http://www.app.com/app/story/0,21625,1115075,00.html
Published in the Asbury Park Press 11/17/04
By KIRK MOORE
STAFF WRITER
CHATSWORTH -- Hopscotching over piles of soil and sand, Emile DeVito stepped on drying clumps of cranberry vines. His feet landed with a solid thud, in a spot just inches from a newly dug pond.
"It's hard as concrete," he said, tapping the surface with his heel. "The modern cranberry bog is like a pool table, with pipes underneath."
A few yards away, New Jersey Conservation Foundation staffers Louis Cantafio and Tim Morris stripped out the circulatory system of the former A.R. DeMarco Co. cranberry farm, hoisting plastic irrigation pipes with the same blue-green hue as the day they were buried in 1997.
When it purchased the 9,400-acre DeMarco property late last year, the conservation foundation inherited one of the bigger freshwater wetlands violation problems in New Jersey: a 22-acre bog that cranberry grower J. Garfield DeMarco built in the late 1990s, before a glut of frozen fruit and free-falling prices plunged the industry into a deep recession.
Now, foundation biologists are using a rented backhoe and an Army surplus dump truck to accomplish an innovative wetlands restoration. They hope to bring back the Pole Branch of the Wading River, once famed among naturalists as the home of rare plant and animal species.
"This area was obliterated in the late 1950s, early '60s. There were no rules, so they could do what they wanted," said DeVito, director of science and land management for the conservation foundation, as he strode along a dirt road atop a dike separating two bogs.
After family patriarch Anthony DeMarco started buying land around Chatsworth in the 1940s, he built cranberry bogs the traditional way, roughly leveling native wetlands soil before planting cranberry vines, DeVito said.
Although the old Pole Branch channel still lies in those bogs, most of the water was diverted to a ditch -- except when it is let into the bog to float berries during the fall harvest, or to protect the vines from freezing weather, he explained.
"These still have the native soil," DeVito said, pointing to older bogs on the east side of the dike. "In this bog, you plug the ditches, let them fill up, and it turns back into a wetland."
On the west side of the dike, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection, DeMarco's son Garfield had illegally converted wetlands to cranberry culture without a permit -- a charge that DeMarco contested, but ultimately settled last January with a $400,000 penalty.
Modern bogs are surveyed with laser transits and graded to within a fraction of an inch to conserve water, their native hydric soils replaced with a mixture of soil and sand covering drainage and irrigation pipes, DeVito said.
That created a set of problems for the wetland restorers. When soil experts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture came out to look over the bog with DeVito, they saw construction activities on the bog had the unintended consequence of compacting the new sand-soil mix, said Chris Smith, a USDA soil scientist.
"When a wetland is compacted like that, the water is on top of the soil, rather than in it," Smith said. "My recommendation to them was to loosen the the surface without cutting into the lower layers that help hold the water."
"We were concerned, not so much about tainting the (land purchase) project, but about our ability to take on the restoration," said Michele Byers, the conservation foundation's executive director.
Just before closing the deal, DeMarco and his family agreed to give the foundation a further $400,000 discount, on a purchase price already around half the property's potential market value. That dropped the final figure to $11.6 million, Byers said.
Initial bids to contract the job out came back around $700,000 to $800,000 but by doing the work themselves, foundation staffers say the cost will be around $50,000 for equipment and rentals, not counting their own full-time work.
They cleared the massive sand table-top from the bog, digging and running "root rake" machinery to break up the soil down to around 18 inches deep, without disturbing clay-bearing lower layers that keep water up near the surface, DeVito said.
Cantafio, who has a doctorate degree in genetics, drove a six-wheel dump truck that the foundation bought from a military vehicle collector in Philadelphia. He hauled back the muck that DeMarco removed, dumping piles of black soil all over.
DeVito wants the result "to look like an English muffin," with humps and holes to create a variety of water levels for different plant species. Cantafio and Morris are careful to avoid squashing shrubs, and they've replanted some in a fenced patch, safe from hungry deer, so bluebirds and cedar waxwings will spread the seeds.
Lessons from the project could point the way toward restoring other abandoned cranberry bogs. Closed down after the industry's earlier economic shakeouts, small bogs returning to nature dot the region, from northern Ocean County across the state to the Philadelphia suburbs.
"But no one knows what will happen if these modern bogs are abandoned, the way a lot of bogs were abandoned after World War II," DeVito said. "We couldn't just fill this back up with water and say it's a wetland again."
