Back on May 11th through 13th, parts of southern Minnesota got a lot of rain. Eight to twelve-plus inches fell Thursday to Saturday. It was an abrupt halt to planting and caused problems with basements and sewer systems not designed for such a deluge. I spent hours sucking water in our basement.
If you took a moment from whatever wet task you were doing to look around, you were met with an amazing view. For a couple days the landscape was covered at least a third by water.
It was like looking back in time. Before Europeans came, this was the prairie pothole region. All that water we were looking at was approximately where nature had water in 1800. The uplands then would have been prairie grasses; now it’s tilled fields and roads.
We planted corn before the rain. As soon as I could I began walking fields to see what was going on with our seeds. One day I noticed two Canada geese in one of the temporary sloughs. The pair was still there the next day, looking quite at home on the glistening water reflecting the sky’s blue.
The third day that I went out, the water had drained. The tile under the surface had done its job, pushing the field back toward a state where tractors could roam. The goose couple was still there, standing on damp soil. At the risk of anthropomorphizing, it looked as if they were thinking, “What the hell just happened here?”
In looking up Canada geese, I read that they “exhibit a high degree of philopatry.” Philopatry is the tendency of an animal to stay in or return to its place of origin. I wondered, was it possible my geese had returned to the wetland home of some distant ancestor? Of course, that home is my cornfield now.
It’s easy to never think about what this place looked like before. We live in the moment. There are plenty of concerns without wondering about some long-ago time.
But for thousands of years, this was prairie and potholes, aka sloughs. It’s barely been one hundred years that it’s been crops and pavement. The transition from what was here to what is here is remarkable. Looking out on acres of corn and soybeans interspersed with farm sites might not be as dramatic as seeing a big city where a forest used to be, but it’s every bit as profound.
A small number of plants, birds, insects, and animals that lived here remain. There might be a few on the line fences. Scattered refuges like Swan Lake give shelter to others. It is said that one could have canoed from Sleepy Eye to New Ulm when the railroad came through in 1872. A few wetlands remain along Highway 14, but they are disjointed and separate.
Two hundred years ago, Secretary of War John Calhoun ordered an expedition to the source of the “St. Peter River,” the name given to the Minnesota River then. That preceded the flow of Europeans here, a trickle that became a flood. In 1851, the Traverse des Sioux treaty deeded 21 million acres to the United States from the Upper Dakota bands. It was a “treaty” like the rest: unfair, imbalanced, and ultimately tragic to the Natives who signed that.
In decades, this region transformed from one of Earth’s great natural eco-systems to one of the most productive agricultural regions on the planet. There is no way to understate how dramatic and complete that was. Draining millions of acres of sloughs is an amazing engineering feat.
Has there been a cost? Like most human interactions with nature, it’s complicated. Millions of people have been fed from the bounty of the Corn Belt. The planet could not support eight billion inhabitants without this place and others where exportable commodities are produced.
Gone or suppressed are not only the Native peoples who were here, but most of the incredible variety of flora and fauna that was. Was there value to the prairie grasses and birds? Obviously not in the way one values 200 bushel an acre of corn.
Twenty years ago, Star Tribune columnist Dennis Anderson wrote eloquently about “empty skies.” He was talking about the vast number of waterfowl that used to fly these skies when all the water was here. Early settlers reported skies darkening in the fall when ducks were migrating. Was that worth something? Again, not in the way that 60-bushel soybeans have a dollar value.
Getting water off the land as quickly as possible so we can grow things has been critical. A great web of drainage ditches fed by underground tile accomplishes this. The fact that after eight inches of rain, we could be back in the field in a week indicates how successful that system is.
We live in the Minnesota River watershed. What was historically a meandering prairie river with gradual rises and falls in water level, has been charged with being the lead ditch. When it is forced to take all that water off our fields like it did this May, it becomes unrecognizable as a great torrent cuts at its widening banks.
The washing of fertilizer and farm chemicals away from their targeted place has been a problem. But the sheer volume of water displaced so rapidly has degraded all our waterways from the Sleepy Eye Creek near me to the Mississippi that ultimately takes the Corn Belt’s water south. A dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is a result of that.
In reading this, you can sense criticism of modern agriculture, the very thing I practice and profit from. Like I said, it’s complicated. Human beings are one of nature’s species. Finding how to be on Earth, respecting and caring for it, mindful of future generations, has been and always will be the great challenge for our species. The Bible says we are to have dominion over the Earth, not trash it.
Groups like the Minnesota River Congress are leading efforts to find creative ways to store water on the uplands, reducing that massive flow to the ditches and rivers. It won’t restore the prairie potholes, but it’s a good effort to imitate them and some of their benefits. Scott Sparlin keeps me involved in that. Scott’s a longtime friend who’s been working on Minnesota River issues for forty years.
We can’t go back two hundred years in time, but for a few days in May, it was useful to think about what was here. If nature is to be a partner and not the enemy, it’s good to know her original design for this place.
