Rebirth of the Bottomlands

By Boyce Upholt

Archibald Samuel Yarbrough passed through Panola County, Mississippi, in the last years of the Civil War. Family stories suggest he continued on to Texas, where he thought he’d settle, before deciding to turn back to marry a girl he’d met along the trail. Land was cheap then—Panola County, in northwestern Mississippi, was still mostly a swampy frontier—and Yarbrough, a practicing physician, had money enough to buy. Not that life was easy.

“He did a lot of timber cutting,” Yarbrough’s great-grandson, Mike Bartlett, says as he walks through the resulting pastures. “He didn’t have a lot of equipment, so he did small patches.”

Still, this was a beginning: Over the next century and a half, Yarbrough’s descendants sweated through the hard work of building a sprawling farm. “They spent a lot of time tearing this land up,” Bartlett says. “I spent a lot of time tearing this land up,” dispatching bulldozers and laser scrapers to turn patches of bottomlands into productive cotton ground.

This, for centuries, has been the story of the land along the Mississippi River: the trees have been removed to create a productive new landscape. But Bartlett has decided to take things in a new direction. He’s had the cotton fields ripped up again, this time to put back the trees.

“People think we’re crazy for doing this,” he says with a chuckle. “Everybody around here that I know, virtually everybody, says that I’m going to be haunted by my ancestors.”

Bartlett’s property is among the first enrolled in an innovative new reforestation program. The pilot project will help assess the potential of using carbon credits to fund an expansion of Ducks Unlimited’s longtime work of reforesting the land along the Mississippi River.

The Mississippi Alluvial Valley—often known as the Delta—is an expanse of low and mostly flat terrain that borders the Mississippi River along its southernmost thousand miles. The region once included 24 million acres of bottomland hardwood forests, where nearly every year local rivers would pour over their banks, filling the woods with water. In some years, the Mississippi itself filled the Delta from brim to brim—or bluff to bluff. The result was an expanse of flooded bottomland hardwood forests that was one of the most important migratory pathways and waterfowl wintering areas in the world. Even today, with most of the forests gone, around 40 percent of the midcontinent duck population uses the wetlands in this region, notes DU Senior Waterfowl Scientist Dr. Mike Brasher.

The major losses began in the late 19th century, after the federal government launched an ambitious effort to contain the Mississippi River within levees. The idea was to make the swampy wilderness of the alluvial valley into viable farm ground—some of the world’s most desirable farmland, in fact, thanks to the richness of the soil. For nearly a century, trees were cleared and canals were dredged until 80 percent of the old forest was lost. The final push came in the 1970s, when surging crop prices made even the most flood-prone land look enticing. Then, when crop prices tumbled, the folly became clear: too much swamp was gone.

A 1985 federal law known as Swampbuster helped stop any further agricultural drainage. Then, in the 1990s, US Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs like the Conservation Reserve Program and Wetland Reserve Program (now known as Wetland Reserve Easements) began to restore some of the lost swamp. Those same decades marked a change for DU, too—its conservation work expanded south from Canada to include efforts to restore waterfowl habitats in the United States. By the 1990s, the Mississippi Alluvial Valley had become a major focus, and DU partnered with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and other agencies as the contractor providing restoration services on retired farmland.

The habitats restored in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana through Wetland Reserve Easements constitute the largest forested wetland restoration effort on the globe. Still, there is plenty of work to do. As Lauren Alleman, a carbon program specialist with DU, notes, a conservation partnership known as the Lower Mississippi Valley Joint Venture has determined that at least 9.1 million acres of forested wetlands are needed to provide sufficient habitat for sustaining migratory bird populations in this region. Collective efforts, Wetland Reserve Easements included, have resulted in a net increase of 1.9 million acres of bottomland hardwood forest in the region since 2001. As of last year, approximately 8.1 million acres of this habitat existed, meaning an additional 1 million acres of reforestation will be required to meet the joint venture goal. Although Wetland Reserve Easements are helping to fill this gap, there are still more landowners who wish to enroll in the program than the government is able to pay. “The tools we have really aren’t getting it done fast enough,” Alleman says.

Enter carbon credits, which also can be traced back to the 1990s, when the world’s first global climate change treaty prompted efforts to reduce carbon emissions. A provision within the treaty allowed for countries to swap their carbon. If one country surpassed its mandated emissions goal, it could sell the excess to a country that knew it would fall short. Because atmospheric carbon is a global resource, the geographic origin of the carbon didn’t matter. Here was the birth of what became known as carbon offsetting.

Eventually, many major corporations decided that they wanted to be carbon neutral, and they began looking for ways to offset carbon that was produced within their supply chains. This created a voluntary market for what is known as “carbon credits.” If someone finds a way to capture carbon dioxide or avoid the release of carbon dioxide, they can register the project with one of several nonprofits that oversee the market. These nonprofits grant “credits,” which can be sold to a company that wants to offset its carbon emissions.

A tree is, in essence, a natural machine that pulls carbon dioxide out of the air and turns it into wood. Thus, forest conservation soon became a commonly accepted means of sequestering atmospheric carbon. The cheapest approach is to pay someone to protect an existing forest, since no start-up capital is required. The benefit of such credits has been questioned of late, in part because many were granted to forests that were already formally protected. (In the technical lexicon, such projects fail to be “additional”—to generate truly new carbon savings.) Planting new trees is a far more reliable approach, but, because of the expense, few such credits are available. Verra, the registry that DU is using, has certified more than 2,000 carbon credit projects worldwide. Fewer than 150 involve reforestation—and only three of those reforestation projects are in the United States.

That may be changing.

