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DOCUMENTARY TRANSCRIPT

Narrator: Funding for Echoes of Cry of the Marsh is provided by the University of Minnesota, Morris; the Upper Minnesota River Watershed District, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. [Music and sounds of the prairie] Narrator: As a kid, I used to come to this hillside and sit and watch the panorama of the wildlife. So, I spent many hours sitting on the hillside. I always called it the “Hill”. This little dip that goes down into the marsh basin, I would come and sit on top here and watch the wildlife for hours on end. Bob Hartkopf: I was always watching the ducks and geese. Canada geese, Mallards, a whole variety of duck species, and other geese as well. The flight of a goose or a duck has always inspired me. I just love to see these birds. Bob Hartkopf: I knew they were attached to that lake for their survival, and lived in the lake, and as a kid, I realized that was their home, just as this little farmhouse was my home. Narrator: For more than 70 years, Bob Hartkopf has walked the grounds of his family’s farm in Swift County, Minnesota. As a young boy, Hartkopf wandered through the shallow wetland that grew beside his father’s crops. The wetland was called Mud Lake, an ironic name that failed to describe its beauty and wildlife. But when it came to crops and springtime floods,

Mud Lake seemed a more apt description in the minds of local farmers who wanted the extra acreage. Hartkopf, on the other hand, saw Mud Lake as a classroom. He studied the plant life and the migration patterns of local waterfowl. The education inspired him to become a high school science teacher. However, the farm Hartkopf sees today does not resemble the farm he knew as a child. Bob Hartkopf: People at that time did not farm fence row to fence row; there were little nooks and crannies on the farm; wild weed patches, cornfields had lots more vegetation in them, and that, in fact, led to more wildlife over the entire farm. Narrator: Hartkopf was not alone in seeing the changes in the Minnesota landscape. Janet Timmerman: My dad was a great local historian in that he knew there were big stories in small places and we would drive by these areas that at one time he would say you know there used to be a lake out there. So we would look out there and try to imagine what that lake might have looked like when there was not corn and soybean growing there at the time. Bob Hartkopf: Any wetland that is destroyed, the biodiversity goes to zero. It becomes the biological dessert with the exception of corn, soybeans, or whatever, if it is farmed, which means you virtually have no wildlife. Narrator: As the 20th century progressed, attitudes about wetlands changed dramatically. The government initiated policy to help increase the amount of food the American farmers could produce. Wetlands became the enemy. Joe Amato: And in that way if removing water “gets me more”, it’s pretty hard to have another discussion if that discussion is on the surface. Bob Hartkopf: I was devastated. It was like losing one of my closest friends or family members, when this marsh was drained. Narrator: Hartkopf decided he could not stand by and let these wetlands disappear into history. In 1959, he picked up a 16 millimeter camera and began documenting the ditching work near the family farm.

Dave Sorhen: I remember Bob indirectly from my days in college, and I was very impressed with the film he produced, “Cry of the Marsh”, and I remembered it, it made a lasting impression on me. Rex Johnson: And I thought it was so remarkable that something that had a particularly significant impact on me in high school was coming back to me so much later in my career. As I started to learn more and more about Bob’s story, what amounts as a 35-year odyssey to restore that particular wetland, I couldn’t help but start to share his passion for its restoration I guess. Narrator: Hartkopf’s film touched off a debate that still rages today. To drain or not to drain, that is the question. And it’s a difficult one in Minnesota and other states dominated by agriculture. For most of the 1960s and 70s, the mighty industry of crop production took front stage. Diane Radermacher: Farming throughout centuries has been like that. It’s just the God given right to do what you want with your own property. Narrator: In recent years, sentiment about wetlands and farming has changed. The public has begun to understand the value of restoring wetlands, and the great social cost of industrial, fence row to fence row farming. Within this debate, many people stand between extremes. Conservationists call for protection of wetlands while farmers try to maintain a profitable farm. Politicians and the public are left to decide where to find the middle. Joe Amato: When it’s somebody else’s property upstream, we’re all in favor of ducks, we think we’re ecologists upstream. But as soon as the water touches our land, we become engineers. And we want to send that water downstream as fast as we can, so we want the guy upstream to dam and fill his land up with lily pads and natural grasses, everything that will hold the water, but as soon as that water gets close to us, we want pumps, we want diversion channels, we want ditching. Loren Harste: We saw a case a number of years ago where a fellow drained what could be called a lake. And just put it on a neighbor, so he improved 30 acres of his own land but probably ruined 25 acres of another farmer’s land.

