In northeast Iowa, a wispy stand of trees looks out of place.

It is surrounded by crop fields on the north side of a four-lane highway, an oasis of nature that is uncommon in rural Iowa, where farming every inch of land is paramount.

Its owner hopes to cut and till it for cropland.

But he can’t do it without risking his business. For now.

Jim Conlan, an out-of-state investor in Iowa farmland, knew the federal government considered those nine acres to be a wetland before he bought it as part of a larger tract. If he clears and plows that land, he will lose eligibility for the federally subsidized crop insurance and other benefits that a majority of row crop farmers depend on, under a 1985 law called “Swampbuster.”

Conlan went to court to challenge the law, arguing it violates his constitutionally protected property rights. If he wins, hundreds of thousands of acres in Iowa and other states could be drained, plowed and put into production.

Conlan said he sued after the U.S. Department of Agriculture declined to reclassify the wetland, which is often dry.

“They’re so impossible to deal with,” he said, following a recent federal court hearing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

He’s represented by the same law firm that persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 to overturn Clean Water Act protections for vast areas of wetlands because they are not continuously connected to a stream. As they did with the Sackett case, Conlan’s lawyers hope to topple another pillar of the federal government’s wetland conservation policy.

The case describes Swampbuster as unfair and coercive, arguing that it prevents farmers from draining or filling wetlands on their own properties without paying them for taking the land out of production.

“It seemed really egregious to me that farmers — an industry that’s so vital to America and to the world — couldn’t use their own property to do this and weren’t being compensated for it,” said Loren Seehase, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, one of two organizations representing Conlan’s company, CTM Holdings. “As long as they … are getting (federal) benefits, they can’t do anything with that wetland.”

But advocates of the statute say it’s reasonable — the law does not prohibit farmers from draining wetlands on their property.

“This isn’t money that’s owed to these farmers. These are optional grants and insurance programs that the government provides,” said Dani Replogle, a staff attorney at Food & Water Watch. “So there are conditions associated with receiving government money, just like there are conditions associated with receiving Medicare and food stamps.”

Whatever happens in court, people in this part of the world know that one farmer’s decisions about how to manage their land will affect their neighbors.

One of those people, a beginning farmer named Elle Gadient, has 160 acres downstream from Conlan’s property. Gadient’s cropland and pasture swaddle an old white farmhouse at the top of a hill.

She and her husband hope to raise young dairy cattle there in future years.

Gadient is concerned about what happens if Swampbuster goes away. “This is really a program for all farmers and affects water quality that affects all of us,” she said.

Protecting ag wetlands

Wetlands in the United States have gained appreciation over time for their environmental benefits. They filter pollution, absorb floodwaters and provide habitat for wildlife. But millions of acres have been destroyed since European settlement.

When European settlers arrived in the Midwest in the 1700s, wetlands were an impediment to agriculture. So settlers drained most of them with ditches and, later, perforated underground tubes known as “tiling.”

In the early 1900s, the government helped organize the drainage networks — primarily in the wetter northern parts of Iowa — through the creation of drainage districts.

There are now thousands of these districts, which are overseen by counties and landowners to collectively maintain the vast systems of drain tiling that lie several feet beneath the surface. There are hundreds of thousands of miles of tile in Iowa alone.

In Iowa and Illinois — the nation’s leaders for corn and soybean production — about 90% of those states’ pre-settlement wetlands were converted, primarily to increase their cropland.

Attitudes toward wetland destruction shifted about 40 years ago. Up to that point, USDA programs were not uniformly designed to protect wetlands — some were actively destructive, such as crop commodification and price supports, which encouraged practices that led to more soil erosion and polluted water. 

Conservation groups like the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society lobbied for changes to agricultural policies in the 1985 farm bill, or the Food Security Act.

The farm bill is a massive, omnibus measure that funds federal policies for food and agriculture. It is renewed by lawmakers about every five years, and it includes SNAP benefits and crop insurance subsidies for farmers, among other supports. Hundreds of billions of dollars are allocated to cover programs, loans and insurance.

The 1985 bill included the Swampbuster provision, as well as Sodbuster, which was intended to prevent soil erosion.

These provisions bound wetlands protection to USDA loans, payments and assistance programs, including crop insurance and price support. They are key programs that more than 34% of farm households in the U.S. receive, helping them break even in times of drought or low commodity prices. About 95% of both corn and soybeans in Iowa — nearly 23 million acres — are insured, according to the USDA.

And it worked. A 1998 study found that about 12 million acres of U.S. wetlands had been protected under Swampbuster.

But it’s hard to track these threatened ecosystems. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which oversees Swampbuster rules, does not maintain a searchable database and cannot accurately say how many acres there are, said Sue Snyder Thomas, a former NRCS state compliance specialist.

She said the wetlands often range in size from a half acre to 10 acres in Iowa.

The Iowa case

Conlan’s property doesn’t look like a wetland.

It’s not connected directly to a stream. Its surface is often dry and overgrown with grass. There’s a stand of trees on part of it, and the rest is pocked with stumps — the government allows landowners to harvest trees as long as the stumps and roots remain.

But you can’t judge a swamp by its surface water.

NRCS is the judge. Federal regulators evaluate the soil and vegetation for signs that it’s often waterlogged during the growing season. They also review aerial images.

