Farming Water and Cows

By Deborah R. Huso
Progressive Farmer Contributing Editor

Jimmy Wohl’s family has been cattle ranching in the North Florida Everglades near Sebring for 50 years. His Rafter T Ranch, a cow/calf operation, covers 5,200 acres, supports about 1,000 cows and supplies female replacements and feeder calves mainly to markets in Texas.

Wohl will be the first to admit there’s nothing particularly easy about ranching in South Florida. Early cattlemen found their pastures under water half the year. But the water problem was gradually tamed as the state, with the help of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, built South Florida’s 2,000-mile grid of canals to drain land for farming and development.

But as the water disappeared, a new nemesis arose for the rancher—environmentalists. They complained loudly about how the state’s canals flushed millions of gallons of water into the ocean every time it rained instead of allowing that water to flow naturally across the landscape to fill the Everglades. The result has been a long-running, occasionally heated battle among groups with conflicting desires—and needs—for that water. Those soaking rains support agricultural production but also fill the Everglades, and they are a critical source of drinking water for fast-growing South Florida.

Wohl got it from all sides. He ranches with his sister and brother-in-law and works in real estate, as well. “I’ve run cross grain with environmental initiatives left and right,” he says.

That’s why when an employee with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services told Wohl about a group offering landowners payments to “farm water” on ranches north of Lake Okeechobee, he was eager to take a closer look.

“I thought it was a good idea to offer financial incentives for conservation,” he says.

Common Goals. The group behind the idea to farm water in South Florida represented a mix of oft-conflicting agendas: ranchers, the World Wildlife Fund and the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD). All joined forces in 2001 to find a way to keep ranchers in business while enabling more, and cleaner, water to flow into the Everglades.

Wohl’s ranch is part of that ecosystem. It includes 1,000 acres of floodplain along Arbuckle Creek.

Arbuckle Creek runs for 25 miles between Lake Arbuckle and Lake Istokpoga in south-central Florida. Lake Istokpoga is some 20 miles north of Lake Okeechobee. The scenic creek winds its way through cypress swamps, grass prairies, ranchlands and oak hammocks. It supports populations of deer, turkeys, wild hogs, black bears, alligators, bald eagles and wading birds. The upper creek also runs along the border of Avon Park Bombing Range, while portions of the lower creek have been channelized.

Long ago, Wohl’s father built a dyke along his section of the creek and put in drainage pumps to draw water off the land. Eventually, however, with rising diesel prices, running the pumps became too costly. As an alternative, Wohl experimented with water-tolerant grasses, ultimately settling on “Floralta” limpograss. It is a tropical grass with genetic roots back to South Africa that provides good forage and is tolerant of seasonal flooding.

In 2004, the federal government and the state of Florida made a commitment to restore the Florida Everglades, but they wanted to find cost-effective ways to do it. One result was a water farming pilot project launched in 2005. The program offered cash incentives to ranchers who agreed to install practices that retained and slowed the discharges of storm water from their pastures.

The early results were so positive that the SFWMD is today offering 10-year contracts in the now-named Dispersed Water Management—Northern Everglades Payment for Environmental Services (NE-PES) program.

Cleaner runoff. Wohl was one of eight farmers who originally participated in the pilot program. He enrolled his Rafter T Ranch in a three-year project beginning in 2009.

“We don’t pump water into the creek anymore,” Wohl says. “We keep it in [an existing] retention pond, and when it reaches a certain point, it flows over into Arbuckle Creek,” he says. Because the velocity of the runoff is reduced, his ranch has improved its own water and soil quality.

That result also has benefits in the water moving off the ranch. “We have been sampling all discharge water and the recipient water bodies for phosphorus levels on a monthly basis,” Wohl explains. “We have [also] eliminated phosphorus in our fertilizers.”

