 The landscape of the upper Midwest has become one of the most productive agricultural regions of North America. Fields of corn and soybeans reach to the horizon in every direction. This land, though, has spawned another kind of product, completely unintended but no less profound. The runoff from these agricultural operations compromises the water quality, both locally and farther down the Mississippi drainage, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, this region is a major contributor to the zone of hypoxia in the Gulf, where excess pollutants wipe out marine life. The area of concern is the region of Northwestern Iowa and Southwestern Minnesota. Today, the plow dominates a landscape where once the grass has stood well over a person's head and buffalo roamed freely. Very few wetlands and native prairies remain on the land to filter the water and slow the pulse of runoff. In addition, the mass conversion of the prairie wetlands ecosystem to intensive farming has threatened many species of migratory birds and butterflies. These species often nest here or use the area during their cross-hemisphere migration routes. Through adapted farming and conservation practices, there are increasing points of hope. New data suggests that the level of nitrates in the water has been declining in recent years. The key is to look at current practices with an eye toward historical conditions and practical conservation strategies. Around 12,000 years ago, when the first humans appeared in North America, the upper Midwest was mostly a glacial landscape. When the glaciers last receded, they left behind a fertile soil, glacial lakes and wetland depressions called prairie potholes. The effects of the last glacial event are still being felt on the land. We're in the prairie pothole region, which is mainly glacial till. Placed here are pretty much the topography, and everything you see is placed here pretty much by glacials coming over the land and then receding, especially the receding part, where they gouged the landscape and made deposits in different areas. This is an open landscape dominated by grasses and wetlands. Glaciers came through this area and dug out these depressions. The climate has provided the moisture necessary to maintain the vegetation, the grassland vegetation and the wetlands. Interacting with the climate and the physical factors, glaciers, glaciation are disturbances such as grazing and fire, which have maintained the upland system in a very early, successional stage. We're at kind of a major boundary in southwestern Minnesota. We're sitting on the moraine of the last glacier that came into this region, and a moraine is a linear ridge of hills. This one trends northwest-southeast. And to the east of this line is a landscape that is very young geologically. The drainages haven't been integrated yet. You have rolling hills, a lot of wetlands, lakes, sloughs. To the west of this ridge is a much, much older glacial landscape. The difference in age is 14,000 years to the east, 400,000 to 600,000 years to the west. So there has been a lot more time for the drainage system to develop west of here. This difference in age of the two landscapes on either side of this ridge has to be appreciated when you're talking about land management, because on the west side you have this well-integrated drainage system. Every single low spot on the land surface has been drained, has been reached by headward erosion of a stream of some size. And so the whole landscape is connected with this dendritic drainage way. On the east side of this line, nothing is connected yet. This landscape is poorly drained, and it will become drained in the long run. And so there is going to be the creation and erosion of streams. And that's a hard thing for people who are managing the land to appreciate. They want it to kind of, lakes to stay looking like the lakes they always have been. They're reluctant to see lakes fill in and become marshes and shallow water environments. But that is going to be the natural progression of this landscape. The biggest change we see now that the state is fighting and doesn't understand is the Minnesota River was deeply down cut during glaciation 10,000 years ago. All its tributary streams which reach into this area are still adjusting to that down cutting event. And so they had waterfalls initially created at their junction with the Minnesota. And those waterfalls or nick points are migrating upstream. And in some cases are only 5 to 10 miles from where they join the Minnesota River. So you have these deeply incised drainage ways that meet with kind of a sluggish looking upland stream. Well eventually that gradient, that step in the gradient is not going to persist for the long run. It's going to be evened out. And so there's a lot of erosion. There's a lot of gullying banks are caving into the river. There's high sediment load in the Minnesota and its tributaries. And a lot of that is natural. Farmers do contribute some of it when they ditch and tile, but the bulk of it is a natural event. And it's something that is still adjusting after 10,000 years. When the first Europeans viewed this area in the late 1600s, they found the land covered with a waving sea of tall grass prairie, roaming herds of bison, and migrating tribes of plains Indians. Those Native Americans left subtle, yet lasting marks upon the land. After the Civil War, agricultural production hit full stride here, and within 100 years came to almost completely dominate the landscape. Most of the wetlands were actually drained at about the turn of the century, maybe up to about 1920, the mid-20s or so. People had to realize that Iowa and much of the upper Midwest here, the prairie pothole region, people had a difficult time even living