In 2010, the NRCS determined that part of the property was a wetland for the purposes of the Swampbuster rule.

Twelve years later, Conlan bought 72 acres near the town of Delaware for $700,000, according to county records. A little more than half of those acres were farmed at the time.

Conlan has since removed trees from part of the land to grow more corn and soybeans, and he would like to clear the wetland. He asked the NRCS to reevaluate the wetland designation but said he was refused.

Federal rules allow landowners to ask for reevaluations if nature alters the land or if there’s evidence the agency erred.

Wetland designations have been challenged repeatedly in federal court with varying degrees of success, but Conlan’s lawsuit might be the first to question whether the wetland protection program itself is lawful under the Fifth Amendment’s clause that says private property cannot be taken for public use without just compensation.

The lawsuit claims that when USDA designates a piece of farmland as a wetland, it effectively takes that area out of production, barring farmers from draining, filling or cultivating it if they wish to remain eligible for USDA benefits.

While applying for USDA benefits is not mandatory, the lawsuit claims that farmers’ historic reliance on crop insurance and other federal subsidies — coupled with pressures on the nation’s agriculture industry — have made these programs essential to their livelihoods and operations.

And if Conlan violates Swampbuster, he loses the potential for those benefits for all of his Iowa farmland, which totals more than 1,000 acres. Conlan rents the land to farmers and confers the benefits to them.

“They’re basically relinquishing (that) constitutional right in order to receive federal benefits,” said Seehase, the attorney for Conlan’s company. “There are ways to conserve and preserve our environment that still keep those constitutional protections in place.”

CTM Holdings’ lawsuit has sparked action from sustainable agriculture groups in Iowa and neighboring states, which filed a motion to intervene in the case in October 2024. The coalition argues that eliminating or weakening Swampbuster would open the door to further depletion of wetlands, exposing its members to greater flood risk and other environmental hazards and imperiling their properties, crops and overall safety.

A slam dunk?

The groups challenging the Swampbuster law don’t think it will result in widespread wetlands loss. 

“It’s a huge logical misstep to think that every farmer would then till their land and turn it into farmlands,” Seehase said. “Not every farmer is going to do that.”

Others are less optimistic. Corn and soybean prices are down, and costs to grow the crops are up. 

“When margins are tight, farmers find every additional acre they can plant corn to plant the corn,” said Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, a group of progressive farmers that has intervened to block the lawsuit.

He added: “It would, for sure, accelerate the depletion of our wetlands.”

In 2005, a federal appeals court ruled that the Swampbuster statute is not so “coercive” as to force farmers to comply, nor does USDA act as a “gatekeeper” to farmers developing wetlands on their properties if they so choose.

The wetlands can be transformed into a non-farm use without losing farm subsidies, under the federal rules. And following the Sackett court ruling, Swampbuster is the main federal legal disincentive for farmers who want to drain wetlands that are not continuously connected to navigable waters.

At a March 31 hearing on Conlan’s case in Iowa’s northern district, Chief U.S. District Judge C.J. Williams noted that potential: “You could build a skyscraper on it if you want to,” Williams said.

Williams is considering competing motions in the case to decide the lawsuit before it is set to go to trial in June. 

An assistant U.S. attorney representing the USDA argued the case should be tossed out because the agency was willing to take a second look at whether Conlan’s property is a wetland, though the agency admitted botching that message. Conlan is dubious.

Even if the judge agrees it was a miscommunication, he might still decide to weigh the arguments about its constitutionality. Whatever he decides will likely be appealed.

It’s unclear what might happen if the lawsuit succeeds. The federal government could implement a new plan that pays farmers for setting aside flood-prone land that they could otherwise grow crops on.

That still might pit farmer against farmer.

“All my upstream neighbors’ land could be drained, and that water’s got to go somewhere,” said Lehman, who farms in central Iowa. “It’s going to come and make my land less usable.”

That’s disconcerting to Gadient, the young farmer who is downstream from the land at the center of the Iowa lawsuit.

She and her husband have sought to strengthen their farm community, inviting their neighbors for regular breakfasts at their home on the hill.

They hope to graze livestock on their farm but for now have chickens and barn cats that laze about.

The men in the area typically go to a local McDonald’s for coffee in the mornings. The wives go to a women-owned gas station nearby. Gadient hopes that a Swampbuster defeat won’t fray those connections and others like them.

“We love the community,” she said. “We really care about our neighbors.”

This story is part of the series Down the Drain from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

One Iowa landowner fights to farm a designated wetland. Others could face consequences downstream is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

It was late in the season, and most of the birds were gone. But there had to be a few stragglers out there, late migrators that hadn’t yet left for warmer waters.

Jordan Lillemon tossed his decoys into Lake Christina, a few yards from shore, and hoped that western Minnesota still had some goldeneyes, ducks with stark black-and-white bodies. He was almost certain that sunlight would bring in hooded mergansers, smaller ducks that fly fast and dive and appear suddenly from any direction, at any time, and are among the most difficult to shoot.

Kettle, his 7-year-old black Lab, paused for a moment in the water, then climbed up to her platform next to the hunting blind and waited for the sun to rise.

