This story was originally published by Grist. This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in northern Michigan.

Tucked about a mile offshore from Lake Michigan, in northern Michigan’s Charlevoix County, sits Norwood Centennial Farms. Besides some 300 cows that live there, a creek and underground springs make up a wetland on the property — one that’s perilously close to the manure pit.

“A concern for us is making sure that the manure stays in the pit, that there’s no seepage,” said Sarah Roy, who helps run the farm with her family. 

To protect the area, they’ve worked with federal and state authorities on manure control, earning four state sustainability certificates. Roy noted that their farm is relatively small — which makes balancing agricultural production and wetlands protection less fraught than elsewhere in the Midwest, where regulating an industry many people’s livelihoods depend on can be much more complicated.

A new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS, called “Wetlands in Peril,” argues that farmers can play a key role in protecting and restoring wetlands in the Upper Midwest, even as federal policy has paved the way for industrial agriculture to degrade and destroy wetlands in recent decades. 

Wetlands are critical to the health of the region and the planet. Along with providing critical habitat for many species, they help mitigate the impacts of floods and other extreme weather events, act as filters that improve water and soil quality, and store massive amounts of carbon dioxide. They’re important to Indigenous communities; in northern Michigan and other areas around the Great Lakes, for example, wetlands are necessary habitat for manomin, or wild rice. 

But they’re increasingly rare: Around half of wetlands in the continental United States have vanished since the 1780s, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the rate of loss has gone up in recent years. The expansion of large-scale agriculture is among the leading forces that have driven this decline, especially in places like the heavily agricultural Upper Midwest.

Stacy Woods, the author and research director for food and environment at UCS, decided to look into the intersection of agriculture and wetlands after the Supreme Court ruled last year in favor of an Idaho couple who were filling in wetlands on their property. The case, Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, narrowed the definition under which wetlands could be protected under the Clean Water Act and fundamentally changed their protections, even as risks posed by climate change means they’re more vital than ever. 

“At the same time that we will be relying on wetlands to protect our communities from flooding, the Clean Water Act has changed, so these wetlands have lost those protections, and now many of them are at risk of being destroyed by agriculture and other industries,” Woods said. 

A key solution lies in the farm bill, Woods said — specifically, in strengthening policies that encourage farmers to take part in conservation, restoration, and sustainability efforts. The report says initiatives like the Farmable Wetlands Program, which pays farmers to restore wetlands on their property, and the Conservation Stewardship Program, which helps farmers expand on existing conservation practices like planting cover crops, help improve the environment and make it more resilient to climate-driven flooding.