Tom Kalahar: What are we doing here? We got one arm of the government that’s paying farmers to behave poorly. We have another arm of the government paying farmers to correct the problems that are created over here. That is just craziness. Narrator: Hartkopf and others think the time has come to make serious changes in farm policy. The disappearance of wetlands from Minnesota has made a negative impact on our environment and affected our quality of life. Bob Hartkopf: The ecosystem deteriorates immediately. The water is gone. Once the water is gone, usually the dry marsh bed is burned off in this case, which is the case. The marsh bed was burned and no wildlife carried, the wildlife’s gone. Rex Johnson: The consequence of draining these depressions into ditches that flow to main stem rivers is that we have more frequent flooding we have more severe flooding that we never had in the past. Narrator: Hartkopf continues his quest to see wetlands restored on his family farm. But neighboring farmers continue to drain their plots, which drains Hartkopf’s land as well. Though that may seem unfair, by federal, state and county statutes, it’s completely legal. Hartkopf’s quest has become a symbol for the larger debate about finding a balance for our environment—a balance between industrial profits and a healthy ecosystem. Doug Anderson: It’s an ongoing debate and it’s not an easy one to stop. Not an easy one to stop. Because when you’re paying big production costs, they need big yields. Steve Delehanty: You can take a thread out of a quilt and one thread you may not notice it, but you start plucking threads out and pretty soon you look at it one day and now you’ve got a big hole in it and it’s not the same beautiful thing you once enjoyed and received from your grandparents a generation ago. Bob Hartkopf: You know, humans wouldn’t think of going into the museum of natural history and destroying it, burning it down to the ground. But yet, we go into a marsh, which is a many times more beautiful than a museum, with all these living species for the entire countryside to observe, without having to pay a fee to go in and look at dead specimens in a museum, and destroy it. I can’t buy that and I can’t

stop from working on the restoration of a living biodiverse beautiful system. Narrator: During the age of glaciers, the fertile fields of Minnesota were covered beneath a thick carapace of ice. Rex Johnson: Over several thousand years, that ice would melt and it would leave a depression and that depression fills with water and that’s a wetland. Many parts of the prairie pothole region historically the density of the wetlands were as much as a hundred per square mile in some of the densest areas. We may be the land of ten thousand lakes but we were once the land of ten million wetlands. Narrator: This landscape remained unchanged for the first 100 years of our country’s history. However, in the mid-1800s, water and wetlands became a central issue for pioneers attempting to settle in Minnesota. Joe Amato: A society that can’t bring water in will perish and a society that can’t push water out will perish. So, manipulation of water is not a choice, once you reach the level of complex society. In fact you can’t have a complex society on any other condition other than manipulating water. Water is a cost. To get rid of it, or to bring it, that’s a cost. It’ll cost you in labor, it’ll cost you in machinery. Narrator: For the earliest farmers, wetlands, especially shallow wetlands, made farming unpredictable and risky. Janet Timmerman: Farmers acreage rose and fell with the water levels actually and a lot of farmers decided well if we can hay these sloughs off in dry years, why can’t we drain them and use them all the time. Doug Anderson: My mother and I were told at the time that we would never have to fertilize that land. It would grow all these crops for years and years and years. All that happened was every time we had excessive rain it would flood our crops out, so it made no sense what they did back in those days. Narrator: But those early Minnesota farmers were ingenious and exceptionally hard-working. It didn’t take long before they discovered that draining wetlands could turn the cost of water into an investment.

Joe Amato: When the farmers were out here, “why not get rid of the wetlands?” More farms, lower prices, more land, get rid of the mosquitoes, you can drive your car from one place to another without having to go around, get out, get stuck. I mean there was every reason you’d want to get rid of water at that point, and the government was fully behind you. Janet Timmerman: Minnesota was just a new state in 1860. They were included in the Swamplands Act. They got about, I think they got jurisdiction over about 5 million acres of land to drain and a lot of that was agricultural land and so those state projects, started in the 1860s, they didn’t really develop a good water policy or drainage policy until 1887. Bullditchers came around and they were essentially teams of men that owned these large teams of oxen and the only way they had to drain some of these smaller wetlands was to dig a ditch and drain them out. So they had teams of ten to fifteen oxen attached to a huge, almost like a muleboard plow, and that plow would just simply dig a ditch from the wetland out to the nearest outlet, which would be a creek. Narrator: Draining wetlands required years of incredible effort, but the work enabled farmers to create a stable life out on the rugged prairie. The wetland that bordered on the Hartkopf farm was known as Mud Lake. It flooded every spring with rain and snowmelt. It was poor land for growing crops. But that didn’t keep his neighbors from trying to drain it. It was a decision that confronted many families across Minnesota—drain a shallow wetland and increase your farmland and possibly your profit. Loren Harste: As we progressed and got larger machinery and things that what we started out with 12 and 14 acre fields now all of the sudden became a real hinderance to that farming because we all liked to have a full 160 acres that we can drive from one end to the other, and all of those things encouraged draining. Narrator: In the early 1900s, the bullditchers became steam ditchers and the rate of drainage across Minnesota increased exponentially as machine technology advanced. Though draining wetlands was a relatively new event on the Minnesota frontier, sportsmen immediately noticed the effect.