Nearly all of the wetlands in Minnesota’s prairie region have been destroyed, drained away and turned into row crops by thousands of miles of ditches and tile lines. Many of the few that remain – an estimated 5% of the total before settlement – were saved by duck hunters.

The love of birds, for sport and food, or simply for observation, has been the saving grace of the swamps, marshes and shallow lakes along the Mississippi River, from its upper reaches in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa on down to Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Hundreds of species, including every kind of duck, goose and swan, need those wetlands, which rise and fall, flood and recede, to breed, forage and rest.

When wetlands are destroyed, the birds are usually the first to noticeably die off.

By the early 1900s, it was clear that draining the swamps, bayous and backwaters of the Mississippi River to create new and valuable farmland was causing drastic falls in duck and wildlife populations across the continent.

In 1918, a man who grew up in Davenport, Iowa, and moved out east wrote to the Omaha World Herald to ask if duck hunting along Davenport’s portion of the Mississippi River was still the best in the world.

“All swamplands have been reclaimed, drained and fields of waving corn now stand where in your days the muskrat built his home,” the paper’s outdoor writer responded. “Very little duck hunting is now enjoyed along the Mississippi River.”

Waterfowl populations continued to fall for the next 15 years, until the habitat loss and over-hunting pushed several species to the brink of extinction.

In 1934, Congress tried something new – and simple. Lawmakers required every goose and duck hunter over the age of 16 to buy a $1 stamp. All the money collected from the stamp would be used to buy and permanently protect swamps and marshes up and down the Mississippi Flyway that the birds needed to survive.

It worked. Through the first few years of the program, the United States and hunters were able to save thousands of acres of marshes. Then tens of thousands.

The ducks almost immediately returned.

The agency in charge of the duck stamp, which became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, started working with nonprofit conservation groups like Ducks Unlimited not only to save swamps but to revive ones that had been destroyed. Ducks Unlimited would negotiate easements with landowners and then remove drainage tiles, ditches and dams to restore the natural flow of water to breeding grounds that had been lost. The Fish and Wildlife Service worked with Ducks Unlimited and other groups to buy and permanently protect restored wetlands.

Over the last 90 years, revenue from the hunting stamp, which now costs $25, has saved about 6 million acres of wetlands. Ducks Unlimited, which is funded primarily by hunters, estimates it has restored 18 million acres in North America, the vast majority in nesting grounds for birds that migrate along the Mississippi Flyway, from prairie Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

That’s a total area of swamps, marshes, bogs and shallow lakes larger than Lake Superior.

But it’s a fraction of what it was.

Lake Christina was one of the most famed and productive hunting lakes in Minnesota in the 1920s. There were regular reports then of more than 100,000 white-backed canvasback ducks dotting the lake. But by 1959, that number had fallen to about 250.

Lillemon grew up on the lake, and seeing its rebirth helped inspire him to become a habitat engineer for Ducks Unlimited.

“It’s hard for me to hunt anywhere else,” he said, as the birds have become so consistent.

The waterline in a healthy and functioning wetland needs to fluctuate, like lungs. The damage done to a wetland when it is drained is immediate and obvious, like air sucked out of a collapsed lung. The rich soil dries up and can be plowed and turned into a cornfield. But the other extreme is just as damaging. Wetlands can be flooded to death. This happens when dams, drainage ditches and tile lines force too much water into the system and don’t let it leave. Imagine taking a deep breath and never being able to exhale.

That’s what happened to Lake Christina.

As thousands of acres of what had been meandering streams and marshes were drained to build out the crop fields of west-central Minnesota, some of that water pushed into Lake Christina. The higher water levels allowed bullheads and carp to thrive. They churned up the lake bottom, and it became dark and mucky. Native aquatic plants like wild celery died off.

The birds left.

About 15 years ago, Minnesota lawmakers funded a pumping system in one of the dams near the lake with the help of Ducks Unlimited and the Fish and Wildlife Service. In 2010, the state drew down water levels, allowing the system to exhale for the first time in 50 years. Fish and algae populations immediately dropped to more natural numbers. Sunlight once again reached the lake bottom. Plants started growing.

As the lake rose with the rains and snow melt of the following spring, thousands of ducks returned.

Shortly after sunrise on his hunting trip in November, a lone bird flew in high and fast from Lillemon’s left. The duck ignored the decoys, going straight overhead. Lillemon swung and fired. The bird fell.

“Hooded merganser,” he said.

Kettle leaped from her platform, swam out, brought it to Lillemon and then looked back up at the sky. It would be a busy morning for Kettle. There were no goldeneyes, but Lillemon and his party had nearly filled its limit of mergansers by 9 a.m.

Restoration can still feel like a losing battle.

For every acre of wetland being restored in Minnesota, more are being lost. A 2024 U.S. Department of Agriculture study found that eight of the top 10 U.S. counties where tile drainage was growing fastest were in southern Minnesota. Nearly all of those drainage systems shoot water into a river that ends up in the Mississippi.

Minnesota lost 140,000 acres of forested wetlands between 2006 and 2020, with many replaced by flooded or man-made ponds and lakes.

The Supreme Court’s 2023 Sackett decision has also removed federal Clean Water Act protections for wetlands unless they have a continuous surface connection to navigable waters. That strips federal protection from many shallow breeding ponds, which fill up with rain and snowmelt only in the spring.

