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Concerns over Loss of Wetlands and Prairie08-05-13 | News

Concerns over Loss of Wetlands and Prairie

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) reports its researchers used satellite data to discover 7.2 million acres of wetlands and fragile land have gone under the plow between 2008 and 2012. Among the wildlife habitat threatened by spreading row-crop agriculture, says EWG, is the Prairie Pothole region, an oasis for bird breeding and migration.

Based on modern mapping and geospatial technologies, an analysis released by Environmental Working Group (EWG) on July 30, 2013 reports that "1.9 million acres, or near 3,000 square miles of wetlands and fragile, highly erodible grassland and prairie have gone under the agricultural plow in the U.S. between 2008 and 2012" www.ewg.org/research/going-going-gone.

During the same period, EWG reports 5.3 million acres (8,300 square miles) of "highly erodible land was similarly broken out" to grow row crops. EWG says the mapping shows the conversion of these lands is concentrated in regions that are "ecologically important and highly vulnerable to degradation."

EWG contends the record-high prices for crops and federal subsidies are responsible for growers moving rapidly over the last five years to plant corn, soy and other row crops across large areas of previously uncultivated land. "The trend has devastated critically important habitat for vast numbers of migratory birds and other species, and left sensitive areas exposed to the ravages of an increasingly unstable climate."

In the last five years, EWG says Minnesota has lost 312 square miles of valuable wetlands and the natural vegetation that surrounds them, an area about 5.7 times the size of Minneapolis, "reducing a resource that provides vital habitat for waterfowl, minimizes floods and keeps agricultural chemicals out of rivers and streams."

Such practices call to mind what occurred in the 1930s when farmers in

southeastern Colorado, southwest Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas converted huge areas of grassy prairie lands to grow wheat to take advantage of the high prices for that commodity. Land speculators fueled the wheat "rush." When the wheat prices plummeted from the glut of wheat, it was no longer economical viable for the farmers to grow the crop. Then the prolonged droughts hit. The loss of the large tracts of the Great Plains grassland ecology of buffalograss, blue grama, bluestem and curly mesquite, left dry soils exposed to the strong winds that sweep down the plains. The Dust Bowl was born. Suggested reading: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan. A National Book Award winner.