James L. Cummins

Wetlands Restored by James L. Cummins

The Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley has reached one million acres of restored and permanently protected wetlands, a milestone marked last month in Arkansas, by landowners, federal officials, and conservationists from across the three-state region. Those acres were enrolled through the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Wetland Reserve Easement program and the Wetlands Reserve Program that preceded it. 

When Congress created that program in the 1990 Farm Bill, it authorized the restoration and protection of up to one million wetland acres nationwide over 5 years. The Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley has now reached that figure on its own. The scale of the recovery is best measured against what was lost. The valley once held roughly 24 million acres of floodplain forest, swamp, and slough, the largest contiguous wetland system in the temperate world. Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, it was losing more than 250,000 acres a year, and by the early 1980s it was on course to retain fewer than 5 million acres of bottomland hardwood forest in scattered patches. The region had become the most deforested in the Southeast. 

The Wetland Reserve Easement program works entirely through voluntary enrollment. Landowners keep title to their property and may continue compatible uses such as hunting, fishing, and forest management, while NRCS covers restoration costs and monitors the easement over its life. The restoration work itself is physical: grading compacted fields back toward their natural contours, plugging drainage ditches, and planting native hardwood seedlings by the millions. More than 85% of the easements in the program are perpetual, and demand has exceeded available funding every year since enrollment began in 1992. 

The program also returns money to the federal treasury. Marginal cropland retired through enrollment no longer draws commodity support, crop insurance premium subsidies, or disaster assistance, savings that average roughly $70 per acre each year. Nationally, the cumulative value of those avoided costs exceeds $8.4 billion. The ecological returns are equally substantial. The valley anchors the Mississippi Flyway, providing wintering and staging habitat for more than 40% of North America’s waterfowl and supporting more than 100 species of breeding landbirds. 

Restored acres improve downstream water quality, slow floodwaters, and store carbon in recovering soils and vegetation. The program featured remarks from Louis Aspey, Chief of the Natural Resources Conservation Service; Kevin Norton of the Tri-State Conservation Partnership; Coleman Garrison of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry; Ted Kowalski of the Walton Family Foundation; and Wetland Reserve Easement landowners Peyton Daniel and Seth Hampton.

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Call 601-445-0473 for all of your auto body repair and painting needs. Stop by their shop and offices at 386 Liberty Road. And as Fall and cooler weather approach, please drive slowly and carefully. Deer run especially near dawn, dusk and overnight. The more cautiously you drive, the better chance you have of avoiding a serious accident. Safe driving!

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