Those ponds, called prairie potholes, will now have to rely either on state protections or conservation programs like those funded by the duck stamp.

Over the last 20 years, wetlands have been losing some of their most ardent advocates. Duck hunting, as a pastime, is in decline throughout breeding grounds of the Upper Midwest.

The number of licensed waterfowl hunters in Minnesota dropped by 45% between 2000 and 2023 – a loss of about 55,000 hunters. South Dakota duck and goose hunters fell by nearly a third over roughly the same time. Wisconsin has dropped by 5,000 licensed hunters. 

But across the country, sales of the federal duck stamp have remained stable at about 1.5 million stamps sold each year since 2010. Some of that is because duck hunting has been growing as a sport in the South, in places like Arkansas where licensed hunters have increased.

It’s also because there has been a newfound push among birders, those who observe but don’t hunt, to buy duck stamps to support the preservation of wild places, said Scott Glup, the recently retired project leader of the Litchfield Wetland Management District for the Fish and Wildlife Service.

“They take as much pleasure in seeing a bird as I do watching my dog work a field,” he said. “If you want bird habitat, here’s something you can do. Buy a duck stamp.”

Each acre is its own struggle to reclaim.

The farmland where much of the losses have been is valuable. Some of it was drained by county or state governments for what was believed to be for the public good.

In November, Glup stood by the side of one of the wetlands he helped restore a few days before his retirement. It took 15 years for the Fish and Wildlife Service to work out a deal with the landowners to put a conservation easement on the property. It’s still owned by the farmers, but it can never be drained or intensively farmed again.

The site was a 200-acre lake named Butler Lake more than 100 years ago. But in 1919, a handful of nearby farmers asked Meeker County to drain it away to give them more room to graze their cattle. The county obliged, hiring a contractor to empty the lake.

Using duck stamp dollars, the Wildlife Service bought the easements. Partner groups including Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever helped tear out some of the old drain tile. And in 2024, a smaller, 65-acre Butler Lake held open water for the first time in more than a century.

Glup watched a pair of trumpeter swans in the lake. Just a few weeks earlier he had seen sandhill cranes, sora rails and black terns all finding an old stopping ground for their migration that had been covered up for a century.

How can you justify taking land out of production?

That’s the most persistent question Glup received in his 37-year career restoring wetlands.

Watching the swans, Glup said he used to dread that question from hostile county boards and skeptical farmers. But then he started looking forward to it – after he had hunted in some of those restored fields and seen all that they had brought back.

“We’re not taking it out of production, we’re putting it back into production,” Glup said. “With these wetlands we’re producing groundwater recharge, erosion control, flood protections, ducks and pheasants. We’re producing public land that people can go out and enjoy. We’re producing pollinators.”

Throughout his career Glup was usually the first one in the office, arriving around sunrise. The Litchfield office is a small building off of a two-lane road that backs up a few hundred acres of restored prairie. During the season he would hunt pheasants over his lunch break in that prairie with Rica, the best pheasant dog Glup has ever had.

About four years ago, as he walked from his car, he heard the clear and cheerful song of meadowlark. It’s a sound he had once heard often, but not in years as Minnesota’s western meadowlark population fell.

“I know young folks who don’t know what a meadowlark is because they’ve never seen them, they’ve never heard them perform,” he said.

Glup ran into his office, grabbed a pair of binoculars and found the bird — a male, bright and yellow, singing in the field.

“For about two weeks, he sang,” Glup said. “And then he disappeared.”

Each year since, meadowlarks have been back. He’ll count up to 10 of them some mornings.

He’s not sure what exactly the limiting factor was. Was it space, water, a certain mix of insects brought in by the right combination of wildflowers? But somehow the field behind his office went from inhospitable to hospitable for meadowlarks, he said.

And as soon as it did, a bird that he hadn’t seen in decades returned.

It’s almost always the birds, he said, that will tell you if the land is healthy.

This story is part of the series Down the Drain from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

For sport or food, love of birds is saving grace for America’s wetlands is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In less than 10 years, three catastrophic floods ravaged northwestern Wisconsin and changed the way people think about water. 

The most severe, in July 2016, slammed Ashland with up to 10 inches of rain in less than a day — a month’s worth of rain fell in just two hours. As rivers swelled to record highs, major highways broke into pieces, and culverts washed away. It took months for roads to reopen, with more than $41 million in damage across seven counties. 

The Marengo River, which winds through forests and farmland before meeting the Bad River that flows into Lake Superior, was hit hard during these historic deluges. Centuries earlier, the upper watershed would have held onto that water, but logging and agriculture left the river disconnected from its floodplain, giving the water nowhere safe to go. 

Today, the Marengo River stands as an example of a new kind of solution. Following the record floods, state leaders invested in opening up floodplains and restoring wetlands to relieve flooding. As the need to adapt to disasters grows more urgent, the Marengo River serves as an example that there’s a cheaper way to do so: using wetlands. 

“We can’t change the weather or the patterns … but we can better prepare ourselves,” said MaryJo Gingras, Ashland County’s conservationist. 

Wetlands once provided more natural flood storage across Wisconsin and the Mississippi River Basin, soaking up water like sponges so it couldn’t rush further downstream. But about half of the country’s wetlands have been drained and filled for agriculture and development, and they continue to be destroyed, even as climate change intensifies floods.

