FGCU researcher: To clean water, convert some farm fields to wetlands in Everglades

Editor's note: An earlier version referenced an event for this Thursday that already happened. More information ⇒

An FGCU researcher says he has figured out a way farmers can make money cleaning instead of polluting water in the historic Everglades. 

Bill Mitsch, director of Florida Gulf Coast University's Everglades Wetland Research Park in East Naples, said he and a business expert at the University of Notre Dame worked out a model in which farmers could get checks from several government programs for building wetlands and capturing carbon. 

Called "wetlaculture," the idea is to convert farm fields to wetlands to reduce the harmful nutrient loads flowing to the east and west coasts of Florida. 

"We came up with a plausible, not an actual, but a plausible way farmers could make money flipping lands between wetlands and agriculture and, most importantly, not adding any more fertilizer to the land," Mitsch said. "They’d use what is already there and recycle it."

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Wetland farmers would make money from existing government programs that pay for the removal of nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon, Mitsch said. 

This approach could end most of the harmful Lake Okeechobee discharges because more water from the big lake instead could flow into Everglades National Park, he said. 

Large water storage projects such as the Everglades Agriculture Area and Caloosahatchee reservoirs would be moot, Mitsch said, if farmers back the idea of getting paid to clean Florida's ailing waters. 

Today much of the water that leaves farm fields and urban areas in the historic Everglades is sent to the Fort Myers and St. Lucie areas instead of the River of Grass and Florida Bay, which often suffers from a lack of fresh water. 

Both the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers were connected by canals to Lake Okeechobee to drain parts of the Everglades for farming and development. 

The drainage has led to water quality problems on both coasts. 

A blue-green algae bloom developed on Lake Okeechobee last June and quickly spread to the Caloosahatchee River at the same time a deadly red tide was flaring along the coast. 

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Hundreds of sea turtles, dolphins, manatees and even a whale shark likely died from red tide poisoning last summer. 

The bloom still is showing up in the Sarasota area and has been active since October  2017, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Mitsch said wetlaculture would help solve what have become routine problems. 

"If you want to prevent blue-green algae blooms, take the phosphorus out," Mitsch said. "If you want to prevent red tide, you better take nitrogen out. Wetlands can do more than one thing, and then the bonus is they accumulate carbon and become a carbon sink." 

Jim Beever, with the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council in Fort Myers, said converting about half of the farmlands in the Everglades to wetlands also would create better habitat for some of the state's most protected species. 

"They could also function as wildlife corridors," Beever said, "because you’d have natural wetland areas and nearby uplands that fox squirrels and panthers could travel through." 

Beever said Mitsch's research and the idea in general seem promising for a section of the state that has had nutrient-related water-quality problems for years. 

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"He’s doing a good job on this — and showing it’s cost-effective is a good thing," Beever said. "Adding his prestige and credibility to it helps."

Gene McAvoy, of the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agriculture Services in Hendry County, said professors at UF are working on similar ideas and that rotating between man-made wetlands and crops could be a way to cut down on the amount of nutrients flowing in the historic Everglades, which stretches from just south of Orlando to the Florida Keys. 

Recycling the nutrients seems promising too, he said. 

"By rotating or harvesting the vegetation and removing it and making compost out of it, you could remove a good amount of nutrients," McAvoy said. 

But one key question is whether farmers would latch onto the idea and find a way to make more money building wetlands than growing sugar cane, food crops and raising cattle. 

"Nobody is going to do it for the fun of it," McAvoy said. "You have to put in an incentive. Certainly there's a lot of cost involved, but it makes a lot of sense."

Judy Sanchez, with U.S. Sugar, said in a statement that there's not enough information about wetlaculture to make any decisions but that the company already has ways of removing nutrients. 

"Whether or not this idea could be some type of variation on (existing) programs, we don’t know" without more details, Sanchez wrote in an email to The News-Press.

"We do know that sugar cane farmers south of Lake Okeechobee are using their current crops and best management practices to remove a large amount of phosphorus and nitrogen from the system every year," Sanchez wrote.

Mitsch said the idea might not catch on any time soon but that his studies are planting seeds for future change. 

"Eventually, some government will agree that farmers can be paid to clean the environment," Mitsch said.

Readers can connect with this reporter at ChadGillisNP on Twitter.