Janet Timmerman: They would spend days out hunting and they often were the ones who were protesting. They were the ones who saw an environmental impact of losing these wetlands. That they were going to be losing hunting land, places where their family could swim and picnic, and they often led the charge, like today. Narrator: Despite these early protests, the push to maximize crop production had too much momentum. After the World Wars, the US government saw agriculture as a means for shoring up the country’s food supply and securing America’s place in global politics. Rex Johnson: America was now being perceived as the entity that was going to feed the world so there was a big incentive to put the latest and greatest technology into the hands of farmers. And one of the things they used it for was increased drainage of wetlands. Janet Timmerman: Most of our ditches in Minnesota were created prior to 1940. I think by 1940-45 we had about 27,000 miles of ditch in Minnesota, but we were also tiling. Farm tiling was becoming more and more efficient. So we were tiling more and more water into those ditches. Joe Amato: You’re going to be prone to find tiling with farmers who have capital for excess investment because it does cost money. They’re going to tend to have flatter land, and they’re going to be in counties where the ditch systems are more articulated, probably, in most cases because then they can feed the tiling into those systems. Janet Timmerman: Then we start to see flooding, possibly, we start to see the watersheds jumping their banks and going into other watersheds. Narrator: By the 1970s, the landscape of Minnesota had been completely changed. Rex Johnson: If you’re sitting in southwest Minnesota or northern Iowa you’re probably looking at wetland drainage rates that exceed 90, 95 percent. That means fewer than 10 percent of the natural wetlands remain, and there are many watersheds where there are no small depressional wetlands left. Narrator: American agriculture had entered the modern age. Maintaining high production meant using every possible acre.

This also meant less time and fewer resources farmers could devote to keeping the land clean. Bob Hartkopf: In order to farm huge acreages, they need huge machines. They don’t have time to do the recycling, so they have to put in chemical inputs, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides. So to me, we have lost that close connection that the earlier farmers had with the land and today it’s following the desires of the big corporations and their inputs. Bob Hartkopf: Wetlands are more productive on a per unit basis, than an Iowa corn field. One acre of wetland produces more in the form of plants and animals than does an acre of Iowa farm land. So people simply aren’t accustomed to the idea that these wetlands are extremely valuable. Rex Johnson: Wetlands are natural filters for nutrients like nitrates. When the nitrates flow into the wetland from the wetland cropland that surrounds the wetland. The result is that they are lost to the atmosphere through a process known as denitrification. So the water that ultimately exits the wetland is cleaner than the water that entered. Dave Soehren: As individuals we need some natural, some connection to the natural world and wetlands and prairie out here are the two biggest communities that this area has. Narrator: Few would argue the value of agriculture to the state of Minnesota’s economy. Many believed that wetlands stood in the way of future profits. But in today’s age of superabundance, some are asking what we have lost in exchange. Steve Delehanty: Being here in western Minnesota in the prairie pothole region. We have a particularly strong responsibility for migratory birds and particular waterfowl, trying to provide breeding habitat and migration habitat for waterfowl and other birds that depend on the prairie wetlands and the grasslands that once covered this entire area. Rex Johnson: When the prairie pothole region of north America is wet, two-thirds of the entire continents duck production may come out of this small part of the continent. In fact it’s the prairie pothole region that drives the pulse in duck numbers that we occasionally see. When the region is wet we see populations spike and when the pothole region is dry we see the duck populations enter and persist at a low slow decline.