in this area because of water. They had trouble even getting around. In Iowa, we had probably about two and a half million acres of wetlands that disappeared because of drainage. So people historically didn't like wetlands. And a lot of people still don't like them today because they were a real problem with people making a living off the land when they had to farm it. And the people's attitudes I think have changed somewhat because they realize a lot more now the values and functions of wetlands. Today, producers and land managers here are starting to look for ways some of that original ecosystem might regain function. The focus is on a few small patches set within the agricultural landscape. One may still find a small remnant of prairie or wetland in original condition. These areas serve as models and seed sources for restoration work elsewhere. Generally down here, over 90% of the original wetlands have been drained and are now used for farmland. For the tall grass prairie, I've heard various percentages but generally it's well less than 1% of the original tall grass prairie still remains. And I've heard as low as, you know, a tenth of a percent. So depending on what area you're looking at, tall grass prairie is very rare. We do have some tall grass prairie behind me. We have some on some of our other waterfall production areas and we use that as the seed source in order to start planting those types of plants in our new areas. So this is a skipper and this is one of the species of insects that we use to talk about the quality or the health of a prairie. The skippers are incredibly specific because they lay their eggs on grasses and despite the fact that it's not very showy of a species, they really do tell us quite a bit about the quality of the prairie. This prairie is also a very valuable resource because when you look at Iowa and the changes in the landscape that have happened over the past couple of hundred years, Iowa used to be predominantly covered by wetlands and prairies and now we have less than 1% of the prairie covering the landscape that we had 200 years ago. So this is an incredibly valuable resource, this site because of the genetic diversity and the species diversity of plants as well as other organisms that live here like insects. One of the other important aspects of this prairie particularly is that it shows quite a diversity of micro-habitats. We have the uplands here, we also have lower wetland areas and there's a high diversity of topography and the different vegetation communities that are associated with that. So it's important when we think about landscapes and we think about areas to either restore or preserve, it's important to think about getting the whole complement of these different kinds of habitat types and in many cases there are plants that are tightly associated with, for example, the lowlands like the wetlands and there are many other species of animals, wildlife that are associated with each of these different micro-habitats. So this 160 acres on Cale or Prairie is especially important because it has this diversity of different habitat types. First of our farming operation is a corn-soybean operation so it has to be economically profitable. Our whole family is conservation minded so that part is pretty easy to work with the family on. But it has to be economically viable for our total operation before we can do them. My parents are older and of course participated in a lot of the drainage of the farm and when we stop a tile and that type of thing, it has to be something that works with the total picture of the farm. That's kind of how we look at it. Big picture wise, we're actually in the Des Moines River on that watershed. Just a few miles north of us, we go into the Blue Earth River system which goes north into the Mississippi and through the Minnesota River. So we're kind of on a tabletop there but even our small watershed, we're in the Des Moines River when I see what comes down it. One of the concerns that I've had is watching the scour erosion on this river and watching the channel change and in my lifetime, we've owned this particular farm for 34 years. There's been a terrific amount of tile upstream increase. It's about a 30 mile watershed and the velocity and the speed the water comes down to us now is greatly enhanced. So we're seeing more scour erosion on the banks and that's one of the things that I'd like to see kind of slowed down and by establishing the grasses on these bank edges is really working in the right direction. In this immediate part of the Great Plains, the northern tallgrass per ecoregion, I think that we are something like 97% privately owned. This landscape is 97% privately owned and something like 85% engaged in cultivated agriculture. So any sort of public policy that has intentions of improving water quality or bird nesting success I think has to include the land that is privately owned. One of the most ambitious programs at work here focuses on establishing conservation practices on private land. The Minnesota Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, or CREP, seeks to place 100,000 acres of marginal cropland in a conservation easement. One of the most significant issues that we've been working on over the last several years is trying to clean up the Minnesota River. It's one of the most polluted rivers in the United States. It's primarily dominated agricultural landscape. It runs from the western edges of Minnesota, actually into South Dakota, all the way into the Minneapolis-St. Paul area where it joins the Mississippi River. It's one of the principal, it is the primary tributary to the Mississippi River, and it's sought to be the number one pollutant to the Mississippi River in the state of Minnesota. Of