As the federal government disposes of rules to protect wetlands, environmental advocates want to rewrite the ecosystem’s narrative to convince more people that restoration is worth it. 

Wetlands aren’t just pretty places, advocates argue, but also powerhouses that can save communities money by blunting the impact of flood disasters. A 2024 Wisconsin law geared at preventing such disasters before they happen, inspired by the wetland work in the Marengo River watershed, is going to test that theory. 

“Traditionally, the outreach has been, ‘We want to have wetlands out here because they’re good for ducks, frogs and pretty flowers,’” said Tracy Hames, executive director of the Wisconsin Wetlands Association. “What do people care about here? They care about their roads, their bridges, their culverts … how can wetlands help that?” 

Bipartisan Wisconsin bill posed wetlands as flood solution

Northern Wisconsin isn’t the only place paying the price for floods. Between 1980 and 2025, the U.S. was struck by 45 billion-dollar flood disasters, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with a cumulative price tag of nearly $206 billion. Many parts of the vast Mississippi River Basin receive up to eight inches more rain annually than they did 50 years ago, according to a 2022 analysis from Climate Central, a nonprofit organization that analyzes climate science. 

Damaging floods are now so common in the states that border the Mississippi River, including Wisconsin, that the issue can’t be ignored, said Haley Gentry, assistant director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy in New Orleans. 

“Even if you don’t agree with certain (regulations) … we absolutely have to find ways to reduce damage,” Gentry said.

Former Wisconsin state Rep. Loren Oldenburg, a Republican who served a flood-prone district in southwest Wisconsin until he lost the seat last year, was interested in how wetlands could help.

Oldenburg joined forces with Republican state Sen. Romaine Quinn, who represents northern Wisconsin and knew of the work in the Marengo River watershed. The lawmakers proposed a grant program for flood-stricken communities to better understand why and where they flood and restore wetlands in areas that need the help most. 

Jennifer Western Hauser, policy liaison at the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, met with Democratic and Republican lawmakers to advocate for the bill. She emphasized problems that might get their attention — related to transportation, emergency services, insurance, or conservation — that wetland restoration could solve. She said she got a lot of head nods as she explained that the cost of continually fixing a washed-out culvert could vanish from storing and slowing floodwaters upstream. 

“These are issues that hit all over,” she said. “It’s a relatable problem.”   

The bill passed unanimously and was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in April 2024. Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature approved $2 million for the program in the state’s most recent budget. 

Twenty-three communities applied for the first round of grant funding, which offered two types of grants — one to help assess flood risk and another grant to help build new wetlands to reduce that risk. Eleven communities were funded, touching most corners of the state, according to Wisconsin Emergency Management, which administered the grants. 

Brian Vigue, freshwater policy director for Audubon Great Lakes, said the program shows Wisconsin residents have come a long way in how they think about wetlands since 2018, when the state government made it easier for developers to build in them. 

There’s an assumption that wetland restoration comes only at the expense of historically lucrative land uses like agriculture or industry, making it hard to gain ground, Vigue said. But when skeptics understand the possible economic benefits, it can change things. 

“When you actually find something with the return on investment and can prove that it’s providing these benefits … we were surprised at how readily people that you’d assume wouldn’t embrace a really good, proactive wetland conservation policy did,” he said. 

Private landowners need to see results

About three-quarters of the remaining wetlands in the lower 48 states are on privately owned land, including areas that were targeted for restoration in the Marengo River watershed. That means before any restoration work begins, landowners must be convinced that the work will help, not hurt them. 

For projects like this to work, landowner goals are a priority, said Kyle Magyera, local government outreach specialist at the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, because “they know their property better than anyone else.”

Farmers, for example, can be leery that beefing up wetlands will take land out of production and hurt their bottom line, Magyera said. 

In the Marengo watershed, Gingras worked with one landowner who had farmland that wasn’t being used. They created five new wetlands across 10 acres that have already decreased sediment and phosphorus runoff from entering the river. And while there hasn’t been a flood event yet, Gingras expects the water flows to be slowed substantially.

This work goes beyond restoring wetland habitat, Magyera said, it’s about reconnecting waterways. In another project, Magyera worked on a private property where floods carved a new channel in a ravine that funneled the water faster downstream. The property now has log structures that mimic beaver dams to help slow water down and reconnect these systems. 

Now that the first round of funding has been disbursed in Wisconsin’s grant program, grantees across the state are starting work on their own versions of natural flood control, like that used in Marengo. 

In Emilie Park, along the flood-prone East River in Green Bay, a project funded by the program will create 11 acres of new wetlands. That habitat will help store water and serve as an eco-park where community members can stroll through the wetland on boardwalks.

In rural Dane County, about 20 miles from the state capital, a stretch of Black Earth Creek will be reconnected to its floodplain, restoring five and a half acres of wetlands and giving the creek more room to spread out and reduce flood risk. The creek jumped its banks during a near record-breaking 2018 rainstorm, washing out two bridges and causing millions of dollars in damage. 

Voluntary program with economic angle could be of interest elsewhere 

Nature-based solutions to flooding have been gaining popularity along the Mississippi River. Wisconsin’s program could serve as a “national model” for how to use wetlands to promote natural flood resilience, Quinn wrote in a 2023 newspaper editorial supporting the bill.

