How Big Ag thwarted wetlands protections in Illinois and Iowa todayheadline

Two years ago this week, the Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. the Environmental Protection Agency significantly limited the agency’s ability to use the 1972 Clean Water Act to safeguard the nation’s wetlands from pollution and destruction. The decision determined that wetlands — waterlogged habitats that help filter water and sequester carbon — must be indistinguishable from larger bodies of water to be eligible for protection under the law. 

The move effectively eliminated federal protection for most freshwater wetlands in the United States.

The Sackett decision shifted responsibility onto states to protect their wetlands from being demolished in the name of development. Although about half of all states already had their own wetland protection laws on the books, the other half had no state-level wetland protections, according to the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy.  

A report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that wetlands in Illinois, Iowa, and other states in the Upper Midwest are particularly vulnerable to overdevelopment due to weak statewide regulations. 

Illinois appears to be well positioned to protect its wetlands. It’s a blue state with Democratic supermajorites in both state legislative chambers and a governor friendly to climate policy. But last year, a wetlands protection bill never made it to the General Assembly for a vote. And Illinois State Senator Laura Ellman, the primary sponsor of the bill, is pessimistic about pushing the same bill through the legislature this year. 

One major opponent stands in the way: the Illinois Farm Bureau. “If the Farm Bureau is against it, a lot of legislators from downstate will be against it,” Ellman told Grist. “I think a lot of planets would have to align before we could get this bill passed this session.”

The Illinois Farm Bureau belongs to the American Farm Bureau Federation, a national organization that bills itself as the “unified national voice of agriculture.” The federation, which boasts nearly 6 million members, is a conservative-leaning group that lobbies for policies that typically limit the government’s ability to restrict farmers’ activities. 

As such, the group often views wetland rules as overstepping — and its state chapters wield their influence to cut such measures short, according to lawmakers in Illinois and Iowa, two of the nation’s largest agricultural producers. Since the Sackett decision, a handful of states have tried to fill in the gap in federal protections with mixed results. Only one state — Colorado — so far has succeeded in passing legislation restoring its wetlands protections to a pre-Sackett level. Illinois presents an interesting test case: Can agricultural states push wetlands protections through when conservative-leaning lobbying groups oppose regulation? 

Ellman’s bill is “definitely in a precarious situation this year,” said Jennifer Walling, who runs the Illinois Environmental Council, an organization that advances environmental policy statewide. “This is something that makes so much sense. It should be bipartisan support, and yet it’s getting a lot of challenges.” 

Wetlands are soggy, muddy interstitial ecosystems like swamps, marshes, and bogs that often bridge the gap between dry land and larger bodies of water. The unifying feature across these landscapes is that they’re all some degree of waterlogged: The ground can be fully flooded or just saturated, and these conditions can vary seasonally. 

As a result of that water content, wetlands have specialized soils that store plenty of carbon, says Siobhan Fennessy, a professor at Kenyon College and wetland ecologist. Globally, inland wetlands occupy only about 6 percent of the Earth’s land surface but are estimated to hold about 30 percent of the world’s soil carbon. That’s significant, since “there’s more carbon in soils globally than there is in the atmosphere,” Fennessy said. 

In the United States, wetlands account for less than 6 percent of the surface area of the lower 48 states, approximately half of what existed at the time of the American Revolution. In addition to storing carbon, these sparse habitats provide critical ecological functions like soaking up excessive rains to mitigate flood risks and recharging groundwater. 

But wetlands have been under attack by corporate interests and those who want fewer bureaucratic hurdles when developing land. The Sacketts, the Idaho couple who gave the 2023 Supreme Court decision its name, engaged in a 16-year legal battle against the EPA to build a lake home despite objections from the agency that doing so violated the Clean Water Act.

The case concerned home building, but agricultural groups joined in the chorus of opposition. The Illinois Farm Bureau, alongside 19 other state Farm Bureaus, signed onto the American Farm Bureau Federation’s amicus brief backing the plaintiffs’ argument that the federal government was overstepping the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act by regulating wetlands not obviously connected to larger bodies of water. 

The Trump administration has stepped up efforts to reduce federal protections for waterways. As part of the EPA’s so-called “greatest day of deregulation” earlier this year, agency administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to further limit the scope of the Clean Water Act by more narrowly defining “waters of the United States.”

The law firm that represented the Sacketts — Pacific Legal Foundation—is now suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture over a program known as Swampbuster, which gives farmers public funds in exchange for conserving wetlands on their land. 

Together, these developments have empowered agribusiness groups to “take actions that are profoundly contrary to the public interest,” said Dani Replogle, a staff attorney of the Food and Water Watch, one of the defendants in the Swampbuster case. 

In Illinois, despite solid Democratic majorities in the state legislature, plans to enshrine wetland protections after the Sackett decision haven’t gotten far. 

In February of this year, Illinois State Senator Laura Ellman introduced SB 2401, or the Wetlands Protection Act, to the state senate. It was her second time bringing the bill to the state legislature, following its failure to reach a vote last year.  

Ellman envisioned the measure as a response to the 2023 Supreme Court decision. It would create a process by which landowners would have to apply for and receive a permit before developing on wetlands.

