Fresh into my career as a wildlife biologist with USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), two things happened: a new Farm Bill conservation program was born, and the Louisiana black bear was listed under the Endangered Species Act. Both were very connected, even if I didn’t know it at the time.
The new program was the Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP), created in the 1990 Farm Bill and piloted in 1992 in nine states, including Louisiana. This program provides technical and financial assistance to farmers who want to voluntarily restore and protect wetlands with long-term conservation easements, enabling them to restore difficult-to-farm cropland back into wetlands.
Soybean prices had reached historic highs in the 1960s and 1970s, and hundreds of thousands of acres of bottomland hardwood forests in the lower Mississippi River alluvial valley were cleared for soybean production. It didn’t take long for prices to drop, the land to lose its rich organic matter, and rainfall and backwater to cause frequent floods, making it difficult to farm in some places.
The loss of bottomland hardwood forests greatly wounded Louisiana black bear populations, which dipped to about 200 when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) determined protections were needed under the Endangered Species Act, for the iconic “Teddy Bear”.
We soon realized how important a tool WRP could be in restoring bottomland hardwoods and other wetland habitat for the Louisiana black bear, which is one of 16 subspecies of the American black bear, unique to Louisiana, western Mississippi and eastern Texas.
Read more on the USDA Blog: https://blogs.usda.gov/2016/03/10/teddy-bears-are-alive-and-well-thanks-to-stewardship-minded-farmers-in-louisiana/?utm_source=WIT031116&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=WeekInTrees