course, from Minnesota's agricultural landscape, the Minnesota River probably is made up of all or parts of 37 counties. It's roughly a watershed of 10.5 million acres of land in this particular river's watershed, and roughly 10 million acres of that land is under intense agricultural cropping. So it's an extremely intensified agricultural. It certainly includes probably the most significant cropping areas in the state of Minnesota are found in this. This particular watershed, certainly we can't turn the clock back to prior to European settlement. We know agriculture is critical to the state of Minnesota, is trying to find that balance between conservation and agriculture use, and we think CREP has been a great, great selling tool for the state of Minnesota, particularly in trying to achieve very significant benefits to the Minnesota River. Wetland restorations are the types of eligible croplands that we are trying to enroll in this program. And the reason for that, of course, these are the lands that, if we can get them out of crop production, we can get a conservation practice on those parcels and protect our future resources from, you know, reducing soil and water erosion, sedimentation, nutrient loading into the Minnesota River, and also be looking at improving and enhancing fish and wildlife habitat. You know, one of the reasons that we're here, of course, is trying to enhance our water resources as well as our fish and wildlife resources within Minnesota. And in order to do that, we have to look at trying to improve and enhance the watershed in the Minnesota River, which then subsequently will benefit the Mississippi River and on down the river down to the Gulf of Mexico and issues related to hypoxia as an example. At the mouth of the Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico lies an area known as the Dead Zone, or the zone of hypoxia. Here, excess nutrient runoff and pollution from upriver have created an oxygen-deprived body of water. No marine life can exist here. Improving water quality in the upper Midwest can help alleviate the Dead Zone. Additional connections extend across the hemisphere. Minnesota and Iowa form critical links in a migratory chain for countless bird species. Some of the species nest here. Some use the area to reproduce. Others continue their journey through here to the Arctic and then back into South America. When you look at this landscape, I think one of the key things that are gained, not only by the producer, but by myself being a taxpayer and all the other taxpayers, is the fact that this system that you see impacts people further down the river. I always think of my parents that live on the Mississippi. That's where I grew up. If I had more knowledge of this at the time when I was growing up as a kid, I would understand better the landscape. But this thing has an impact on that Mississippi river. It has an impact further down when you get to the Gulf of Mexico. Removal of nutrients, maintaining the flash flood system. That sponge effect, the wildlife habitat benefit on the migratory species all just benefit to everybody in the community as well as further down the watershed community. For me, in my present position as a wildlife biologist for NRCS, all of this is connected from the headwaters, from the potholes, the management of uplands through the flood plain, riparian systems to the coastal marshes, all of this is connected. So these areas get used by a wide assortment of wildlife, some of which stay around for extended periods and rear their young, either on the wetlands or in adjacent areas. Others which only occupy these habitats very temporarily en route to breeding areas elsewhere. This time of year you see used by transient birds that may have bred up in the Arctic and such as shorebirds. You see the mud flats out here which provide them access, vegetation free access to feed on the invertebrates that are in the shallow water which would allow them to complete their migration down to the Gulf and eventually down to South America. When we bought it was all grassland. Since then we've put the basins on it that are here today gradually over a period of time. My wife Jean and I are very much interested in wetlands for a number of reasons. The wildlife of course comes with it. Once you put the water in the wetland you have the wildlife following and the natural vegetation that comes along. It is extremely advantageous to not only the immediate neighbors but the long range downstream neighbors are benefiting from this too because of the filtration effect of the vegetation and the mere existence of the wetland between here and downstream at some point. The Prairie Pothole region in the upper Midwest and Canada is the most productive area in North America for producing waterfall ducks and geese. The birds that are going to stay here locally for waterfall are primarily mallards, blue winged teal, shovelers, gadwalls. Many of the other waterfall that migrate through here, the buffalo head, a lot of the diving ducks, scop, canvas-backed redheads, they'll go farther north in Nest and some of those Prairie wetlands farther north. Iowa currently has some hot spots as far as nitrate contribution to that whole hypoxia problem and part of our solution to that problem is to be able to position our wetland restorations within a watershed or a large landscape and position them to the point where we get the maximum filtration value out of our wetlands. Wetlands placed in a watershed anywhere are good but if we can strategically place those wetlands in a position where they do the greatest benefit everybody comes out ahead. Up here in the Upper Midwest, one of the big issues that's come up over the last few years is the hypoxia issue and that's mainly