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The Land Remembers: Why Farmers Are Bringing Back ‘Prairie Potholes’
Switchgrass and foxtail provided the perfect camouflage for a heron slowly wading through a prairie pond. Only the squawking of a Canada goose mother scolding her offspring shattered the bucolic stillness of the wetland. It was the summer of 2023, and throughout large areas of the Canadian prairie provinces and the Great Plains of the United States, increasingly dry conditions had made water a precious resource. But not here. The 260-acre Hannotte wetland in east-central Saskatchewan was an oasis in an otherwise arid desert of wheat fields.
It hadn’t always been this way. The land had been drained for agriculture over a century earlier, and it took 20 years of door-knocking for Kevin Rozdeba to convince farmers in the Yorkton region of Saskatchewan that removing land from crop production and turning it back into a wetland was in their best interests. As a program specialist for Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUCS), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to conserve and manage wetlands, Rozdeba knew a wetland’s unique hydrology could contribute to water availability essential for crop production in times of drought. Getting farmers on board, though, was a tall order.
“Some landowners were an easy sell,” he says. “Others were more skeptical and took the most amount of visits. I’d go back every couple of years and try to build a case.”
The 260-acre Hannotte wetland is an oasis surrounded by wheat fields. Courtesy of DUCS
It’s a story repeated across 770,000 square kilometers stretching across South and North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Montana and into the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. This area, known as the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR), was formed during the last ice age. As the glaciers started to melt, heavy chunks of ice calved off and became buried in prairie soil. Their enormous weight created permanent depressions in the landscape.
“These basins are like saucers able to hold excess water,” says Suzanne Joyce, a communications specialist with Ducks Unlimited. Serving as natural sponges, they not only hold in water from snowmelt and rain events but have incredible flood storage capacity, which helps keep water from running off the land. Instead, it seeps through the layers of silt and sediment lining the basin, recharging the underground wells and aquifers many prairie farmers rely on.
Farmers used to work around the potholes, but over time, a drive for greater agricultural productivity has caused almost half of the wetlands throughout the PPR to be drained.
“The ironic reality of the Prairie Pothole Region,” says Joyce “is that these incredibly productive wetlands, which are so amazing for wildlife because of their rich soils and mineral deposits, are also the most productive for agriculture on the continent.”
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