Wetland Success Story

(My success story is on a personal level as a private landowner in the Minnesota River Basin.)

by Lauren Klement
Winthrop, MN

I grew up in Minnetonka, Minnesota where our house was situated on a hill that rose up from a beautiful wetland.  Wetland activity has always fascinated me since I was a child.  I grew up, married a farmer and moved to south central Minnesota.  The attitude of this farmer was that a wetland was a wasteland and they should be drained and farmed.  I was horrified to say the least.

In 1989 we purchased our own farm and I went back to college to finish up my degree.  I went from being a Geology Major to a Soil Science Major at the UW-River Falls.  Soil and water conservation was my area of interest.  After 12 years of marriage, my husband went from the old way of thinking to becoming conservation minded. With very little persuasion from me, he restored 30 acres into a wetland restoration through an NRCS program, buffered our ditches without a program and now uses conservation tillage.  Many acres of the restoration were an old pasture, and he took acres out of production to buffer the area.  We came up against a lot of peer pressure to not restore this area.  “Farm the high ground” we were told.  My husband came full circle when he told his peers that it was his land, not their land.  He then listed the values of wetlands. 

Now I do local water planning where watershed management is a large part of what I do.  I love my job!