Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com

Published - Thursday, May 22, 2008

Ashley wetlands restoration nears completion

By REID MAGNEY | La Crosse Tribune

ETTRICK, Wis. — Ashley makes a lot of furniture, but the company’s nearly done building something completely different — a wetland.

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 make up for expanding its Arcadia plant into wetlands.

Ashley Furniture officials in October 2005 finally got the approval they’d sought since the 1990s from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to fill in about 12 acres of wetlands in Arcadia for a 425,000-square-foot building addition and other facilities.

In return, the company has been has been reversing about 100 years of agriculture on a farm field near Ettrick, about 11 miles east of Arcadia.

“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 wetland 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 can be reached at (608) 791-8211 or rmagney@lacrossetribune.com.