Kyle Rorah, regional director of public policy for the Great Lakes/Atlantic region of Ducks Unlimited, said he’s talking about the Wisconsin grant program to lawmakers in other states in the upper Midwest, and he sees more appetite for this model than relying on the federal government to protect wetlands.  

And Vigue has found that stakeholders in industries like fishing, shipping and recreation are receptive to using wetlands as infrastructure. 

But Gentry cautioned that voluntary restoration can only go so far because it “still allows status quo development and other related patterns to continue.”

Still, as the federal government backs off of regulation, Gentry said she expects more emphasis on the economic value of wetlands to drive protection. 

Some of that is already happening. A 2024 analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that wetlands save Wisconsin and the upper Midwest nearly $23 billion a year that otherwise would be spent combating flooding. 

“Every level of government is looking at ways to reduce costs so it doesn’t increase taxes for their constituents,” Gingras said. 

John Sabo, director of the ByWater Institute at Tulane University, said as wetlands prove their economic value in reducing flood damage costs, taxpayers will see their value. 

“You have to think about (wetlands) as providing services for people,” Sabo said, “if you want to get people on the other side of the aisle behind the idea (of restoring them).” 

And although the Wisconsin grant program is small-scale for now, he said if other states bordering the Mississippi River follow its lead, it could reduce flooding across the region.

“If all upstream states start to build upstream wetlands,” he said, “that has downstream impacts.” 

This story is part of the series Down the Drain from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Framing wetlands as a flooding solution won bipartisan support in Wisconsin. Could it work elsewhere? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

On a sunny spring day on a farm outside St. Louis, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin celebrated a new era for America’s wetlands. 

Flanked by farm equipment and a large American flag, Zeldin said federal rules about wetlands, long a source of frustration for people who want to drain them to grow crops or build homes, were going to relax. 

“The federal government doesn’t need to be regulating every puddle on every property everywhere in America,” he said to a group of local farmers, in a state that has already lost nearly 90% of its natural wetlands.

Zeldin said the Trump administration will once and for all solve the hotly debated question of which wetlands are federally protected — determined by the tricky term “Waters of the United States” — so farmers won’t be punished for draining them. 

That solution, Zeldin said, will come from a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared only wetlands connected to a “water of the U.S.” will be protected. That ruling, Sackett v. EPA, could remove safeguards from more than half of the nation’s remaining wetlands, which slow flooding, improve water quality and serve as important wildlife habitat. 

“There is nothing to debate anymore … we’re going to follow the Supreme Court,” Zeldin said. “It’s going to be simple.”  

But wetland protections have never been simple. 

To align with Sackett, the EPA will rewrite the definition of “Waters of the U.S.,” which spells out which water bodies and wetlands are subject to federal regulation in the Clean Water Act. The term has been caught in the crosshairs of litigation and politics for decades. Environmental advocates claim more expansive federal protections are needed to preserve the country’s natural resources, while some farmers and homebuilders argue the government is overstepping its authority to control their land. 

Zeldin’s proposed definition instructs the federal government to take a big step back from how many wetlands it protects, which conservationists have warned will further abuse a misunderstood ecosystem that has already experienced widespread destruction. 

The battle to save what’s left will fall to the states, which don’t protect wetlands equally.

The Mississippi River, of course, doesn’t heed any state rules on its long journey from Minnesota to the Gulf, and its millions of acres of wetlands control flooding and catch pollutants all along the way. An uncertain future for those wetlands means an uncertain future for the river and the people, animals and ecosystems that rely on it. 

Mississippi River wetlands are varied and vital 

Wetlands are places where land and water meet, and the Mississippi River Basin, which covers 40% of the contiguous U.S., hosts some 65 million acres of them. 

What they look like varies immensely. The prairie potholes of the upper Great Plains formed from retreating glaciers. Peatlands, most common in Minnesota, are characterized by a layer of dead plant material called peat. The swamps of the Gulf South are home to water-loving trees, like cypress and tupelo. And along the coast, freshwater from the river’s mouth and saltwater from the ocean mix in tidal marshes. 

Their common denominator is their great ecological diversity and their ability to relieve flooding, purify water, mitigate drought and provide rich wildlife habitat. Experts say in an era of increased storms, droughts and floods wrought by climate change, they’re needed now more than ever. 

During the river’s massive, long-lasting flood in 2019, Nahant Marsh, a protected wetland in Davenport, Iowa, held about a trillion gallons of water from the Mississippi that would otherwise have flooded downstream communities, according to Brian Ritter, executive director of the marsh’s education center. 

Wetland protections get political  

Despite their benefits, wetlands are in peril. Intentional destruction began in the country’s colonial days, when “drain the swamp” was a literal, not political, strategy to clear space for farmland and cities. They were also vilified, thought to harbor diseases, dangerous animals and even monsters and ghosts. 

The states that border the Mississippi River have lost at least half of the wetlands they once had, and in some states, like Illinois, Iowa and Missouri, nearly all are gone. In 2019, the latest year for which data is available, only about 116 million acres of wetlands remained in the contiguous U.S., roughly half of the pre-colonial landscape. 

