and deer are not the only ones to benefit from the created wetland.

“There are a multitude of benefits,” said David Sawyer, state conservationist for the NRCS. “One of the biggest is the improvement in water quality. They also act as buffers to reduce the effects of floods, and of course there are the benefits to wildlife.”

The water held in the wetlands also is more likely to sink into the soil and recharge the water table, said Forest Taylor, the chairman of the Logan County Conservation Board.

Taylor said he has been part of the conservation board since 1965 and has seen many improvement to farming practices in those years.

The program spends about $250 million a year developing wetlands across the country, Sawyer said, and has paid over $14 million to Kentuckians for the right to make their property into wetlands.

About 40 percent of the land in this project was replanted in native bottomland hardwoods, especially oaks, to provide acorns as a food source for wildlife and to preserve those native trees in the State, Kuhn said.

Members of The Nature Conservancy added a number of nesting boxes for bats on the property. They are for the Indiana bat, a threatened species, which traditionally nested in the now scarce shag-bark hickory trees that were common in the area.

In the past, Kentucky had dwindling wetlands, said Russ Kennedy of the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife. He explained, though, that with the cooperation of State and Federal agencies and the willingness of landowners in the State, that has turned around.

He said the project on the Hines farm was an excellent example of that cooperation.

“I want to see more of this,” said Elizabeth Ciusio, water bird specialist for the State. “I’m very excited about this project.”

Sawyer also said carbon sequestration is another consideration in the move to create more fallow farmland around the nation. He explained that the carbon from industrial sources is taken up by plants and stored in the soil.

When that soil is left undisturbed that carbon is locked away, but when the soil is tilled the carbon is released. Being a greenhouse gas constituent, carbon could be a traded commodity between rural landowners and industrial businesses in the future.

Hines said he went for the program in large part because of his wife.

“She likes the birds,” he said. “We come up here on the weekends just to enjoy the wildlife.”

Story by Greg Wells, Bowling Green Daily News.