Over the half-million acres of drained Everglades south of Lake Okeechobee hangs a long established but persistently  ignored truth: the soil is disappearing.  Sometime this century the Everglades Agricultural Area will be down to bare rock, unless it is reflooded.

Historically, this is a fact that people in the Glades knew but didn’t know  They could see the evidence of subsidence  but refused to believe it.  Even today, the vanishing land, most of it in sugar cane, is a subject seldom discussed.  There are no plans to put the water back on the land now, while there still is some soil left.  Nor are plans being made to protect the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) from urban development when the soil is so thin it no longer can be farmed.

The EAA sits in the heart of the River of Grass, the life source of the Everglades.   Most of this ag land was drained about 50 years ago in the first attempt of the Army Corps of Engineers to rearrange the Everglades.  The EAA acts as a huge dam, blocking the shallow sheet-flow of water that once began  north of Lake Okeechobee and ended at the tip of the Florida peninsula, in Florida Bay, 100 miles to the south.

Current plans to restore the Everglades devote scant attention to the EAA and none at all to the prospect of restoring it to its natural condition as headwaters of the River of Grass. The only official act of the restoration in the area has been the purchase of  about 30,000 acres of sugar land at the south end of the EAA where the soil is thinnest, to be used as a water  reservoir.  The land was offered for sale by the Talisman company.  The appraiser commented extensively on  the shallowness of the soil and said “the fate of this soil for continued agricultural production is uncertain.”  In some parts of the southern EAA,  sod farms have gone out of production because the soil is too thin.

 Suggestions that government purchase the remainder of the EAA as it goes out of sugar production are meeting opposition and even hostility from official sources.  Yet the need for space to store water is one of the most urgent concerns of Everglades restoration.   In the meantime, urban development continues its approach on the Everglades.    The little EAA town of Belle Glade is becoming a suburb of West Palm Beach.  In time a city could rise in the heart of the Everglades, imperiling the whole natural system that sustains South Florida.

Even the deepest part of the EAA, is expected to go out of  production in about 70 years, according to a 1997 by the University of Florida in 1997.  That study is the latest made on subsidence, and  was restricted to the northern part of the EAA.  It set the subsidence rate there at a little over a half inch a year (.56).  That is a lower rate than earlier studies, most of which set the rate at about a foot every 10 years.   The South Florida Water Management District, which is working on Everglades restoration, last made a study on subsidence in 1993.  It predicted that at least 80,600 acres and maybe upto 252,000 acres in the EAA will leave production by 2013—in just 13 years—because of subidence problems. The higher figure represents about half the land under cultivation in the EAA. The authors of this report commented: “Questions regarding whether agricultural production in the EAA can be sustained in the future may restrict new investment in agricultural facilities.” 

Some experts say higher water tables and better management practices have slowed subsidence.  But all agree the decline will continue unless water is put back on the land. Average depth in the northern area measured 37 inches four years ago. When the soil dept is less than 24 inches, canals must be deepened and other work done at a considerable increase in production cost.  Down to six inches, the soil can’t be farmed.

The Corps of Engineers reports that “Rapid subsidence combined with limited soil depth (to bedrock) has raised concerns about the sustainability of agriculture in the EAA.”

Seventy five years ago a post nine feet high (108 inches)  was erected at the Everglades Research and Education Center at Belle Glade.  It now stands at three and a half  feet, (66 inches).

Despite the knowledge about subsidence and predictions of vanishing agriculture, government is preparing to spend millions to clean up the polluted water from EAA farms.  

Knowledge that the drained Everglades soil would subside was available even before the first dredge arrived south of Lake Okeechobee.  It was ignored long past the time that extra steps routinely had to be added  to Everglades houses so their occupants could  reach the ground.  Or when backyard septic tanks  took on the appearance of  solitary graves as the dirt around them disappeared.

Organic soils are found around the globe, but the Everglades is one of the largest areas of peat and muck to be converted to agriculture. It is one of the world’s richest farming areas.  Most other soils are mineral-based and contain sand, silt, clay and other materials that come from rock.  Muck soils contain from 25 to 65 percent organic matter; peat contains 65 percent or more.  Peat and muck are created when organic matter such as sawgrass seed and dead plants pile up on the ground faster than it can decompose. This happens in lush areas like the Everglades that once was under water at least part of the time. Water shuts off oxygen that causes matter to rot. When the water is removed the rotting resumes. “The process keeps us from being up to our ears in plant material,” said Dr. George Snyder, professor of soil chemistry at the University of Florida’s Everglades research center.

Lawrence E. Will, who wrote with humor and insight of pioneer life in the Everglades, frequently planted his feet in both peat and muck. The muck, he said, is firm and black..  It is found around the rim of the lake where a thick forest of custard apple and other tropical trees once grew.  Peat, wrote Will, is brown and fibrous, soft as a mattress on top, fluffy as feathers. “You’d sink to your shoe tops every time.”

It took many centuries for nature to create the 3,000square miles of organic land that layat the bottom of the Everglades floodway, better known as the River of Grass. The shallow channel was fertile ground for aquatic plants, growing and dying and dropping under the hot sun.  In the Eighteenth Century, when the first adventurers began to explore the Everglades, the sharp, triple-edged sawgrass grew more than head high. The muck under it was 8 to15 feet deep. This was learned by poking long rods in the soft earth.

Out there on the  steaming, smothered plane, a dream was born.  People would drain the Everglades, create an agricultural Eden, and get rich.  The dream had invaded the public psyche as early as 1837, when the Second Seminole Indian War give the country a flashing glimpse of the awesome land. The Everglades might be drained, said John Lee Williams, Esq., by deepening its natural outlets. By the time Florida became a state in 1845, many of its officials were convinced that drainage was possible.  A survey headed by Buckingham Smith, an aristocrat and state leader from St. Augustine, agreed with them.

