Capital Press - November 18, 2005

KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. – Cattails and bulrushes could be working their way into crop rotation in fields around the lower reaches of the Klamath Reclamation Project.

There’s not a new market for the aquatic plants, but turning fields into temporary wetlands for one to four years produces fertile soil, rid of pests, farmers and federal officials say. The practice has been tested for more than a decade on agricultural land leased on the Tule Lake and Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuges.

Now it could be moving to private land.

“It’s really provided an economic value to a wetland, and if you can give an economic value to something, that is powerful,” said Ron Cole, refuge manager. “It’s not just a wildlife value or an ascetic value.”

Farmers want to lease the refuge’s agricultural land that has gone through the program, bidding twice as much for it as for land that was in crops the prior year. Some, like Mike Noonan, who farms on and near Lower Klamath refuge on the California-Oregon border, are trying it out on their own land or private land they lease.

“It’s a great tool, but the jury is still out,” he said.

Started in the 1990s, the “walking wetlands” program revitalized refuge fields while providing habitat that quickly draws migrating birds and spurs the growth of aquatic plants.

“We are seeing birds nesting ... that we haven’t seen nest in years,” Cole said. 

Drowning out pests and nematodes with temporary wetlands saves farmers a couple of hundred dollars per acre on fumigation costs and boosts crop production by 25 percent, refuge officials said. The refuge’s walking wetlands are usually created in February on 200-acre blocks, using irrigation canal water.

Ron Cole, manager of the Klamath Basin    National Wildlife Refuge Complex, says    “walking wetlands” – or temporary    wetlands – made on leased agricultural    land in the Tule Lake and Lower Klamath    refuges attracted birds not seen in the    Klamath Basin for six decades.    - GARY THAIN/For the Capital Press

Making the wetlands sometimes requires building dikes around fields, but it doesn’t require the planting of aquatic plants. Cattails usually are the first to spring up, growing from hard seeds that may have been mixed with the soil for 60 years, said Fran Maiss, deputy refuge manager.

“The seed is there. We don’t have to do anything,” he said.

In fields that stay wetlands for more than a year, bulrushes and other plants start to grow, also from seed stock already in the ground, Maiss said.

To ready the field for crops again, it is drained and the aquatic plants are burned, putting seeds back into the ground.

With the boost in crop yields minus the cost of chemically treating a field for pests, the fields are hot when it comes bidding time for lease lands.

“Productive wetlands make for productive croplands,” Maiss said.

Not only do farmers bid twice as much for the land, he said, but also crops grown in fields that have been under water for three years can be labeled organic.

Now farmers are trying to figure out if they want to have walking wetlands on their private land.

Noonan turned 800 acres of private land he leases into temporary wetlands, but said he wants to see if the federal government will add incentives by providing funds through the Natural Resource Conservation Service before deciding how much to involve wetlands a part of his farming business.

“We just need some additional help to get this done,” Noonan said. “It’s a dollars-and-cents game.”

If the incentives are right, said Marshall Staunton, a farmer in Tulelake, Calif., wetlands could work their way into the rotation for many Klamath Basin farmers. The rotation could be wetland, organic crops, conventional crops, then back to wetlands.

“It gives you time to rejuvenate some tired ground,” he said.