In the heart of the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, some of the nation’s most productive farmland overlaps with one of its most important ecological corridors. Bottomland hardwood forests, wetland habitat and working fields all intersect the floodplain of the nation’s largest river basin.
But over the course of a century, the delicate balance of this landscape has shifted. More than 20 million acres were drained and cleared for cropland – and not always successfully. For as innovative as modern agriculture has been at transforming land, in the valley, the power of the river has proven even more powerful.
“It’s an excessive wetness problem,” says Ron Seiss, Lower Mississippi River program director and coordinator of the Tri-State Conservation Partnership, which encompasses Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. “If your land frequently floods, farmers are going to struggle to make a profit on that land.”
For Ron and the partnership, restoring balance to the valley has required significant buy-in from the valley’s landowners, where between 90–95% of the land is privately owned.
To return as many acres of land back to nature as possible, Ron and the Tri-State partners connect farmers and landowners with the Wetland Reserve Easement Program, administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The federal program pays landowners to take frequently flooded lands out of agricultural production, allowing restoration teams to replant native trees and reestablish wetlands.
Easements compensate landowners for the public benefits their land provides. As marginally productive farmland returns to nature, wildlife habitat is restored. The soil also holds more floodwater, preventing soil erosion and cleaning up water bound for the Gulf. For farmers, they can keep their land as an asset while continuing to farm their best acreage. For taxpayers, easements retire cropland and avoid federal payments for commodity programs, crop insurance and disaster assistance.
At the Walton Family Foundation, we believe that the most viable and lasting solutions work with the power of nature to improve water outcomes while also strengthening surrounding communities and ecosystems.
To get there, the foundation works to connect landowners to local, on-the-ground partners like the Tri-State Conservation Partnership to ensure that federal programs like the Wetland Reserve Easement Program deliver the greatest possible benefit to people and nature.
To date, more than one million acres have been placed into easements in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley.
To reach this impressive milestone, Seiss and his team have built a deep bench of local support, like The KKAC Organization, a land retention and agricultural organization serving farmers and landowners with limited resources based in the Arkansas Delta.
Across the rural South, Black farmers and landowners once owned nearly 20 million acres. A combination of discriminatory practices and a lack of proper estate planning caused this number to crater, and by 1997 around 90% of this land was lost. Currently, Black landowners own between 7–10% of the land in the valley.
The KKAC Organization provides education and technical assistance on estate planning and heirs’ property issues, and helps connect landowners to federal and state conservation programs, such as the Wetland Reserve Easement program.
Wilbur Peer is the founder of The KKAC Organization. Growing up on 40 acres of farmland, Peer says his large family had a strong work ethic and “grew everything that we ate. We had cows. We had chickens, guineas and ducks. The garden was not far from the house, and we grew tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbages and greens. We milked the cow. My daddy did what he had to do to feed all of us. He sold moonshine and barbecue on the weekends. We didn't focus a lot on natural resources. It was just survival.”
When Peer was 12 years old, he asked his father why he wouldn’t just sell his land and move the family to Chicago.
“He was a lot smarter than me, because I didn't realize how valuable land was at the time. That’s part of why we are doing this with the people here today.”
Rather than selling their land, Peer and the team at KKAC help landowners find other ways to keep it in the family through conservation, creating generational wealth and connecting younger people to their roots in the Delta.
“Farming is a good life,” says Peer. “Owning land, walking outside into a forest that you own and just listening to nature, fishing or hunting makes you feel a sense of self-worth.”
Working with organizations like KKAC, the Tri-State Conservation Partnership has become a nationwide model of how communities can work with nature to become more climate resilient.
For Seiss, it’s also about maintaining a way of life for farmers and landowners across the valley: “We like to say, “farm the best and conserve the rest.’”