Narrator: Wetlands come in several forms… ranging in size from small marshes to small lakes. Generally, wetlands are classified into four groups. Temporary wetlands hold water from one week to one month during growing seasons, and provide valuable food and nutrition to female waterfowl. Seasonal wetlands hold water up to sixty days during the growing season and feature ground cover for duck pairs to isolate themselves for breeding. Semi-permanent wetlands hold water in the spring and summer unless a drought persists. Ducklings are raised here amidst the brush and native grasses. Permanent wetlands are usually more than six feet deep and sometimes confused with small lakes. Mud Lake, near Hartkopf’s farm, was classified as a semi-permanent and permanent wetland. Ducklings could hide in the bulrushes around the edge. When Mud Lake was drained, the ducklings and other waterfowl disappeared. Bob Hartkopf: A lot of people think they leave, so what, they just move over to another marsh or whatever, which isn’t the case at all. Other marshes are occupied fully with other plants and animals and they don’t just leave and go to another marsh and exist there. They disappear. That group of wildlife simply disappears forever more. Rex Johnson: If you drain most of the small temporary wetlands that only hold water from 7 days to at most 2-3 weeks during the growing season you will eliminate most of your breeding populations of ducks. They simply will not settle in this part of the state, this part of the continent. Tom Kalahar: And it’s just been in the last 20 years that we’ve realized that maybe it’s a good idea that we replant some of these prairies, that we restore some of these wetlands, and not just for the diversity of wildlife and critters, but for the health of the landscape and the health of the community.

Steve Delehanty: They offer a buffering a capacity to the land the water from a heavy rainfall event or snowmelt that would other wise go and contribute to a flood in Montevideo, or in Fargo or in St. Paul. Rex Johnson: Flood damage reduction is one of the primary reasons we restore wetlands. In fact if you were to look at the Prairie pothole region at the time of European settlement, as little as 10-20% of the landscape may have contributed to river flow, water ran off the lands into the rivers. The other 80-90% flowed into small depressions like these. Now when you drain out of these small depressions into a main stem river, there result is predictable. You get more frequent flooding and much more severe floods. Steve Delehanty: We’ll have an hundred year flood event and it seems like every 5 or 10 years we’ll have a hundred year flood event, well part of that is because we’ve changed the equation the land cannot hold the water because we’ve lost our wetlands, the land can’t hold the water the way it once could. Rex Johnson: I prefer to think of it as flood prevention. Let’s hold the water on the landscape where it falls rather that try to get it into a single spot. Everybody unfortunately has to deal with a little bit of flooding but a few people have to deal with catastrophic flooding. Catastrophic flooding occurs less often. Narrator: Flood prevention is just one natural control that wetlands provide. They also filter pollutants and keep them from our rivers, lakes and water tables. Bob Hartkopf: Any pesticides that come in, any herbicides that come in to the marshlands are taken up by the plants, cattails and other plants, so that they don’t get into the river systems like the Minnesota River or the Mississippi River. Narrator: Today, thousands of tons of farm chemicals from Minnesota leach into the Mississippi River. And they become a problem for our neighbors to the south. Rex Johnson: We believe that that’s a function of the runoff of primarily nitrogen fertilizers from intensively farmed portions of the Mississippi river watershed. Ironically the watershed here in Minnesota is one of the worst polluters in terms of total contribution of nitrogen to the problem associated the problem of Gulf hypoxia we believe.

Joe Amato: Then all of a sudden it looks like we cut water a cheap deal. So we sold it on the cheap, now we got to figure out how we can save what we can save, or even put back what we can put back because it’s a long-term asset we need for other purposes. Tom Kalahar: I go to a lot of classrooms, and the little kids, you gotta love ‘em, they always bring up the rainforest. Sometimes the teachers will even have posters or take up collections or selling something to protect the rainforest. And it just slays me. We drained 95 to 99-percent of the prairie wetlands in Minnesota and across the Corn Belt. We destroyed and converted 99.9 percent of the native tall grass prairies out here. But yet we have the gall to teach our children that we should be scolding third world countries on clearing their rainforests. I mean it just kills me, you know. Narrator: Fifty years ago, ecology was a new term in the English language. Books from early conservationists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson inspired us to take a fresh look at the effects of modern farming on our ecosystem. Bob Hartkopf was one of the people who adopted this new perspective. Bob Hartkopf: Well, the farm is an ecosystem and the marsh is an ecosystem. The marsh tremendously diverse and rich, and farms can be tremendously diverse and rich. Except we have through our operations on farms today, reduced that richness to kind of a monotone production. We’ve got corn and soybeans. Narrator: Though he no longer lived on the family farm in Swift County, Hartkopf was determined to record the changes wrought by large-scale drainage. And he was determined to restore the rich variety of plant and animal life he knew in his youth. But, as he would soon learn, his options were limited. Bob Hartkopf: So we are seeing something that approaches the look of the early grass lands through out North America which is just a small small remnant land left. Now I think there’s less than 5 percent of the early grasslands left and what we’re seeing are some of those original plants which dominated the prairie. Bob Hartkopf: My parents moved to this farm in the mid-20s; just prior to the Depression, and I was born in 1931 during the Depression, so it was a hard-scrabble time for my parents making a go here as it was for