“To put it bluntly, only recently have the price points for carbon credits become attractive enough to grow landowner interest and reach a level where a carbon offset program made sense for DU,” says Josh Green, a conservation lands coordinator with DU. In late 2022, noting this shift, Green and other staff members gathered at DU’s office in Ridgeland, Mississippi, to sketch out the contours of a potential new carbon credit program.

The result was the Flyway Forests program. Participating landowners receive $2,200 per acre in exchange for a conservation easement on the enrolled property, paid in five equal annual payments. DU and its partners cover the cost of site preparation, tree planting, and ongoing monitoring. Carbon credits will be released six years into the project, once the trees have grown enough to store substantial atmospheric carbon, and then in five-year intervals thereafter. After 40 years, the carbon credit program ends, but because the easement is permanent, the forests will remain intact.

Pachama, a technology company that has long focused on assessing third-party carbon credits, has in recent years shifted toward developing projects too. Reforestation is a small professional world, and word trickled back to Pachama about DU’s ideas. Soon Pachama came on board as the project developer. The company is managing the registry process, monitoring the carbon stored by trees, and interacting with credit buyers. The upfront funding, meanwhile, comes from PERENfra, an investment firm focused on water infrastructure. DU continues its traditional role as the restoration service provider and handles landowner relations.

With the Flyway Forests program established, DU reached out to existing landowner partners in the region. “When they approached me, I was thrilled,” says Jake McFadden, who with his wife, Harriet, owns Birdlands Plantation in Panola County. Despite its name, nothing has been planted on this land for decades. The property sits in the hills just east of the Delta, where, as McFadden puts it, “Farming equals erosion. The hills make the water wash the land away.”

When they inherited the property, McFadden and his wife tried to stem the erosion by putting in pastures, but cattle were a money-loser. So eventually they turned to easements. Through that work, McFadden came to know and trust DU, so he jumped at the chance to put some of his pastures into the new program.

Birdlands sits a few miles down the highway from a regenerative pig and cattle farm, Home Place Pastures, which is operated by Mike Bartlett’s son, Marshall, on the family’s land. One day, McFadden stopped by Home Place’s farm store for lunch and mentioned the new program. Bartlett, a self-described “tree hugger,” was already enrolled in several federal conservation programs. He, too, jumped at the chance to put some of his little-used pastures back into forests.

Eventually, Bartlett decided to go even further, retiring some of his active cropland. That took “a lot of cogitating,” Bartlett says, and not only because of the ghosts of his grandfathers. He makes around $200 an acre renting the land—a rate that will likely go up in the years to come. Still, farming comes with costs, on the lowest ground especially. Bartlett has to maintain ditches and pipes to keep these old bottomlands from returning to swamp on their own.

“I’m 81 years old,” Bartlett says. “I’m getting tired. I’ve been farming all my life, and I’ve been in debt all my life.” He was planning to buy a house near his grandchildren. So he crunched the numbers and decided it was time to undo some of his family’s generations of land-clearing work.

The two Panola County properties are somewhat unusual for Ducks Unlimited, in that they are not located within the Mississippi River’s historic floodplain, but rather in the surrounding hills. This expansion out of the traditional alluvial valley is a necessity for the carbon credit program. If every Flyway Forests property were exposed to the frequent floods along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, an exceptional high-water year could wipe out the young forests and erase the carbon credits that would have eventually been sold to offset the costs.

For balance, the program also includes riverside land. Southside Land Company, for example, is a cooperatively owned hunting club that has enrolled land in the program. The club is named for Southside Plantation, which once covered thousands of acres below the loess bluffs near Natchez. This turned out to be a tough place to farm. When the river swells, everything gets swamped. The ghosts of those failed farming efforts are still visible in the crumbling sharecropper shacks that dot the land. Brad Booth, the club’s president, says a group of hunters once came across a rotted-out stagecoach in the woods. Perhaps the most obvious artifact of this past, though, is the cleared farm ground, hundreds of acres of which remain on the club’s property. The club makes some income by renting that land. Still, the Flyway Forests program represented a win-win: “You’re doing something good for the environment, and, quite honestly, it’s going to benefit us,” Booth says. Pointing to the recently ripped fields, he notes the long lines where oak seedlings will soon be planted. “As soon as they get a little high, and the deer feel like they can hide, they’ll be laid up in those rows.”

As a pilot project, Flyway Forests has a relatively small goal—restoring 3,000 acres in total, in parcels of at least 100 acres. Even that small start would mean more than a million new trees in the ground, which over the 40-year life of the credit project will absorb 400,000 tons of carbon. The bigger impact, though, may be the proof provided that carbon credits are a viable tool for restoring this ecosystem and fueling waterfowl habitat conservation. “Carbon is the means to an end,” says Jerry Holden, senior director of operations in DU’s Southern Region. “We need to accelerate both the pace and scale of on-the-ground conservation to achieve the promise of DU’s waterfowl mission, and this program supports those twin objectives.”

To the northwest, in the hill country, as Mike Bartlett walks alongside a pond that over the decades to come will be embraced by the forest, he envisions what his descendants will see here. “We’ll have all kinds of wildlife—lions, tigers, bears,” he says, laughing.

Then he corrects himself: they probably will see Louisiana black bears, a once-threatened subspecies that has already made a comeback, at least down at the bottom of the hills in the lowlands along the river. As more trees are planted, perhaps they’ll wander up into these new forests.

It will be something for his descendants to marvel at. And that’s what matters most, Bartlett notes: not the hopes of his ancestors, but the happiness of the people who will come next.

Boyce Upholt is an award-winning writer and editor based in New Orleans. His first book, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, will be released by W.W. Norton & Company this summer.

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