having to do with nitrogen, extra nitrogen that's in the system of the Minnesota River and in the Mississippi. Of course, it dumps into the delta and anytime we can, with our buffers and with our filter strips up in the Upper Midwest, we definitely can have an impact on removal of some of that nitrogen before it becomes a problem in our streams. While I'm sitting in the tractor cab planting on ridges or cultivating or harvesting, I often think of myself as being just one farmer within a watershed or within a flyway or within the northern Tolgras Ferry Eco Region and I try to think of my role. I love, of course, as all farmers do to think of big yields. It's just great fun to get big yields and that is what really matters to my success. But I also get some sort of reward from feeling that the birds that are making their way from, in some cases, golden plover. They pass through usually while we're planting corn and I think that they've been in Argentina and I think that they're headed for the very, very northernmost parts of North America. And I think of their trip when I'm moving really slowly across the field in the tractor and I'm fascinated and I really want to do what I can to make their trip as easy as possible. I like the idea of giving the really delicate and fine-tuned attention to what I'm doing on this farm so that that golden plover finds what it needs on its way through. But then I also want to be part of a network of information and research so that I can learn whether or not what I'm doing is creating any sort of advantage to the entire flyway or the entire watershed. I would like to believe, I would like to know that this farm is not contributing to the zone of hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Farming with the mind on the larger ecological issues leads to new practices on the land. Small changes in tillage methods and timing can have a great effect on the landscape's overall health. This farm wouldn't be recognizable from the road passing by as being different in any way to an untrained eye from other farms, but there are a number of changes and practices that I've implemented to try to create benefits for water quality and wildlife. I've manipulated and tweaked their cropping system a little bit to try to make room for bird nesting success, small mammals, and our greater diversity of flora and fauna to exist while at the same time hoping to achieve maximum yields, maximum economic yields. I'm really enjoying in my professional life trying to design a corn and soybean cropping system that facilitates bird nesting success. We can use these implements to get 170 bushel per acre corn yields while at the same time leaving a 45-day no re-entry interval in our cropping system to allow ground nesting birds to rear broods of young. In our ridgely cropping system, the practices of the past of broadcast applications of fertilizers and herbicides are almost a part of the past. We apply our fertilizers in a band, seven inches deep, and in a very stable form so that the fertilizer that we apply is used by the crops that we grow and doesn't end up as pollution in surface water flow leaving the farm. We apply our nitrogen fertilizer at the point in time when the corn needs it the most with this row crop cultivator. We just make a few little modifications to it and we band our fertilizer typically in late May and we do nitrogen soil testing before making our fertilizer recommendations so that we are pretty assured that we're not applying more than we need. That combined with leaving the fields untilled in the fall and hopefully including the understory crops, we're really hoping to keep all of our fertilizers right here on the farm. Since we've changed cropping systems and since the arrival of some new technologies that allow us to leave this large no re-entry interval in our cropping system and allow us to leave untouched residue corn and bean stocks through the winter where we're finding that upland sandpipers regularly nest in rear broods right in our crop fields and I find this really, really exciting and really rewarding. Other rewards come when agency managers link up concerned producers with appropriate government programs such as the wetland reserve program and the Minnesota crop. When land is set aside through these programs, the ecological function may be managed using some basic conservation strategies by restoring or preserving prairies and wetlands and by establishing riparian buffers or filter strips. One of the things that we're trying to think about when we look at these prairies is how, in a fragmented landscape, how can we reconnect the pieces? How can we make this a better landscape for the species that we're trying to preserve in the prairies? And one way of doing that could potentially be by adding reconstructed prairies. Another way of putting this landscape back together could be by creating buffer systems that would connect these prairies. The site that we're looking at here now is a glacial remnant. This is a prairie that had never been cropped. In this case, this landowner hadn't done anything to the land and so we're able to come in, do some burning on it. We broke the tile lines. The Nature Conservancy actually owns the feed title on this now and we have the permanent easement on it. And so we're in the process of restoring the ecosystem for this particular site. As far as connectivity goes of this site with other sites that we're talking about a larger area, we address it here in Iowa a couple of different ways. In specific programs like the Wetlands Reserve Program and those related easement programs, we add extra points in for sites that are in proximity. Either you get the most points if they're touching, an application is touching an established