In the last 50 years, societal views of wetlands changed as people learned more about their value. They also became a bipartisan issue. The 1972 Clean Water Act gave them federal protections; the 1985 Swampbuster provision in the Farm Bill penalized farmers who grew crops on converted wetlands; and former President George H.W. Bush declared “no net loss” of wetlands a national goal in the late 1980s. 

But they are still disappearing. The Mississippi River Basin lost 132,000 acres of wetlands between 2009 and 2019, according to data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That’s the equivalent of about 100,000 football fields. 

And as efforts to protect wetlands picked up, so did the issue’s political charge, launching fights over the remains of a system that was once far more vast.  

“When people heard about wetlands, it was always, ‘There’s a wetland in between where I am now and what I need to do. And the goddamn government won’t let me fix that,’” said Tracy Hames, executive director of the Wisconsin Wetlands Association.

Before Sackett, the Supreme Court tried to lay down the law in Rapanos v. United States in 2006, when a developer in Michigan wanted to fill in wetlands on his property to build a shopping center. A majority of the justices agreed that the government had overstepped, but they offered two interpretations of which wetlands get federal protections. One was more restrictive, saying only wetlands that touch a protected body of water could be regulated, and one was broader, saying any wetlands that play a key role in improving downstream water quality could be regulated. 

In the years that followed, presidential administrations have flip-flopped between the broader and more restrictive approach to governing wetlands, continually redefining “Waters of the U.S.”

Former President Joe Biden’s administration issued a broader “Waters of the U.S.” rule. But 26 states sued to block his rule from taking effect. That means that while those legal battles play out, the country is using two “Waters of the U.S.” rules to determine which wetlands are protected — Biden’s amended rule and an older version in the states that sued. 

“Waters of the U.S.” has been a “pain in the side” for farmers and ranchers, Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said in Washington March 12 after Zeldin announced his intent to revise the rule.  

“I need a rule that’s on one page, that’s sitting on the dash of my truck right beside my devotional book, and if I have a question about a ravine on my farm I can pick that one page up and read it and interpret it myself,” Duvall said. “It should be that simple.” 

And homebuilders say to fix the nation’s housing shortage, which is estimated to be at least 1.5 million housing units, developers will need wetlands. 

They’ve tried to avoid them because of the difficult permitting process over the years, said Tom Ward, vice president of legal advocacy for the National Association of Home Builders. 

“To get these 1.5 million units, we’re going to have to go back to some of those more difficult pieces of property,” Ward said. 

What’s next 

Speaking with reporters in Chesterfield, Zeldin said he’d end the ambiguity and back-and-forth with one word. 

“Sackett,” he said. “S-A-C-K-E-T-T.” 

On March 12 the EPA issued guidance that spells out what the new rule will do: Unless a wetland directly abuts another federally protected water, it will not get federal protections. 

Importantly, that guidance isn’t legally binding. Until the EPA issues its new rule, wetlands will still have Biden-era protections, meaning half of the country will be under one rule, and half will be under another. And the rule-making process contains lengthy steps that can take years — the Trump administration issued its first “Waters of the U.S.” rule in 2020 — although Zeldin has promised this one won’t take as long. 

That means the actual impacts of Sackett are yet to be understood, although some have attempted to predict them. Following the ruling, the EPA under Biden estimated that up to 63% of the nation’s remaining wetland acres could lose federal protections.  

Another way to examine the impact is by looking at the determinations the Army Corps makes when someone wants to drain or fill a wetland. After the Sackett decision, about 18% fewer of those determinations found the wetland was federally protected, according to Adam Gold, coasts and watersheds science manager for the advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund. 

Although the tool Gold created to track the change in these determinations has limitations, in part because of a small post-Sackett sample size, he said it gives a “sneak peek” at how federal protections for wetlands are waning. 

Even under a new rule that the Trump administration asserts will be more straightforward, wetlands will not have the same protections across the country because different states have different rules. Along the Mississippi River, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Tennessee and Mississippi have wetland protections that go beyond the arm of the Clean Water Act, an Ag & Water Desk analysis found. But Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky and Arkansas do not have more protective wetland laws on the books. Louisiana extends broader state protections to its coastal wetlands, but not inland ones.

In other words, it will be easier to develop wetlands for housing in Missouri, for example, than in Minnesota. That will likely cause confusion and variation across the country, said Mark Davis, founding director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy in New Orleans. “I think you’re almost guaranteed to have more confusion … we’re like everybody else. We’re reading tea leaves.”

Even the state laws are moving targets. Illinois is aiming to beef up its wetland protections, for example, while in Tennessee, lawmakers want to scale theirs back. 

Still, Zeldin intends to close the case on “Waters of the U.S.,” stepping back from decades of broad federal protections for wetlands and giving farmers and developers the certainty they’ve long asked for, with Sackett as his guide. 

But given the history of wetland regulation, certainty could still be an elusive target. 

After all, the Biden administration defended its amended “Waters of the U.S.” rule as being consistent with the Sackett ruling, too, said Abby Husselbee, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Energy and Environmental Law program. 

“To the extent that this EPA would proclaim to be the final arbiter of how Sackett applies to the definition of (Waters of the U.S.) — we see already that there are other interpretations,” Husselbee said. “I don’t necessarily know that those would go away forever.” 