Published in the Asbury Park Press 11/17/04
By KIRK MOORE
STAFF WRITER
CHATSWORTH -- Hopscotching over piles of soil and sand, Emile DeVito stepped on drying clumps of cranberry vines. His feet landed with a solid thud, in a spot just inches from a newly dug pond.
"It's hard as concrete," he said, tapping the surface with his heel. "The modern cranberry bog is like a pool table, with pipes underneath."
A few yards away, New Jersey Conservation Foundation staffers Louis Cantafio and Tim Morris stripped out the circulatory system of the former A.R. DeMarco Co. cranberry farm, hoisting plastic irrigation pipes with the same blue-green hue as the day they were buried in 1997.
When it purchased the 9,400-acre DeMarco property late last year, the conservation foundation inherited one of the bigger freshwater wetlands violation problems in New Jersey: a 22-acre bog that cranberry grower J. Garfield DeMarco built in the late 1990s, before a glut of frozen fruit and free-falling prices plunged the industry into a deep recession.
Now, foundation biologists are using a rented backhoe and an Army surplus dump truck to accomplish an innovative wetlands restoration. They hope to bring back the Pole Branch of the Wading River, once famed among naturalists as the home of rare plant and animal species.
"This area was obliterated in the late 1950s, early '60s. There were no rules, so they could do what they wanted," said DeVito, director of science and land management for the conservation foundation, as he strode along a dirt road atop a dike separating two bogs.
After family patriarch Anthony DeMarco started buying land around Chatsworth in the 1940s, he built cranberry bogs the traditional way, roughly leveling native wetlands soil before planting cranberry vines, DeVito said.
Although the old Pole Branch channel still lies in those bogs, most of the water was diverted to a ditch -- except when it is let into the bog to float berries during the fall harvest, or to protect the vines from freezing weather, he explained.
"These still have the native soil," DeVito said, pointing to older bogs on the east side of the dike. "In this bog, you plug the ditches, let them fill up, and it turns back into a wetland."
On the west side of the dike, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection, DeMarco's son Garfield had illegally converted wetlands to cranberry culture without a permit -- a charge that DeMarco contested, but ultimately settled last January with a $400,000 penalty.
Modern bogs are surveyed with laser transits and graded to within a fraction of an inch to conserve water, their native hydric soils replaced with a mixture of soil and sand covering drainage and irrigation pipes, DeVito said.
That created a set of problems for the wetland restorers. When soil experts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture came out to look over the bog with DeVito, they saw construction activities on the bog had the unintended consequence of compacting the new sand-soil mix, said Chris Smith, a USDA soil scientist.
"When a wetland is compacted like that, the water is on top of the soil, rather than in it," Smith said. "My recommendation to them was to loosen the the surface without cutting into the lower layers that help hold the water."
"We were concerned, not so much about tainting the (land purchase) project, but about our ability to take on the restoration," said Michele Byers, the conservation foundation's executive director.
Just before closing the deal, DeMarco and his family agreed to give the foundation a further $400,000 discount, on a purchase price already around half the property's potential market value. That dropped the final figure to $11.6 million, Byers said.
Initial bids to contract the job out came back around $700,000 to $800,000 but by doing the work themselves, foundation staffers say the cost will be around $50,000 for equipment and rentals, not counting their own full-time work.
They cleared the massive sand table-top from the bog, digging and running "root rake" machinery to break up the soil down to around 18 inches deep, without disturbing clay-bearing lower layers that keep water up near the surface, DeVito said.
Cantafio, who has a doctorate degree in genetics, drove a six-wheel dump truck that the foundation bought from a military vehicle collector in Philadelphia. He hauled back the muck that DeMarco removed, dumping piles of black soil all over.
DeVito wants the result "to look like an English muffin," with humps and holes to create a variety of water levels for different plant species. Cantafio and Morris are careful to avoid squashing shrubs, and they've replanted some in a fenced patch, safe from hungry deer, so bluebirds and cedar waxwings will spread the seeds.
Lessons from the project could point the way toward restoring other abandoned cranberry bogs. Closed down after the industry's earlier economic shakeouts, small bogs returning to nature dot the region, from northern Ocean County across the state to the Philadelphia suburbs.
"But no one knows what will happen if these modern bogs are abandoned, the way a lot of bogs were abandoned after World War II," DeVito said. "We couldn't just fill this back up with water and say it's a wetland again."
. I needed to wear a bumper sticker on my tee shirt; "I'd rather be elswhere".