all the farmers in this countryside. So as a young kid, I would go down in the marsh and bring back a few ducks or a few pheasants or whatever and felt like I was really making quite a contribution to the survival of this farm. I remember my dad telling us that it’s important not to over harvest. You know if you want a pheasant to eat fine, if you want some venison take a deer. But he always emphasized the fact that you don’t want to over harvest any these animals. They have a part to play and we simply need them. We just use what we can and the natural reproduction will take care of itself to replenish them. Years ago I’d see prairie chicken flocks coming out of the north and passing over this marsh bed and passing over the farm yard, In fact my brother shot a few prairie chicken that I can remember. So I was part of the prairie chicken scene years and years ago. But they, of course, have been non-existent here for years in this area. Even as a kid of five or six, I was continually gone to the marsh, would go into the marsh, put on some boots, and grub around, looking at the plants and animals, and got a real good sense of the ecology of that marsh at a very early age. I think my dad was ahead of his time and looking at the farm as a whole, I think he actually saw the farm--even though he didn’t know what the term meant—I think he saw the farm as an eco-system and he related in a healthy eco-system and very much related to everything that is going on the farm, both domestic animals and the wild animals. I think in those days of more diverse farms, people made a living by raising diverse crops and livestock. You can say that the same thing happens in nature, the more diverse something is the more stable something is. People would come with their horses and teams to an individual farm to thresh out the grain. So it was a lot more community-oriented. And we all shared doing things together, spent a lot more time together. The initial drainage started in 1910, believe it or not. That was done with a horse drawn dredge. That enterprise was unsuccessful simply because they didn’t have the big machines. Narrator: They didn’t have big machines, but later they would. In the 1960s, old systems were lined with tile for faster drainage and new systems tapped into old ones.

Bob Hartkopf: When they did the job with these huge machines, they also used dynamite. So they would dynamite these trees along the ditch. Some of which ended up on the roof of our barn. You would hear this huge dynamite blast and part of this huge tree would land on the barn roof. It was like war. Diane Radermacher: I think his heart was broke when the marsh was actually drained and I think he would do anything and everything possible to see it restored. He doesn’t mean it to be against farmers or anything. He’s doing it truly just because in his own heart that’s what he would like to see done. Bob Hartkopf: I’m always interested in nature films. The more I thought about it, being I was virtually helpless to stop the drainage, the least I could do would be to expose it to a wide audience. The film was finally put together in the late ‘60s. We decided at that time to hold it until 1970 for release. So it was released in the neighborhood at least, on the first Earth Day. Well we entered a number of festivals and it won awards in six or eight festivals, including New York, Washington DC, Berlin, so it got a wide amount of coverage. It was shown on TV, several places, and that got the film out there for the public to see. I don’t think a lot of people realized that sort of thing was happening to the wildlife and from the wildlife’s perspective, you might say. I don’t think they made the connection really until that time. I get some feedback every once in a while about a marsh being saved. Ironically, this marsh has not yet been saved, the one that I filmed being devastated. Well, the impact of Cry of the Marsh on my neighbors is largely unknown because I haven’t spoken to them about the film and they haven’t spoken to me about the film. I’m sure they feel that what they are doing is more important than the marsh existing as a marsh. Steve Delahanty: When I first saw Cry of the Marsh, the film, it was just so sad because it’s such a common story, such a common tragedy that is repeated over and over and over again. Now Bob was one of the few that took the time to document it and to do something about it, but it’s a story that is repeated thousands upon thousands upon thousands of times and it’s just inherently sad, I guess, to me.

Bob Hartkopf: I understand that people do have to make a living on a farm and sometimes it’s hard not to farm, even if it means destroying a wetland. But I think there are other ways of gaining income and people are finding other ways of gaining income from the farm. And some of the farms have, of course, a lot of land and probably could use a little diversity in the land as well. So if they’re not struggling, it’s hard for me to understand draining a marsh and destroying a beautiful, diverse ecosystem. Narrator: Since the earliest days of statehood, the right to drain wetlands has been protected by a set of laws that enable farmers to maximize crop production. Dave Soehren: Current drainage law is an old law, been on the books for a long period of time, it allows for one group or in some cases even if an individual has enough land in one particular area to enforce a drainage or improvement of or restoration of a drainage system over another landowner or group of landowners based on the amount of land they have in the system or the number of acres of benefited land in the drainage system. Diane Radermacher: Through a legal drainage system if you have several landowners that will be involved and say only one or two people are for the project what happens is if there is more that 50% of the land owned by the individuals that want to put the tile in or the ditch system in it is petitioned before the board and if it is more that 50% it has to be allowed. Bob Hartkopf: That’s the catch. Even though a number of farmers have government programs in the lake bottom, there are two or three farmers left out of seven that still want to farm that land. Loren Harste: In actuality I personally feel that probably our drainage laws have, like Minnesota drainage laws have probably created a good deal of drainage because farmers kinda get in a panic mood and say ‘well, boy, I better get busy and get that drained or they’re not going to let me do it anymore.’ Narrator: Since the late 1960s, ditching and tiling permits in the state of Minnesota have been evaluated and issued by watershed districts. Watershed districts are primarily concerned with how farmland drainage affects flood control and water quality.

