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Farmers and Conservation

As an environmental activist , I've been involved with some of these very
issues. I live within 1/4 mile of Shawnee National Forest land and 1/2 mile
of Crab Orchard NWR and maybe twenty miles from the new Cypress Creek NWR
and within five miles of two of the largest state parks in Illinois, Ferne
Clyffe and Giant City.

Cypress Creek refuge was established just a few years ago and leading the
charge of opposition was the Farm Bureau. They scared farmers with a
deliberate mis-information campaign that was shameless. I don't know any of
the history at Darby Creek, but here we have the Cache River basin that was
an unbelievable wetland treasure that wasn't destroyed until the late '60s
and early '70s. Westvaco, one of the largest timber companies in the world,
clear-cut nearly all the cypress/tupelo swamp that was left, destroying
great blue heron rookeries in their wake. The cypress/tupelo swamps were
gone, the drainage districts(working at the farmers behest) put all the
creeks into drainage ditches changing the hydrology radically. Farmers from
the Missouri bootheel bought up land in the Cache really cheap and cleared
and tried to drain it the same way they did in MO. It didn't work.  They got
a crop about every 3-5 years. But that didn't seem to matter. A wealthy
attorney from the Chicago area purchased several thousand acres of
"farmland" in the basin that was in bankruptcy. He found out about it from a
local attorney(family farmer) that farmed about 1200 acres of bottomland.
They knew the refuge was about to be established and bought the land out
from under the govt.

At the public hearings prior to establishment of the refuge boundaries, the
most virulent, rude, obnoxious, mean, hateful people that attended were the
farmers. They shouted down and booed anyone that wanted to preserve or
restore what was left of the Cache. When they testified, they parroted the
lies from the Farm Bureau over and over. The rep from the Farm Bureau got a
foot stomping standing ovation.

The refuge was established with Ducks Unlimited, the Nature Conservancy and
IDNR as partners with USFWS . Everything was on a willing seller basis, and
here's the cool part. The farmers couldn't line up fast enough. The only
thing holding up the growth of the refuge is a lack of funds. The govt.
can't process the land transactions fast enough. Even the rich lawyer sold
(after trashing a local aquifer because he irrigated his drained swampland).
Most of the farmers mowed down what was left of the old growth timber on
their land to get that last bit of capital out of it before selling.

Some thousand year old cypress trees were saved and volunteers are
replanting bottomland hardwoods. Seems a shame it was trashed such a short
time ago and now it will take a couple hundred years to recover.

I find it a little ironic that farmers will sell readily to any suburban
developer and will scream bloody murder about the demise of family farms
when a refuge or park is established. If farmers really wanted to save
farmland, they shouldn't have been so greedy when the subdivision developers
and mall developers were handing out the big checks.

Ed Cook
So Illinois

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