Here was fertile land in a somewhat tropical setting, where crops should be able togrow year around. All that was needed was to get the water off the land. There surely was great bounty to bed reaped with little labor. Just scratch the ground and things would grow. Or so it seemed.

Before the end of the nineteenth century, people were beginning to learn about subsidence. The first great wetlands drainer in South Florida, Hamilton Disston, was growing sugar in the Upper Kissimmee River valley north of Lake Okeechobee in 1890.  One of his scientific advisers urged him to move on the Everglades, describing it as ideally suited for sugar plantations. In the meantime it was discovered that the drained muck in the Kissimmee area was disappearing. That and other problems with the land caused Disston to give up sugar growing.

By 1909 there was available an official report that said if the muck was drained it would soon begin to disappear, that even careful handling would only slow the process.  Publication of the report was delayed for some time. Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward had launched his big drainage project in the Glades.

When the report finally was published, it was ignored.

Drained muck dries, shrinks, compacts and turns powdery. Wind carries it way. Fires easily ignite it. The ground water recedes. And most damaging of all, biochemical oxidation begins, as invisible bugs satisfy ravenous appetites. Peat fires sometimes burn for days, sending thick smoke to clog lungs and traffic in the urban areas.  Some fires keep going until they reach underground water or rock. But  even the most widespread fire destroys less soil than oxidation. Subsidence occurs at varying rates. In the Everglades it is hastened by the warm climate, the absence of minerals in the soil, and the need to keepthe underground water level low enough to protect crops.

The subsiding soil was mentioned again in a 1913 publication, which minimized the problem. Loss rates from subsidence, it said, were exaggerated. The author predicted that no more than about eight inches eventually would disappear. So the populace believed although reality proved otherwise. Not until

The 1920s, when visible signs of subsidence were all over the Everglades, did engineers begin to recon with it in their designs.

In 1926 after a hurricane ripped through Miami it proceeded to the Everglades and blew the water out of Lake Okeechobee, drowning people and farms on the southeast rim. Subsidence aggravated the problem.

Over the years the drained land had receded, forming a bowl to draw the high water from the lake.  A 1927 report from the Everglades Drainage District, based on 15 years of data, found that up to 4.6 feet of soil had been lost. But the authors predicted that at some point the subsidence would slow and eventually cease.

“How such a conclusion could be reached by such eminent engineers is difficult to understand,” wrote Lamar Johnson, who held important posts with both the old and and new water districts. “The conclusion did reflect the hope of the farmers of the organic soil in the Everglades,” he added.

Later, Johnson himself and a colleague, J. C. “Jakc” Stephens, gathered up all the data available on subsidence, did some research of their own, and came out with a report.  It found that the soil was disappearing at the rate of about one foot every ten years. The future held little chance for continued farming  in the Everglades, they said. Johnson’s agency, the Everglades Drainage District, would not release the report. It became public in 1951, when Johnson and Stephens were invited to speak before a private group, the Soil Science Society of Florida. The audience included many farmers.

Farming the Everglades soil is similar to mining for coal or other minerals, reported Dr. R.V. Allison, head of the Univrisy of Florida’s soils department, and one of the organizers of the l951 meeting.  “In other words, these soils are like the cake which we cannot eat and keep,” he told the assembled group.  At the same meeting Johnson advised that the rapid rate of subsidence “means, of course, that we must develop these glades lands as rapidly as possible; to mine them for everything they are worth if we are to get out of them their total value as a natural resource so long as they last.”

Some of the farmers dismissed the predictions of the Johnson-Stephens report. Others expressed hope a solution to subsidence could yet be found, or complained that none had been offered.  “They haven’t given me any answer as to prevention or cure, said George Wedgeworth, whose family has longtime holdings

In the Glades. Some were thoughtful. . “We didn’t come in to make our money quick and get out. We didn’t come in to mine this good land,” said  Harrison Raoul, manager of a large plantation in the middle of the Glades. His land was being lost, he said, “because I just didn’t know what I was doing.”  Like many, he refused to believe nothing could be done. His farm would experiment with growing aquatic plants, he said. But the dame practices continued across the Glades as the land continued to subside.

One man wanted to know wht he could tell all the wealthy Northerners he had talked into investing in the Everglades. A county agent said he was getting a lot of requests for information, but was left with nothing to do but “listen to the land speculators.”

Stephens, who in 1993 was 83 years old and living in Ft. Lauderdale, was research project supervisor for the U.S. Soil Conservation  Service’s Everglades Project when he and Johnson wrote the report. He acknowledged that they “had a little trouble getting published.”  “Behind the scenes,” he said, “I perceived that the Corps didn’t want this published until they got their plan.  I expect, but I can’t prove it—wouldn’t want to prove it—but there was a little objection up there to this until they got a little farther along.” At the  time of the 1951 report the Army Corps of Engineers was drawing up plans for draining the Everglades, after Congress had approved what was called the “Project”.  Much of that work the government now is trying to undo in its Everglades Restoration Plan, or “Restudy”.

Thje Project, said Stephens, would need a long life to justify the Corps” favorable cost-benefit ratio.  Predictions that the land would disappear didn’t do much to support the claim that benefits would outweigh the costs, he said.  He and Johnson decided to write their report, he said, because “there were so many people jumping up and down and saying their land was not subsiding.  We had to try to convince the farmers they had a problem.” About 20 years later, when Johnson wrote of his experiences in the Everglades, he reported the subject of subsidence still was being ignored.  “Subsidence has never been a popular subject in the Everglades,” he said.