School and Public Lands Commissioner Jarrod Johnson recognizes how the federal crop insurance program (which crop insurance salesman's wife Kristi Noem wants to expand) causes farmers to plow up land that's better for other uses than crops.
Now South Dakota State University professor Carol Johnston provides data on just how much of our wetlands we've been sacrificing to cropland:
Comparing wetlands mapped 30 years ago with those areas in 2011, she documented a yearly loss of nearly 13,000 acres of wetlands. Considering only the changes in the last decade, those losses increased to 15,377 acres per year.
The 2012 data came out this spring and, Johnston said, “the rate just keeps going up” ["SDSU Scientist Documents Wetland Losses," South Dakota State University, 2013.05.24].
Johnston estimates that South Dakotanis losing 21 acres of wetlands and 73 acres of grasslands per hour. But why should you care if we're tiling and draining mushy ground and planting corn and beans instead?
“Wetlands are called the kidneys of the landscape,” Johnston said. The soil microbes in wetlands convert nitrate, a form of nitrogen dissolved in the water, into harmless nitrogen gas. Nitrates can pollute well water, making it unfit to drink. Without the filtering effects of wetlands, these nitrates can also encourage the growth of algae. When these algae decompose, they decrease the oxygen available for fish and other aquatic organisms.
Wetlands help recharge groundwater supplies in many places, Johnston explained. Because these shallow reservoirs hold excess water, they can also reduce flooding downstream. Johnston cited an instance in which wetlands along the Charles River in Massachusetts were bought and maintained specifically for the purpose of reducing floods in the city of Boston [SDSU, 2013.05.24].
Folks who want me to build a $6.4-million sewer system to reduce pollution in Lake Herman are going to have a hard time competing with the billions more Kristi Noem wants to pour into crop insurance, which will help pour more nitrates into our lakes and help the algae bloom brighter and greener and stinkier. Folks who like drinking water rather than wading through it might also want to take a look at the farm bill and ask if it is as good for our kidneys—our wetlands—as it is for expanding industrial agriculture.
p.s.: The pending farm bill links crop insurance to conservation measures, but it also reduces the acreage that can be enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program from 30 million acres to 25 million acres.
You can read Johnston's abstract and pay $40 to read her original research in Wetlands here.
Much of what is now being tiled was protected until the wetland maps were redrawn and now allowed. I'm not buying the argument tiling reduces flooding. It feels eerily like the prelude to the dirty thirties. They're even ripping out shelter belts.
You can't tile wetlands, its illegal and if you do it you get kicked out of the farm program which makes you ineligible for federal crop insurance.
Tiling does reduce located, area, flash flooding, there are scientific studies that prove that.
Now I'm not disagreeing with you specifically that wetlands are being farmed, pastures are being ripped up, and tree belts are being taken out. But its the economics of it. If you had a 2 car garage on a lot that wasn't worth anything you'd probably just fill it full of crap and keep it there. If the value of the lot increased 10 fold you'd probably tear it down.
Who paid for the scientific studies? Many areas that used to be categorized as protected wetlands can now be tiled, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't naturally hold water in wet years if there wasn't a drainage system under them.
I have a hard time understanding how tiling can reduce flash flooding. That type of flooding is causing by massive amounts of rainfall that the ground cannot absorb quickly enough. The water never reaches the tiles. Could you please send a link to that research? Thanks.
Oops, caused, not causing...sorry.
Eastern South Dakota is turning itself into wildlife-less Iowa -- all despite fatally flawed and short-sighted agricultural and corn policies. It truly is turning itself into an ecological desert.
Dig up the numbers on the favorite state Mn on tiling Corey. Tiling increases flooding as it sends all the wetlands water downstream immediately.
Take a lesson from Minnesota, they are spending millions to fix over 30 years of neglect to their wetlands. Crop insurance has out grown its original intent. While now causing unintended circumstances, including legaling providing a form of food stamp subsidies to corporate farms. Rep. Noem should support amendments like Sen. Coburn and Sen. Durbin to limit subsidies to farms with an AGI of $750,000.00 and limit crop insurance subsidies to $50,000.00 per farmer. I'm all for capitalism, but if you want to farm the whole county you don't need taxpayer support to do so!
In fifty years, we'll have United Nations programs subsidizing the few remaining mega-land owners to remove their vast networks of agricultural tiling in an effort to return the ground back to wetlands, as well as UN efforts rebuilding thousands of miles of shelter-belts in a massive re-forestation effort, and of course the vast suburban sprawl reclamation and reversal front, which was first completed in Detroit a half -century prior, all of these efforts being built upon the stinging memory of the past decades of unfortunately witnessed, and now completely accepted, violent extremes in weather caused by man, that devastated the singular mono-crop of the recently banned Monsanto 'Universal Gen X One-Seed', whose dramatic failure led to the 'Great Hourglass Wars', where 7/8th's of the population starved to death, all of which was widely accepted that all of this was caused and promoted by their own reckless sod-busting straddle-bug ancestors who put themselves ahead of nature for profit and used a quaint god to justify their insane zest for Manifest Destiny, ancestors which are collectively now known as the 'Greatest Generation of Self-serving A*******', and as such, little care or concern is shown for their graves and monuments, as those were readily plundered (except for that of Kurt Vonnegut) for their minerals, scrap value, and of course, heating needs during the Hourglass Wars.
Millions wouldn't touch Mn's tiled wetlands...neglect is exactly what wetlands thrive under.
As for taking out trees and plowing up every piece of greenery, a good read is "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan. Our future????
We do all these unnatural things to our environment and food supply cause we're greedy. We take good food and process and alter it until it's unhealthy but cheap with the highest profit margin. We've seen the devastation of the dirty 30s from elementary school on up but we'll disregard if it increases production. As Joe pointed out, it's all about the money, as if we didn't know.