South Carolina - Economic Benefits, Riparian Areas

Horry County is one of the fastest growing counties in the country. Home to Myrtle Beach and its houses, commerce, golf courses, and vacation spots, Horry County also contains 160,000 acres of cropland, 400,000 acres of coastal wetlands, forest land, the Waccamaw and Little and Great Pee Dee rivers, and villages of just a few hundred souls.

Horry County also has Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) District Conservationist Alex Johnson working with private landowners on a variety of conservation measures. Between the fall of 1997 and the spring of 1998, Johnson prepared about 175 contracts for landowners to enroll between 1,000 and 1,500 acres in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), mostly for riparian forest buffers along open drainage ditches and adjacent to wetlands. Bay systems on converted wetlands are being restored for waterfowl. One such place, now owned by a hunt club, boasts the northernmost nesting area for the endangered wood stork. The owner of another property enrolled 447 acres in the Wetlands Reserve Program and then donated the acres to the Horry County Conservation Foundation. The land is around a donut-shaped freshwater bay typical of South Carolina, about a dozen miles from the coast. Several adjacent wetland areas also are being restored and protected.

Johnson says he expects that the high growth rate in Horry County will result in more stringent requirements for nonpoint source water pollution within a couple of years, and installing buffers now amounts to a head start. "These riparian buffers, particularly along the ditches, will benefit the whole area. After all, several hundred miles adds up, and there will be a lot of nonagricultural benefits from an agricultural program. The 1,500 acres of buffer strips are filtering sediment, pesticides, and animal waste from 15,000 to 20,000 acres of cropland and pastureland."

There also are monetary benefits to the landowners. One farm owner, who leases out his land and works off the farm, has enrolled 50 acres in CRP for riparian forest buffers. He ran the numbers. "At $72 per year per acre, plus the 50 percent towards planting trees ($80 per acre), you end up investing about $40 an acre up front. The first year you get all the money back, so you get a positive cash flow. For the 15 years of the contract, you get $1,080 per acre (15 x $72). After 15 years you can thin the timber, and at today's prices, it will bring you $1,000 to $1,500. So, if you take money that comes in from thinning, and if you'd saved the CRP rental money, you would have $3,000 drawing interest. That would double again in another 15 years. So, you would get a $6,000 or even a $10,000 return on an acre in a 30-year period; you can probably get a $10,000 return--on a freebie! Now, it could all burn up, of course, or be eaten by bugs." This particular farmer, though he likes the monetary support, also is fully committed to the environmental benefits. "We're the second fastest growing county in the U.S., so there is a lot of stress on water resources. It's a coastal county, so our runoff drains to the beach and to coastal wetlands, and there's lots of interest. In the rural areas there's still a lot of development, and these filters are helping to offset that."

Sam Ward lives in Aynor, farms part-time, and works for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. He says, "I'm an avid quail hunter, but I care about water and natural resources, too; it all interweaves, goes hand in hand." An unnamed intermittent stream runs through his place into Chinners Swamp on the northwest border of the farm. It drains into the Little Pee Dee (under consideration for designation as a Natural and Scenic River), the Great Pee Dee into Winyah Bay--all of this the focus area for a newly established National Fish and Wildlife Refuge. Ward has enrolled about eight acres in CRP for a 100-foot-wide strip of field borders. This will "give a filter for the water to travel through from corn and soybean fields and provide a corridor for wildlife--turkeys, deer (which I don't hunt), bobcat, and foxes." He also is planting food plots for quail, using native vegetation--"that's probably better for quail than anything." He adds that while he is "first a quail hunter, these filters also help water and benefit the whole farm."

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