That’s important because this water also makes its way down toward Lake Okeechobee. That 730-square-mile,shallow lake (9 feet deep on average) suffers from unnatural fluctuations in water levels and high nutrient loadings, notably among them is phosphorus. When water is pumped out of the lake and into the Everglades, it often pollutes the estuaries it flows through.

Ranchers are key to any successes. They hold vast properties, pockmarked with isolated wetlands. A third of the acreage in the region around Lake Okeechobee is in cow/calf operations. Many of the ranchers like Wohl were water managers long before the state stepped in to ask for their assistance. They had to be convinced.

“The ranchers’ focus was on economic sustainability,” says Sarah Lynch, director for agriculture at the World Wildlife Fund. “Meanwhile, we felt cattle ranching was the best land use, better than anything that would replace it. We wanted to forestall more intensive agriculture like grain or potatoes, or having producers sell to developers,” she says.

Retaining Water Pays. With help from the pilot program, Rafter T Ranch now operates pumps that draw water off the NE-PES–designated pastures and into the retention pond. “The principal of retaining more water is being applied to the whole ranch,” Wohl adds.

Currently, the eight cattle ranchers participating in the NE-PES program are paid from $99 to $158 per acre-foot of water retained and released. An acre-foot of water covers an acre of ground with one foot of water.

“Our estimated annual goal is 4,778 acre-feet,” says Benita Whalen, director of the agricultural water program for SFWMD. That’s a small portion of the state’s overall goal of supplying 450,000 acre-feet of water to the Northern Everglades, but it might be the cheapest tool Florida has in its toolbox, certainly cheaper than building reservoirs and restoring wetlands.

When the pilot program launched, ranchers like Wohl were concerned about how payment for services would be determined since annual rainfall is unpredictable. Wohl and his rancher peers thought they might end up spending a lot of money to maintain pumps and monitor water levels only to end up with no income to show for it in a dry year. They much preferred an option that would provide them a fixed annual income for water-retention services.

After testing several ways of measuring ranchers’ contributions to the program, the World Wildlife Fund’s Lynch says the pilot group ultimately decided to come up with “an estimated average annual retention service” for each participating ranch.

“We do not calculate on an annual basis,” she explains. “What we care about and what has to be verified is that the landowner is fulfilling his contract.”

“The water we retain and release is predicated on the rainfall we receive,” Wohl adds. “We’re capable of storing 1,600 acre-feet of water on the ranch.”

The SFWMD pays Wohl for installation and maintenance of pumps, impoundments, berms, riser boards and culverts necessary to capture, hold and release water on his property. What’s especially noteworthy about this rancher/state partnership is property owners select where on their land they want to store water. They also don’t surrender future development rights to participate in the NE-PES.

Wohl says the payment Rafter T Ranch receives consists of a “participation fee,” which the ranch receives whether its water is used or not. That fee is paid quarterly. Ranchers also receive a monthly operation fee for maintenance of equipment, fuel and time spent monitoring. All told, the annual gross income from NE-PES for Rafter T is about $88,000. That’s no small boon, and Wohl knows it.

“I want this to be something more ranchers adopt,” he says. “We need to protect the biosphere we live in.”

Whalen sees NE-PES as a highly effective water-management tool that addresses multiple goals.

“We’re putting more water on a landscape that has been drained, we’re reducing nutrient load, improving habitat, restoring wetlands and taking a step back toward restoring the timing and distribution of historic water levels,” she notes.

The program also offers landowners an economic incentive to do good conservation work while alleviating the state of some of the manpower and other expenses of managing water itself. She says SFWMD is already working on a new solicitation for more ranchers to participate.

The greatest obstacle to more ranchers participating, Wohl believes, is overcoming the notion holding water on the land is bad. “We have old thought paradigms where the farmer was rewarded for draining the soil,” he explains. “It’s hard to see things in a different light.”

But like the state’s water managers, Wohl also recognizes cattle farming is the best land use for maintaining natural vegetative communities. “The cattle business is one of the few agricultural endeavors where the grazing animal can also be a land-management tool.”

(BAS)

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