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The Arcadia, Wis.-based company is nearing completion of a 30-acre wetland restoration project at a cost of more than $700,000, said consultant Jeff Kraemer.
Why restore a wetland? To build on a wetland somewhere else, as allowed by federal rules that restrict wetland development.
It started back in the 1990s when Ashley Furniture officials wanted to expand one of their factories into an adjacent wetland area, but the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources wouldn’t let them.
In June 2002, the company told then-Gov. Scott McCallum it was abandoning its plans to expand its Arcadia plant into wetlands, and that it would instead expand its Ecru, Miss., plant, which it later did.
In October 2005, Ashley finally got DNR permission to fill in about 12 acres of wetlands next to its Arcadia plant, clearing the way for a planned expansion.
Ashley put up a 425,000-square-foot building addition, railroad siding track and an intermodal container storage area.
On a farm field near Ettrick, about 11 miles east of Arcadia, the company has been reversing about 100 years of agriculture.
“It’s a 30-acre farm field that historically was wetland that was drained with ditch systems and drain tiles pretty extensively,” said Kraemer, a botanist with Natural Resources Consulting, Inc. “It’s been farmed for the last century or so.
“Over the past two years we’ve been working on restoring the hydrology and eliminating some of the agricultural weeds that were in these fields,” Kraemer explained.
To undrain the land, workers “filled in the agricultural ditches and broke the drain tile,” plus did some grading, he said.
Last fall, they seeded
the site with native wet-
land seed. And more than 6,000 wetland trees have been planted on 8 acres of the site.
This week, they’re planting 45,000 wetland plant plugs throughout the site.
“Once this phase is done, we’ll be in management and monitoring phase,” Kraemer said.
That means targeted herbicide treatments and some mowing, he said. When the site grows they’ll be doing controlled burning. “This will be going on for the next 10 years,” he said.
Kraemer’s next step will be to prepare a detailed report that will be submitted to the DNR and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which will review the work to make sure it was constructed as planned.
Reid Magney is a reporter at the La Crosse Tribune.
