EVANSTON, Ill. — Farmers may continue to farm certain wetlands without repercussion by purchasing agricultural wetland mitigation credits through Magnolia Land Partners, which has been awarded grant funding to help producers navigate wetland compliance through the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). 

The option was created as part of USDA’s Wetland Mitigation Banking Program, which is being rolled out in Illinois by Magnolia as the Illinois Conservation Exchange. The Wetland Mitigation Banking Program is also available in Indiana and Nebraska, as well as some western and eastern states, according to Nikki Palella, an analyst for Magnolia involved in the company’s land acquisition and credit distribution aspects.

“We specialize in creating endangered species mitigation banks, but we do a lot of things in the world of conservation to generate wetland mitigation credits through restoration projects. Our role in the agricultural mitigation program is that we are grantees. We were awarded our first grant in 2016, and since then we’ve won two additional grants in Illinois,” Palella said of Magnolia Land Partners, which operates under the premise that environmental conservation and economic development can be supportive of one another. 

“The Illinois Conservation Exchange is basically Magnolia’s expression of the agricultural mitigation banking program in the state. It encapsulates both the land enrollment side and the credit distribution side of the program,” she added. 

Through the grant funding, Magnolia has created a total of five wetland mitigation bank sites as part of the Illinois Conservation Exchange. There are two such sites in rural Champaign County, along with two in Wayne County and one in Will County, Illinois. 

“A mitigation bank site is a site that is restored or conserved for the purpose of promoting a specific natural resource, and then in generating that ecological uplift through doing that restoration, we’re able to compensate for impacts on natural resources located elsewhere,” Palella explained. 

The legislation driving the Wetland Mitigation Banking Program and Magnolia’s conservation exchange dates back to the 1985 Farm Bill’s “swampbuster” provision, which compels agricultural producers to take action to offset any loss of designated wetland habitat on cultivated lands in order to maintain eligibility for USDA support programs. 

“The swampbuster provision says you cannot drain, dredge or fill a wetland without being in violation of this provision. If you are in violation, you’re going to have to be responsible for mitigating that impact,” Palella explained. “Traditionally there are two main ways to mitigate impacts: one is that you can stop what you’re doing and restore the property and put it back into wetland habitat. If you don’t want to or can’t do that, you can go find a neighbor that’s willing to host a wetland restoration on their site of the size of the acreage you impacted. What we are providing is a new, third option: instead of doing any of that, you can keep farming the wetland but you would have to buy wetland mitigation credits to support one of our wetland banks.”

Palella said that purchasing wetland mitigation credits from the Illinois Conservation Exchange offers producers a streamlined solution to an issue facing a lot of farmers who could be at  risk of losing crucial USDA support systems like crop insurance, CRP payments and other benefits over wetland issues. It also shifts liability for future wetland violations onto the shoulders of Magnolia, which is responsible for continuing wetland upkeep and restoration of the mitigation bank sites.

Though the nation recently elected a president who has pledged to eliminate or reverse the amount of government involvement in conservation and climate-related programs, Palella said the swampbuster provisions of the 1985 Farm Bill are time-tested and should remain intact — along with the programs that support them. 

“I don’t see that going away anytime soon,” she said. “What I do understand about administrative changes is that as the Supreme Court looks different, jurisdictional wetlands and how they are defined can change over time. These farm wetlands that are protected and managed by NRCS, I think, will stand the test of time.”

To learn more about the Illinois Mitigation Exchange, which is now open to farmers in all 102 Illinois counties, reach out to Palella at nikki@mitigation.org or (847) 909-9865.