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Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Environment - Returning a 7,000-acre Illinois farm to swampland
"Future of Illinois Farm May Lie in Swampy Past" was the headline to this story published yesterday in the NY Times. Some quotes:
HAVANA, Ill, Sept. 20 - Every autumn for more than 80 years, a sprawling farm beside the Illinois River has yielded a rich bounty of corn and other crops. Now it is being turned back into a swamp.Four years ago an environmental group bought the 7,000-acre farm, which for generations has been one of the largest in Illinois. Over the next few months, ecologists will begin allowing it to flood.
Based on their experience in smaller projects, the ecologists think that within just a year or two, they can return this farm to its natural state as a thriving wetland. And they believe they can do it without planting a single seed. All they need to do, they say, is to stop sowing corn and to allow water levels to rise, and soon the seeds of wetland plants that have lain dormant in the soil for 80 years will spring to life.This suggests that the century during which food was grown along the banks of America's great rivers may one day be seen as an aberration, a brief parenthesis in the life of rich swamps that thrived along these rivers for thousands of years.
If the project here, about 165 miles southwest of Chicago at a farm called Emiquon, works as expected, planners would like to see it duplicated around the United States and beyond. They dream of the day when there will be fewer farms along riverbanks and more swamps.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 28, 2004 07:47 AM
Posted to Environmental Issues