Avery Martinez of KMOV, Estefania Pinto Ruiz of KWQC and Elise Plunk of the Louisiana Illuminator contributed to this story. It is part of the series Down the Drain from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

A new era dawns for America’s disappearing wetlands as feds retreat from oversight is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Peat bogs sequester a massive amount of the Earth’s carbon dioxide. But even as scientists work to better understand bogs’ sequestration, the wetlands are under threat.

On a cold winter afternoon, naturalist and educator Mary Colwell guided visitors on a chilly tour of the Volo Bog Natural Area in northern Illinois. 

Crouching down from a boardwalk that runs through the wetland, Colwell pointed to one of the stars of the tour: sphagnum moss. With her encouragement, the group touched the little branch-like leaves of the pale green moss growing at the base of a nearby tree.

“Then in warmer weather, this is so soft,” Colwell said. “It’s unreal.”

Bog ecosystems are some of the most efficient carbon storage ecosystems in the world. They cover just 3% of the Earth’s surface, yet hold up to 30% of global carbon.

The bog’s keystone species, sphagnum moss, plays a key role in its storage capacity. Sphagnum acts like a sponge — it holds up to 20 times its weight in water.

“Sphagnum moss itself is incredible,” Colwell noted. “It’s very slow-growing.”

It grows so slowly, in fact, that it can take thousands and thousands of years for a peat bog to develop. Volo Bog started to form from a glacial lake more than 6,000 years ago. It’s still encroaching on the center of the lake, called the “eye” of Volo Bog.

But while bog ecosystems provide habitat, filter water and store carbon, they have been disappearing for decades. Wisconsin has lost half of its wetlands. In Illinois, more than 90% of wetlands have been lost. There are about 110 million acres in the United States, with more than half in Alaska — but nearly 70% have been drained and developed over the past 100 years. 

Unlocking sphagnum moss’s secrets 

Scientists think sphagnum moss may hold important lessons about carbon dioxide sequestration, but there’s much they don’t know. 

Sona Pandey is the principal researcher at the Danforth Plant Science Center in the St. Louis suburbs and is part of a team researching sequestration and bogs. 

“The first time I saw a peat moss under the microscope I just literally fell in love with it,” Pandey said. “That’s the only way to describe it. It’s beautiful to look at.”

Pandey’s research team is growing moss in a lab, studying its DNA, and trying to figure out how it is threatened by climate change — and how it could be a solution. 

Moss excels at storing carbon. It thrives in waterlogged, acidic conditions. It doesn’t decompose, acting almost like a giant mat of living carbon. 

But when it’s threatened, that carbon has to go somewhere. The main threat to bogs – draining for development and agriculture – exposes these waterlogged species to air, which kick-starts the decomposition process from microbes. 

“It is a possibility that all the carbon which is stored in peat bogs at the moment will be released to the atmosphere,” Pandey said, noting how it will become a greenhouse gas.

She said if we understand these mosses on a microscopic level, scientists and conservationists can better protect and restore them on a larger scale. Her research could lead to making informed decisions about which species would be more successful to reintroduce as part of potential restoration projects.

Protecting what’s left 

Historically, bogs have been undervalued, often drained to make land more usable.

Trisha Atwood, an associate professor and ecosystem ecologist at Utah State University, said people are slowly beginning to see them in a new light.

“There has been substantial changes in people’s perception of these wetlands just because they don’t typically hit people’s top 10 most beautiful places,” Atwood said. “Governments are starting to realize that they have these other benefits.”

While forests and forest soil often get attention for their carbon sequestration, Atwood said wetlands are even more important, storing 30 to 50 times faster and at a higher rate than other systems.

“They’re like no other ecosystem on Earth,” she said.

Even as some aspects of wetlands are seen as more valuable, a 2023 Supreme Court decision rolled back most existing protections for these ecosystems. The Sackett v. The EPA decision ruled that the Clean Water Act doesn’t protect wetlands that aren’t continuously connected to bigger bodies of water. The decision has been criticized for putting ecosystems, like bogs, at risk. 

Rebecca Hammer is an attorney for the freshwater ecosystems team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. She said peat bogs are particularly affected by the Sackett decision because they are mostly isolated from larger bodies of water.

“They generally begin their life as a lake that doesn’t have a drainage or connection to another water body, which allows vegetation and plant material to collect,” she said, “and the sphagnum mosses that grow there to collect over 1000s of years.”

About half of U.S. states have existing legal protections for wetlands, but these ecosystems in 24 states are left without any protections, legal or otherwise.

There are bogs scattered throughout the Mississippi River basin all the way down to the coast. 

Hammer said the decision could have a near-permanent effect on bogs.

“When peat bogs are destroyed or polluted, affected by development, we lose all of those benefits,” she said. “We really can’t replicate peat bogs. They take thousands of years to form. So once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

Colwell, who takes visitors on tours at the Volo Bog, says more needs to be done to protect what’s left. 

“We’re trying to restore these natural systems,” she said, “and when we restore them, they can increase the amount of CO2 that they will take.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri, of which Wisconsin Watch is a member, in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. Sign up for Wisconsin Watch’s newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Bogs hold a climate solution through carbon capture, but many have been drained is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.