After making my first rice crop in 1998, I told my dad I would save my levees and duck hunt the field that winter. He quickly said something to me that burned into my brain in a way that I’ve never been able to forget. He said, “Well, you can either farm or duck hunt, but you can’t do them both.”
I hated those words, and I, unfortunately, have heard them a lot over the years.
Desha County, where I was born and raised, is a perfect example of the historic wetland loss in the Mississippi Flyway, but unlike the Cache River, you’ve probably never heard about it. Scarred by the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers for centuries and crisscrossed by bayous and creeks, the land is remarkably flat, falling only a half-tenth of a foot every thousand feet to the southeast. But at the start of the 20th century, almost 90% was covered in bottomland timber.
The General Assembly created the Cypress Creek Drainage District in 1911. The goal was to close the Cypress Creek gap in the Mississippi River levee at Cooks Ramp by building three large drainage canals and a series of lateral ditches to drain 298,450 acres in parts of Lincoln, Drew, Desha and Chicot counties.
Dredging companies were hired to dig the first canal at Belco Lake on Desha County’s north end. After some gun threats by local landowners, a spot on the lake bank was purchased, and a dredge boat was built with a two-yard bucket powered by a steam engine. From there, a right-of-way was cut with cross-cut saws and axes, and for the next eight years, they dug a channel from Belco to Lake Chicot.
By 1950, the clearing accelerated, with farming as the clear objective. The federal government was pumping money into the Delta, building taller river levees and expanding the canals as people began leaving in the Great Migration.
Inevitable Change
Back to modern farming, I often get asked by folks I hunt with, “Smith, why do y’all work all that ground in the fall?” If you’ve ever picked up downed rice for a month after a hurricane or seen beans rot in the pods in the fall and have to dump them on the ground, you know why being early is essential.
But those are just my experiences. I’m also influenced by the stories of those around me about the hardships they faced, which are brought to life by the rusting carcasses of draglines and dozers from the drainage district work that still litter the landscape.
Most of my farm ground is poorly drained clay soils, so getting in the fields in the spring can be troublesome. Fall ground prep evolved almost out of necessity, and what my dad told me so many years ago was true: Farming and duck hunting genuinely don’t go together.
I’ve been a duck hunter as long as a farmer, and our hunting has changed. The change in duck numbers and habits we see today is undoubtedly the culmination of drainage and agricultural efforts of the past century – like the biologists have been saying for decades but nobody wanted to listen.
Change comes slowly with duck habitat, and even though it seems like the scarcity of waterfowl gets worse every year, conservation programs have been working for the last 20 years to correct some of the damage done.
Making a Difference
The Mississippi River Basin Initiative is one project that is making a huge difference. It is focused on enhancing surface water irrigation and minimizing soil and nutrient runoff by building fields with berms around them, drained by pipes with flashboard risers to hold water for ducks.
Not many, if any, changes in farming from Prairie Canada to Louisiana have benefited waterfowl. A farmer’s hands are tied in an effort to run an efficient and effective operation in a time of rising costs and swings in commodity pricing. Therefore, ducks and geese have taken a back seat, and hunters are feeling the pinch with lower duck populations and less suitable habitat to breed, raise young, and winter.
A few holdouts are trying to leave habitat for the ducks, but those are typically duck-first, farming-second-type operations, and thank goodness they exist. Otherwise, the rest of Arkansas may resemble what has happened in my neck of the woods.
We can have the best hunting regulations and the best harvest management plan for ducks, but if they don’t have a place to land, it’s all for nothing.