site like this or it's within a mile or two miles, those types of things. And we try to bring those groups of easements together because we can get a more valuable package for wildlife and for water quality and all those types of things. If there is a segment and it's all in one land, we would try to get a buffer strip between this site, for example, and another one that's maybe a quarter mile away. We would try to get that person in maybe in a CRP buffer strip and plant that down to native grasses and forbs and so it becomes this passageway, this buffer between this site and another site. Maybe there's another landowner that has a representative site too and try to connect them all together so it becomes a very connective ecosystem. Although it's segmented in smaller pieces than what it was naturally, these alleys are wide enough so that they're just not a carnivore trap so that their wildlife can actually reproduce in there and can actually pass through and safely. We would try to get those done and have a good connected wildlife area. The way we see wetlands at the planting phase and all the way through it is that they're just one of the opportunities that we can use to get conservation on the land. Early on when we do our preliminary planning for these projects, we ranked them for water quality, for restorability, for cost of restoration. In this case, this wetland is set in a position where it created a string of wetlands over 30 miles long where it fit into that chain and created a situation where you cannot drive more than two miles in this chain north and south in the potholes without coming upon another restored wetland or a prairie system. So we use that as the ranking. We emphasize that and we also emphasize the fact that we took approximately 80% of the drainage area in this particular area and filtered it through this wetland so it had some big water quality benefits. These conservation buffers that we have out here today, the riparian forest buffers, they're planted here in the river bottoms in the flood zone areas and we're hopefully creating a practice here that will be absorbing nutrients that are moving underground in the crop fields here whereas we pick up a lot of nitrates that are picked up off the cornfields and come through the underground streams. We're also creating a lot of wildlife habitat down here and these are very fast growing species and we're going to create some habitat for the wildlife. The forest buffered trees are going to be creating shade habitat over the stream for the fisheries here in the southwest Minnesota tallgrass prairie, particularly for instance in the northern pike which is considered to be a lake species in a lot of cases, in most cases in Minnesota but they are known to migrate up in these streams at certain times of the year. Anytime you can create your banks a little bit more stable but also create some shade over in pockets and pools to just create a little bit more fish habitat for those migratory species. We're located here with this riparian forest buffer situated at the bottom of a landscape that's kind of steep for years. It had been tilled some. It's protecting what used to be a feedlot up there that could have had runoff coming through. We're protecting that. You've got a corn crop that's being raised down here and of course in this part of the country it takes a lot of nutrients, particularly nitrogen to raise that crop of corn and with the intense rainstorms we get we can get some leaching down into the root zone so that's going to be moving towards the stream which is only a couple hundred feet away and so anytime we can absorb any of that nutrients through a crop like the crop of grass that's located in the buffer here it's going to be absorbing that out and taking that out of the system. Landowners and land managers in the upper Midwest are faced with challenges both social and economic. In addition, the byproducts of an otherwise successful farming operation are threatening the ecology of the entire basin. Through appropriate conservation and farming practices however some solutions are being applied to this complex problem. As NRCS employees we don't make the decisions for the landowner. Our responsibility is to provide to that landowner alternatives, resource alternatives for those acres and then if there's programs available whether it's USDA programs whether it's interior programs or local soil and water conservation district programs those types of things lay those programs out so that landowners can fit the right decisions with a program to help them implement those decisions but as far as us making decisions we don't we provide alternatives to the landowner landowners that make the decision. When you look at conservation planning on this site you may come out and see your eyes may focus on a basin per se but when you can look beyond the basin and into the perspective of what the system is requiring do we need a filter system to help keep sediment and nutrient load out of a water flow can we do that not only with one landowner but with several and when you look at a basin per se like this the question would be is on the other side of the fence what's on the other side of the hill and how does it connect with one another and can you as a conservation planner make that connection happen by providing information, assistance opportunities for landowners to get together and complete conservation practices that not only function on their land but also work within the entire system as we work with one landowner then that information can go to another landowner as we work in a neighborhood in a group setting and collectively then these good decisions result in resulting in multiple acres large blocks of acres being treated properly