Yotter is not alone. From the Iowa to the Missouri to the Mississippi, hundreds of riverside farmers throughout the Midwest are giving up a legacy as dear to their hearts (and wallets) as price supports: farming the flood plain. Like Yotter, they are deciding not to patch their levees. Instead, they’re signing up for an innovative government buyout program that takes their property out of production forever and turns it into a federally protected wetlands. As a result, the big public-policy issue swirling around last year’s flood-how much to levee the nation’s waterways-is resolving itself in a way that few anticipated: rather than demanding the government rebuild the levees, some farmers are backing away from the rivers.
It was another disaster, ironically, that speeded the land-use reforms. Buried among the pork attached to February’s $11 billion California earthquake-aid bill was a little-noticed provision giving the Soil Conservation Service $340 million in flood relief Almost a fifth of that money may go to the Emergency Wetlands Reserve Program, under which rivers and streams are permitted to reclaim flood plain that was theirs before farmers started planting it. That expands the flood plain’s natural capacity to absorb rising water, which scientists say will lessen damage from floods like those expected this spring. Before getting the table scraps from the earthquake bill, SCS had already spent $15 million to enroll 25,000 acres into the wetlands reserve. With the new money, hundreds of farmers from eight states are expected to put 85,000 additional acres (130 square miles) into the program. “A lot of farmers have recognized that this is the one flood that put them over the edge,” says Scott Faber of the Washington, D.C.-based group American Rivers.
To qualify, land has to contain water-absorbing soil, and it must have been significantly damaged by last year’s flood. Participants don’t actually sell their land; they just give the government a permanent easement. The wetland can be used for wildlife observation, fishing or hunting. But owners cannot build on or cultivate the property. Since “most people are just walking away from the land,” says the SCS’s Shawn Dettmann, who works in Iowa’s Louisa County, “it’s gradually going to turn into whatever it was like before it was settled.”
This wetland windfall has given environmentalists a rare land-use victory. For years they have complained that by channeling and leveeing the nation’s rivers to within an inch of their lives, government agencies only made streams run faster and water levels crest higher. Now they hope that the wetland reserve will reverse that trend. “It’s the best kind of pork-it’s green pork,” says Faber about the buyout.
Not everyone is convinced giving farmland back to the river is a hydrologic panacea. “This isn’t going to make a hoot in a whirlwind,” complains Claude Strauser of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in St. Louis, the agency that built many of the Midwest’s levees. He argues that the converted area is going to be too small and that the new wetlands will fill with water too quickly. Once they become saturated, they’re of no use in flood control. “On a flood like we had last year, it will have no effect,” he predicts. “Wetlands are important, but not for flood reduction.”
That’s still a minority viewpoint, and whatever the flood-control benefits, the program is changing the face of rivers throughout the heartland. Wildlife is expected to flourish, and water filtered by marshes will become clearer. The program should also save the government money by cutting down on federal crop-and flood-insurance claims. That’s good news for taxpayers: after last summer’s inundation, farmers submitted $986 million in crop-insurance claims. Martha Hawk’s family was among them. Her relatives have been fighting the Iowa River since the 1800s, but even she has decided to convert half of her 200 acres to wetlands. “The river always wins,” she says simply. And for the first time in 250 years of flood control, the river has been rewarded for its victory.