Hartkopf’s farm sits in the Upper Minnesota Watershed district. It is the largest drained basin in the entire district. Diane Radermacher: When a permit request comes in, we usually have to look at the entire area they want to drain. We go through old photos starting back in the 1980s. We look for wetland possible wet spots that should not be drained, we do that first locally in the office then we go on site with farmers, he explains exactly where he wants his ditches to go, how much he wants to deepen them, so we do it really thorough with the farmers. The biggest dispute is always ‘I want to get rid of my water, but I don’t want anyone else’s’, is the biggest dispute. Somebody cleans out a ditch and it runs down on to the neighbor and that causes a battle. Narrator: Current law favors drainage, but farmers do have conservation options in the form of set aside and buy-back programs funded by the federal and state governments. The Conservation Reserve Program, otherwise known as C-R-P, is a USDA program that pays farmers up to 10 years in exchange for allowing a piece of land to return to its natural state. The Reinvest in Minnesota program, or RIM, enticed farmers to restore sensitive lands by offering payment upfront and arranging a contract to determine the future use of that land. The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, or CREP, took over where CRP ended. Under CREP, farmers agreed to take certain lands out of farm use permanently. Rex Johnson: And when we enroll the wetland in restoration program or a protection program we try to compensate that landowner appropriately because we know its preservation does come at a cost to them. Loren Harste: I have several pieces of land in the RIM program and I also have 2 filter strips along natural drainage ravines that are in the CREP program that are in the buffer strip. In my case I’ve been very successful. I actually get more rent on that land than I do on the land that I rent out for farming. Doug Anderson: My RIM acres down there don’t look like it, but it’s probably my highest priced land if I wanted to sell it, which I don’t. But recreational land nowadays is an extremely lucrative property to have.

Narrator: Under all three programs—CRP, CREP and RIM—farmers are compensated relative to the crop capability of the land. However, despite the intentions of federal and state conservation programs, some farmers feel the payments and set-asides are not in their best interests. Doug Anderson: Well, it’s kind of tough for me to tell a renter that I’m going to allow ponding on my land because I want to change my intakes to a different intake and he’s paying me good money for this land. That’s a tough one; that’s really tough. Diane Radermacher: The motivation for those individuals no matter what hold out, it’s more of an issue of government. There’s several farmers out there that would just do anything to not have the government have any say in their land. It’s just a right that they should have the right to make the decision themselves and nobody else. Janet Timmerman: The message is that this is a local issue. This is an issue of landowner rights over the rights of maybe the greater public, and that is still and issue today. That’s still and idea that we can control what’s going on, on our own land no matter what anybody around us, how they might be affected. Loren Harste: Farming is more in the category of being a gambler. You borrow a bunch of money and invest it into putting in the crop and you hope at the end that you get enough wage to come out in the profitable end. There is no guarantees, you can take insurance and things like that but that’s only enough to say you broke even. Narrator: Risk, survival, history, resistance to change—taken together, these worldly and human traits complicate our relationship to the land, and wetlands in particular. Janet Timmerman: There’s still a feeling on the part of farmers that if you take land out of agriculture, you’re not allowing it its best use. That’s still a real priority for farmers, that you’re not using that land and by leaving it fallow, then you’re wasting its potential. Bob Hartkopf: Farmers are getting, as of today, prices for their crops that existed 40-50 years ago, no higher. So it seems to me, by leaving a marsh, creating fewer surpluses, farmers will be getting more money for their crops.

