By DOUG GRAVES
Ohio Correspondent

COLUMBUS, Ohio — If farmers in Ohio or any other rural dwellers are interested in developing a wetland on the premise, now is the ideal time. And in the long run it might not cost them anything at all.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Wildlife and Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) are spearheading this wetlands effort. As much as $8 million is available to restore wetlands in Ohio.

“Typically some farmers have fields which are wet and not tillable and never see crops,” said Dan Crusey, biologist with the Ohio Division of Wildlife. “Oftentimes they weigh the expenses of tilling that land and decide that wetlands it the way to go. Strangely, this is the first time we’ve had more money than applications. We’ve been running news releases constantly, trying to drum up some interest.”

In general, wetlands are low-lying areas that are covered or saturated by water during part of each year. This results in specialized wet soil types and water dependent plants. Ohio wetlands include marshes, swamps, bogs and fens. They vary by degree of wetness, soil characteristics and vegetation type.
The NRCS Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP) is a voluntary conservation program that offers landowners the means and opportunity to protect, restore and enhance such wetlands on their property through perpetual easements, 30-year easements or Land Treatment Contracts. The program is managed by the USDA, providing technical and financial support to help landowners who participate in WRP.

“The most popular method is the perpetual easement,” Crusey said, “because the easement payment is roughly $2,500 per acre. The farmers get a lump sum per acre plus reimbursement for restoration and other habitat work on those eligible acres.”
The goal of WRP is to achieve the greatest wetland functions and values, along with optimum wildlife habitat. Enrolled lands are mostly high-risk agricultural lands located in flood-prone areas that are then restored to wetlands.

“The wetlands program has been pretty successful here in Ohio,” Crusey said. “But there are still a lot of acres being destroyed every year. There is a lot of wetland being turned into farmland.”
In addition to paying the landowner for the easement, the USDA pays up to 100 percent of the cost of restoring the wetland. These restoration expenses are oftentimes paid for by the farmers or other landowners. These receipts are then turned over to the county USDA office for reimbursement. In some cases the rural residents can obtain the needed forms from the county office and assign payment directly to a contractor, thus eliminating any out-of-pocket expenses.

In the end, the landowner retains ownership and controls access of the land. The landowner must agree to implement a wetland reserve plan of operations, a conservation plan that identifies how the wetland functions and how the area will be restored, improved and protected.

In Ohio, WRP was first offered in 1995. To this day, Ohio has 326 WRP easements covering 20,143 acres.

The values of wetlands include the storage of ground water, the retention of surface water for farm uses, the stabilization of runoff, the reduction or prevention of erosion, the production of an outdoor laboratory for students and scientists, and the production of cash crops such as minnows (for bait), marsh hay, wild rice, blueberries, cranberries, and peat moss. Some wetlands even provide good fishing.

Interested landowners should contact a NRCS Wetland Team member or an ODNR Division of Wildlife private lands biologist. Participants are urged to call within the next few months.
NRCS wetland team members to contact include Barbara Baker, 419-429-8306; Danielle Balduff, 330-830-7700 and Gordon Starr, 937-836-5428.

Ohio private land biologists to contact include Dan Crusey, 614-644-3925; Jeff Burris, 419-429-8367 and Mark Witt, 419-429-8362.