West of Mpls MN about 50 miles on Hwy 12 | I damn near went to swampbuster prison back in the day even after I jumped through all of the hoops and had permission to clean an old Army Corps of Engineers ditch snaking through one of the farms I own when a cattail slough mysteriously drained after cleaning the ditch which was located on the other side of a hill from the wetland.
The only thing that saved me was we found an old too shallow, too small clay tile in the wetland that poorly drained the wetland on a dry year that some ambitious Finnlander had hand dug about 12 feet deep to get through the yellow clay hill that nobody knew about. It was luck and nothing else that I was spot on depth/grade with my ditch cleaning and the old tile on the other side of the hill.
The old tile was too shallow and too small to do much good other than maybe drain the wetland enough to make one crop of horse/meadow hay IF the weather cooperated, and I was not allowed to "improve" the drainage system...so I turned the area into a wetland credit bank and sold the wetland credits to BWSR.
When asked, I was informed by authorities, that one of my many "concerned" neighbors that live on the gravel road (that was in danger of flooding because the old clay tile was completely blocked) had turned me in for draining the wetland.
Edited by CMN 2/20/2025 10:36
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time to trim the fat