Dave Soehren: It’s very evident that we have more farmland available that we need right now and technology has been more than able to keep up with the increase in demand. So, yeah, you’re still buying a loaf of bread for a buck and a half but production costs for a lot of these operators have gone a lot higher proportionally than that. Bob Hartkopf: Well, I think we’ve been sold the bill of goods. I think farmers simply have been sold the idea by these large corporations that in order to produce a crop, you have to use these things. You have to use these herbicides. You have to use these pesticides. Janet Timmerman: Farmers will do to the land what’s profitable for them. What keeps their family fed, and what keeps their operation moving. The government policies dictate those things—but not just that—I think more and more corporations dictate how farmers are going to be able to farm their lands as well. Tom Kalahar: And it’s hard for people in today’s world to look long term, you know? We all look short term. And the conservation business is, sometimes we won’t see the results of what we do for years. Steve Delehanty: We need to come together and sit down and say we need to be smart about this we need to raise food and we need wildlife, we need clean water, what can we do where can we go to find the right balance points between wetland drainage and wetland restoration. Bob Hartkopf: Do they appreciate seeing birds fly over the farm yard? Do they appreciate seeing a pheasant on the road side? Do they appreciate seeing a buck deer in the marsh edge? If they appreciate diversity, I don’t see how they can feel that the marsh is worthless. Bob Hartkopf: It would simply mean plugging up the outlet, plugging up the ditch, the marsh would fill with water, and that would not take more than a year or two. Once the marsh is filled with water, then the original vegetation, which is still in the soil, will begin to establish itself. Steve Delehanty: We know where these drained wetlands are. We know how to restore them and all we lack is the will as a society is to decide how many of them we need to restore and where we are going to do that not only to benefit wildlife but to clean up water and reduce flooding problems and things like that. I think we have the technology to help us make informed decisions now so that we can pick and choose and say if we’re only going to restore 10 wetland in this particular area, which ten should we restore out of the

thousands that might be there, we can pick and choose the one that do the most environmental good, clean up the water best or will raise the most ducks will help other non-game birds will help flood control. Loren Harste: By blaming farmers for things you’re putting the blame on 2% of the people. And the other 98% feel real good about themselves because the farmers are the ones that are guilty about it, Until we all get the idea that I have a part to play in this it probably won’t get any better. Diane Radermacher: They are more than willing to listen. What they’re really looking at is bottom line how they can make money off of a piece of ground that they have. They’re not out to destroy anything or ruin part of the environment. What they’re trying to do is make the land pay for itself. Steve Delehanty: My hope over the next ten years is that we can work together, smartly, to figure out how we can meet the dual needs of agricultural production and conservation in this landscape. Tom Kalahar: It’s not farmers that I have trouble with; it’s the government that I have trouble with. Give me the right program that makes sense, that pays farmers enough in order to make ends meet and they will do what’s right. Diance Radermacher: There are several elderly farmers out there that will never forget that. I actually got paid to do this, I did not do anything wrong. And now they kinda have the temperament that you’re trying to blame me that a lot of the problems are my fault even though the government paid me to do them. Tom Kalahar: So many times we want to personalize the whole thing. ‘It’s your fault. You’re a farmer and you’ve screwed this up. My water’s dirty. I don’t have any wildlife.’ Hey, we did that as a society. And we’re still doing it to this day. And it all boils down to money. Narrator: In a state made prosperous and strong by agriculture, no one wants to hold farmers or any group responsible for dirty water, floods or declining bird populations. The real culprit is a body of law slanted toward drainage and unready to commit itself to cleaning up the state’s water and restoring the state’s wetlands. The Minnesota Wetlands Conservation Act, passed in 1991, was lauded a positive step for restoration.

However, the law exempts wetlands smaller than 2 acres. It is these smaller, ephemeral wetlands that are most important to waterfowl and flood control, and most troubling to crop production. This is just one example. There are several others. Tom Kalahar: Right now farmers are paid by how many acres they farm and how many bushels they raise. And that’s the defeatist way to pay people if you are concerned about the environment. Steve Delehanty: I don’t think anybody is advocating or suggesting that we’re going to go in and restore all the wetlands that were drained in Minnesota, that’s just not realistic, and it’s probably not desirable. Dave Soehren: The status quo in farm programs is not giving us the benefits that we need. Tom Kalahar: We as taxpayers have to demand more out of that farm program than what we are getting. What happens is that so many times conservation gets thrown the bone. I mean, you know, we’re going to spend two hundred million on the commodity and we’ll throw eight, nine, ten million toward conservation to keep those people happy. Between 1994 and 2004, that ten year period of time here in Renville county, we spent over two hundred million dollars on farm subsidies payments to farmers. Four percent of that, four percent we spend on conservation, the rest went to the commodity side of this area. And so there’s no lack of money. There’s plenty of money there. Dave Soehren: I think we have to realize that there, we need to spend our dollars a little more wisely and look for permanent change and permanent restoration of some of these habitats rather than just, you know, demanding approaching of some of the past farm programs.) Bob Hartkopf: Today, the picture has changed somewhat, more and more people are beginning to understand that these marshes, biodiverse places in general, are extremely valuable to human beings. Janet Timmerman: Today, dealing with the decisions of 100 years ago, and a whole different mind set, a whole different understanding of the environment. We’re working now with biological boundaries while back

