MPR: Minnesota River Cleanup

Minnesota River Cleanup
By Mark Steil
February 10, 1998

The Minnesota River valley could look different in a few years, and the river water may be much cleaner. What may be the most concentrated effort ever in Minnesota to clean a river is set to begin this spring, assuming the US Agriculture Department okays the state and federal effort. That approval is expected in February. The goal is to reduce the amount of agricultural runoff entering the river.

THIS SOUTHERN MINNESOTA FIELD doesn't look much out of the ordinary, with its spikes of brown grass poking through ice-encrusted snow.

Douglas Bandemer: We got good snow cover out here, we're looking at eight to 10 inches of snow, which is good for the grass that's been seeded for next year. We're going to have plenty of moisture.

Douglas Bandemer's field, though, represents a success story, one which the federal government is prepared to spend $100 million to replicate. The state will add about $30 million to the program. Bandemer has much of his river valley land in government conservation programs which pay him not to farm the land. He planted grass or trees on the fields to hold soil in place. Last spring water covered much of this land as the worst flood in recorded history moved down the Minnesota River. If Bandemer still farmed the land, the fast moving water could have scoured inches of soil off plowed fields.

Bandemer: You could definitely see where the soil was held back by the vegetation. Plus when I walked out in the field after the water went down, I think I gained about an inch of extra soil just from the filtering effect of the water running over my land. I think that's quite a benefit to the river and it's a benefit to everybody downstream.

The state-federal effort hopes to duplicate Bandemer's findings on a massive scale along the Minnesota River and its tributaries. Instead of a jumble of federal and state river cleanup efforts, the goal is to unite them into a single program with a clear goal: to build a green buffer between the river and farm fields. The idea was first proposed by Tim Searchinger of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Searchinger: I think people will remember these plans as the first real effort by Americans to restore the natural functions of water bodies.

The official name is the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. It's already being implemented in Maryland to help clean up the Chesapeake Bay. It's hoped grass and tree buffers between farm fields and streams will remove much of the water-damaging nitrogen and phosphorous entering Chesapeake Bay. The first river cleanups are proposed in two Midwest states: Minnesota and Illinois. Along the Minnesota River and its tributaries, Searchinger says the program will pay farmers to convert cropland to natural grasses and trees.

Searchinger: It will restore the flood plain and riparian areas around most of the main stem of the Minnesota River and probably half the tributary areas. So they will serve a very valuable filtering function. The program will also restore around 30,000 acres of so-called pothole wetlands. These are the little wetlands that used to dot the landscape where water would go into them and pretty much filter through them into the ground water instead of running directly into the Minnesota River.

Farmer Doug Bandemer has several parcels of land along the river he may enroll in the program. He says soil- and chemical-laden runoff has choked the river.

Bandemer: When I was a young boy I used to fish with my grandfather, and the river hardly had any carp in it. And it was good walleye fishing and good catfish fishing, and we had crappies in the river. And there was hardly any mud. There was big sand bars, we had a lot of clams down there. Now there's no clams that I know of, and I don't know of any clean sand bars. Most of it is mud bars.

Farmers are generally suspicious of government programs which come looking for their land. Kent Kanten farms near the Chippewa River, a major Minnesota River tributary. He also serves on a US Agriculture Department advisory committee which helped shape the river cleanup program. He says it may be difficult to convince farmers to end crop production permanently on some of their land.

Kanten: That seems to be a tough pill for most of the landowners to swallow.

The program is entirely voluntary, farmers don't have to sign up. The government first looks for landowners willing to sign permanent easements, an agreement where the farmer still owns the land but agrees not to farm it, now or ever. In exchange for the permanent easement, the landowner receives a one-time payment roughly equal to the land's current market value. Kanten says that may be a difficult agreement to sell, particularly to folks intending to pass the farm on to their children.

Kanten: Somewhere down the road there's no income and some restrictions on what can be done with the land, not only as far as agriculture but other things, for recreation too. Most people don't want to be tied to that.

If the government can't find enough farmers to sign permanent easements to make the river cleanup a success, they can offer limited duration easements, say for 30 years. Standing in a field near the main channel of a frozen Minnesota River, Douglas Bandemer says it's important that there is wide-spread participation:

Bandemer: We can't just say we got work by Brown County or Nicollet County or Redwood County. We got to go way up to the source, of eastern South Dakota all the way down through Big Stone, down Yellow Medicine, Lac Qui Parle county, down through Montevideo, Granite Falls. We got to do the whole river.

To get started, the Minnesota River Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program needs a final okay, from US Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman. A successful program will be a major step toward Governor Arne Carlson's goal of making the river safe for swimming and fishing by 2002.

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