As Peyton Daniel III tells it, the water in Woodruff County, Arkansas, has shaped his family’s history for more than a century.
“My great-grandfather farmed this land with mules. At lunch he would go home to the house on Seven Mile Lake, and my great-grandmother Gertrude would have a sandwich made and the boat ready. She would paddle him around for 30 minutes, he’d fish during lunch, and then paddle him on back.”
Peyton’s great-grandfather originally moved to Woodruff County in the early 1900s as a foreman for the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company, overseeing the crews clearing the valuable hardwood forests that once covered river swamps across the Mississippi Alluvial Valley.
After the timber was cleared, the company would sell the land at a discounted rate. Through this process, families like the Daniels began to acquire significant acreage that they then turned into cropland.
“At first, cotton was king,” says Peyton. “But in 1947, we grew our first acre of rice, and rice turned out to be pretty profitable … so eventually rice phased out the cotton.”
As more forest disappeared, and more cropland was cleared “right up to the edge of the rivers and lakes,” the water quality started to change. Growing up, Peyton recalls the Cache River looking like “a flowing milkshake. At times it looked like you could walk across it, it was so thick and muddy.”
While the Daniel family continues to farm the land with rice, corn, soybeans and “just enough cattle to be a headache,” a federal conservation program is helping them return some of their acreage to forest and wetland.
Wetland Reserve Easements, administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, pay farmers to take unproductive and frequently flooded lands out of production.
These easements benefit both landowners and taxpayers. They compensate farmers for the public benefits their land provides, such as improving wildlife habitat, holding more floodwater, preventing soil erosion and keeping water clean. They also reduce federal disaster costs by keeping crops and livestock away from harmful floods.
In the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, the program demonstrates what’s possible when conservation is voluntary, incentive-based and led by local communities.
And it’s proof of how working with the power of nature helps people and the environment thrive.
Farmers here lead the country in signing up their land for conservation programs under the Farm Bill.
To date, Wetland Reserve Easements have transformed more than a million acres of marginal farmland into thriving wetlands and bottomland forests in the valley.
James Cummins is president of the Mississippi River Trust, a grantee of the Walton Family Foundation that has worked with the Daniel family and many others to conserve their land.
“When the Mississippi River carved up the valley, it left good soil and unproductive soil. By helping farmers and landowners retire their unproductive land and continue to farm their best lands, we are creating a more efficient and effective agricultural and conservation system to benefit the valley.”
“Some of this ground never should have been cleared,” says Peyton. “It’s swampy, it’s harder to access as our machinery gets bigger, and because it floods all the time, it’s hit or miss whether we get a crop any given year.” Peyton jokes that for many of the old-timers he grew up with, “they can’t believe they are getting paid to put land back in trees that they spent their whole lives clearing. But it made sense. That land flooded constantly.”
Peyton says while financially, the easement has been a big boost, it has also helped to improve yields on the land they continue to farm. “Now that we've got 40 acres we're not farming anymore, we have time to concentrate on the ground that's more productive.”
The acreage Peyton has put into easement is beginning to change. Deer, quail and ducks are returning, and the cypress, oaks and persimmon trees planted through the program are now “about the height of a walking cane.”
“I don't know if I'll ever see it with the huge trees that were here when they came and cut all the virgin timber, but hopefully my kids and my grandkids will. I tell them exactly what my grandparents told me: You won’t ever get rich off this land, but you’ll always have a place to go.”
More wildlife also presents more opportunity for recreation, says Peyton, just like it did for his great-grandfather. “My kids enjoy hunting, and we go out and hunt for deer and duck. My son and I will grab a couple of kayaks and throw out a couple of lures for bass. It’s my mental floss for the day.”
As his acreage slowly returns to forest, Daniel is beginning to see changes in the water, too.
“My dad was about 10 years old when he was on a boat in the Cache River, near where an old rail bridge that used to take timber out of the forest had collapsed into the water. As they floated by, he swears you could see that railroad trestle all the way down – that’s how clear the water was. In the past few years, I've seen Cache River extremely clear. It's one of the prettiest things to see.”