then we were working with man-made boundaries and trying to redevelop things that have been gone for 100 years. Steve Delehanty: We need to balance the rights and need of an individual with the rights and need of everybody else the rest of society so that if I can do something to my land for example that benefits me but it hurts five other people should I, where do we draw the line, and that’s a very difficult, very, very difficult question. Tom Kalahar: But the hard part is trying to get it through the political system and of course all the special interests that are out there fueling the decisions that are made in Washington through the farm bill. And we all know who those people are. Joe Amato: Maybe the minister has to curse the people on Sunday, and the banker has to educate them on Monday, and if you can get the minister and the banker saying the same message and then throw the government on Tuesday, maybe in some kind of odd combination that produces that mixture of model, habit, and so on. Loren Harste: Whatever my decision to do on this farm. That’s whether I use a plow, a chisel plow, or whatever I use. That decision doesn’t only affect this farm it goes beyond this farm. Tom Kalahar: The Reinivestment Minnesota license plate is a crying shame. All the cars on the road go to have a Reinvestment in Minnesota license plate, really. It’s thirty bucks, I mean, come on, it’s half a tank of gas. It’s going to take more commitment by people that say they like these things. Steve Delehanty: We need people to be informed. We need people to be engaged in the political process, whatever their view point. They might think precisely the opposite of what I think, but if they come to the table and I come to the table, I think we’ll end up with a better product in the end. Janet Timmerman: We found that the greatest restoration projects are one that are grass root local driven. They’ve gotten states and organizations on board. They’ve gotten the federal organizations on board with it. And it’s a collaboration of local, state and federal that actually creates a successful restoration project. Loren Harste: But you won’t buy their product unless it has that long ear, now they have to use fertilizer and to eliminate the worm in the end they have to use insecticide. Now I said ‘if you won’t buy their little ear

then who‘s asking for the big ear?’ You can’t put all the blame on the farmer because you won’t buy his product unless he does that. Narrator: Each of these ideas stresses the need for collaboration. Restoring wetlands in Minnesota requires that we all do our part—farmer and consumer, voter and legislator. Bob Hartkopf: I think the lesson is, it did work many, many years ago to do it simply. People raised livestock, they were diverse. The manure went back on the land, commercial fertilizers were not necessary. Pesticides were not necessary. Once you have a healthy ecosystem, you can cut down on the pesticides. Once you have a healthy ecosystem, you can cut down on the fertilizer use. If you recycle natural systems, the way nature does, you can cut back. Bob Hartkopf: What else can I do? I’ve been working on this so damn long, I’m still not sick of it. I’m still persistent. I’m not going to give up. Dave Soehren: We need people with Bob’s optimism, and I think Bob’s long-term commitment there is gonna pay off. Steve Delehanty: Even the people that will never see that place, never see that marsh, whether it remains drained or whether it’s restored, it has an effect on all of us because land use in one place radiates out and it has an effect. Narrator: Since releasing Cry of the Marsh in 1970, Bob Hartkopf has worked tirelessly to promote his film, to promote the benefits of conservation, of biodiversity, and of course, wetland restoration. A recent battle with cancer has limited his efforts, but he still hopes that one day his marsh will be restored. It would be a personal triumph, but more importantly, he believes it would signal a change in our attitude about stewardship and conservation. Rex Johnson: Anybody who has that much passion deserves to be rewarded for it one way or another. I think the fact that the 35 years since he’s shown that video all across the country, and that wetland has yet to be restored, is a testament to the fact that change is slow, that change is painful, but we’re getting there, and I’m confident that at some point in the not too distant future that wetland will be restored and I hope it happens within Bob’s lifetime.

Joe Amato: Aristotle said that people need good examples to learn how to be good because they themselves find it really hard in themselves to imagine anyone practice the good. Well, if that is true, I’m prone to think that people need examples. Most people don’t come to the good on their own, or find enough initiative on their own to do it. They need examples. Steve Delehanty: I think it would be a very fine thing if Bob Hartkopf could walk along the shores of his marsh and not see that marsh crying, not see the Cry of the Marsh, instead see the joy, see laughter, see the joy of a flock of ducks landing, the joy of seeing eagles swooping across that marsh, of hearing a chorus of birds singing, and the frogs in the springtime. Bob Hartkopf: You know, humans wouldn’t think of going into the museum of natural history and destroying it, burning it down to the ground. But yet we go into a marsh, which is a many times more beautiful than a museum, with all these living species for the entire countryside to observe, without having to pay a fee to go in and look at dead specimens in a museum, and destroy it. I can’t buy that and I can’t stop from working on the restoration of a living biodiverse beautiful system.

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