“It was originally a wetlands and streams act,” Ellman told Grist. But in early conversations with the Illinois Farm Bureau, she received feedback that the way she defined streams in the bill was too vague. The group voiced concern that the bill was too far-reaching and placed an unfair burden on landowners. At that point, she decided, “Okay, we’re just going to focus on wetlands.”

Even after the change, Ellman remembered the Illinois Farm Bureau “turning on their jets”: She and other lawmakers were flooded with calls urging them to oppose the wetland bill. She thinks the unified show of opposition reflects the organizing power of Illinois’ nearly 100 county-level farm bureaus.

The Illinois Farm Bureau has also wooed city and suburban legislators via its Adopt-A-Legislator program. “People go down and spend the day touring farms and learning about agriculture,” said Illinois State Representative Anna Moeller. “I know a lot of my colleagues really enjoy that.”  

As an example, the Menard County Farm Bureau posted photos on Facebook post last summer from a cookout in central Illinois hosted by Senate President Don Harmon and State Representative Camille Y. Lilly, both Chicago-area Democrats. According to Lilly’s official Facebook account, she’s hosting the cookout again later this summer.  

Chris Davis, director of state legislation for Illinois Farm Bureau, told Grist that Ellman’s bill remains “extraordinarily broad and vague in terms of what scope of wetlands it would regulate.” If the bill were to pass, he said it would be “extremely difficult” to assess its impact on farmers — despite the bill exempting agriculture from the permitting process. Under the legislation, farmers would be able to perform activities like ranching, plowing, seeding, and harvesting and drain wetlands and other waterways in the process without a permit. 

Ellman said that other factors besides agricultural lobbying could also kneecap her measure. A November 2024 memo from Governor JB Pritzker’s office directed all state agencies to oppose legislation that would add to Illinois’ multibillion dollar budget shortfall. The state’s department of natural resources estimated it will cost approximately $3 million to stand up the wetlands permitting program. The state of Illinois’ budget for 2025 is more than $50 billion. 

Alex Gough, a press secretary for Pritzker, told Grist that the governor “will carefully review this legislation, should it reach his desk.” 

But environmental advocates say preserving these ecosystems is paramount. 

“We should be able to respond to rollbacks of the Clean Water Act that threaten our water quality here,” said Robert Hirschfeld, with the Illinois-based Prairie Rivers Network. 

Across the Mississippi River in Iowa, attempting to pass wetland protections hasn’t been any easier. 

Today, only about 5 percent of Iowa’s original wetlands still remain, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. New research from the Natural Resources Defense Council found that today, Iowa has about 630,000 acres of wetlands that likely fall under the Clean Water Act’s current regulatory definitions. Still, the environmental organization determined that 18 to 97 percent of Iowan wetlands could be at risk of destruction in the aftermath of Sackett. 

In Iowa, the state Farm Bureau influenced the outcome of another bill that would have helped conserve certain wetlands, according to lawmakers. HSB 83, a measure introduced in January, would have made it easier for counties to finance projects reconnecting wetlands and floodplains and restoring winding bodies of water known as oxbow lakes as a means of mitigating flood risk. 

Typically, when counties borrow money by issuing bonds to do these kinds of major projects, voters must approve the debt. HSB 83 would have added wetland conservation to the list of essential county purposes for which leaders do not need to seek voter approval.

The measure was introduced by State Representative Megan Jones, a Republican, whose district experienced severe flooding last summer. The bill never made it out of committee, and the legislative session ended earlier this month without it getting to a vote.

Several organizations registered in support of the measure, according to the state legislature website, including the Nature Conservancy and the Iowa Farmers Union, an agricultural group that supports conservation efforts. But only one group registered in opposition to the bill, and that was the Iowa Farm Bureau. 

The organization “had concerns that by allowing these projects, property taxes would increase on farmers,” said State Representative Adam Zabner, a Democrat who supported the bill. After the Iowa Farm Bureau voiced its opposition at a committee hearing, according to Zabner, it became clear the bill would not have the votes to pass. “They were the group that sunk it.” 

The Iowa Farm Bureau did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

“It’s just their policy,” said Pam Mackey-Taylor, a lobbyist who represents the Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club, which supported the bill. The Iowa Farm Bureau doesn’t “like any farmland being taken out of production. They don’t like those kinds of heavy-handed regulations, so to speak, affecting private property.” She also pointed out that many state legislators in Iowa are farmers themselves, and may not have wanted to “go that far” with the measure this year.

Zabner added that the flood mitigation measure could come back in the next legislative session. But, he said, “I am very skeptical, if the Farm Bureau continues to oppose it, that it could get done, unfortunately.”

The Illinois and Iowa Farm Bureaus are especially influential, according to Austin Frerick, a fellow at the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University who wrote the book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. The Iowa Farm Bureau reported $1.71 billion in assets in 2023 and spends hundreds of thousands on lobbying efforts every year, according to public disclosures. “Illinois and Iowa are in a league of their own,” said Frerick. 

Hirschfeld, from the Prairie Rivers Network, argued that agribusiness interests like the Farm Bureau have the effect of blocking progressive environmental policy. He compared Iowa and Illinois, specifically — two states with incredibly different politics, but equally active Farm Bureaus. “Iowa can be all red, top to bottom,” he said. Illinois, on the other hand, has a “democratic supermajority.” 

But “when it comes to ag policy, what is the difference?” If Illinois’ wetland bill fails again, it might confirm his fears: “There’s just not a difference.”