Moist Soil Management (MSM)

[Eric Patterson]

I'd like to hear some opinions and gather any data you folks might be able to provide with respect to moist soil management. Our WMAs are headed in the direction of replacing grain crops for waterfowl with food produced via MSM. I'd love to hear from anyone who has practiced MSM on their own property and can comment on the relative cost and merits of MSM to row cropping. I'd also like to hear from anyone with experience hunting MSM areas during the later months of the season, December and January, as to how well waterfowl forage in MSM areas compared to row crops. Looking forward to your inputs.

Eric Patterson

 

[Blake K]

My entire property is in MSM. The mallards really like smartweed. Layout boats are golden in MSM. Pic below is from my solo hunt in my MoMarsh Fatboy on January 17, 2019 in smartweed on my property. Hunt only lasted about 3 minutes before I took my limit of greenheads.
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[len hawkins]

How deep are your wetlands? We have minimal smartweed on our pond and are just getting some duck potato starting to grow, but it isn?t enough to draw birds. My pond is pretty large, and our blind has thigh deep water in front of it. And we can?t draw it down. We have a couple smaller sections we are going to try to draw down and plant, but we were thinking millet in those.

 

[Blake K]

How deep are your wetlands? We have minimal smartweed on our pond and are just getting some duck potato starting to grow, but it isn?t enough to draw birds. My pond is pretty large, and our blind has thigh deep water in front of it. And we can?t draw it down. We have a couple smaller sections we are going to try to draw down and plant, but we were thinking millet in those.

My wetland is 88 acres and 100% is in the WRP program. I drain down each spring to approx. 5 acres of water and let the rest grow back up in natural vegetation and re-flood it typically around 1st of December(this year closer to November 1 due to the flooding we incurred). I have a 17 acre section of this 88 acre wetland which is somewhat divided off and sits by itself and all 17 acres is mostly smartweed. Also have approx. 20 acres of smartweed in the bigger section. Never have planted any smartweed in it. Water level throughout the property is anywhere from chest deep to just below the knee deep when water is in it. I have approx. two foot of elevation from one end of the property to the opposite end. I have done some broadcasting of millet late summer as my 5 acre pool of water recedes from evaporation.

 

[Pat Gregory]

Eric - our duck club is 475 acres of moist soils. We have smartweed, nutsedge, pigtail and wild millet. Cost varies. Because moist soils come up every year, there is no seed costs. Most of your cost seemingly would be if you had to pump water, fuel costs etc. As far as nutritional value to the ducks, far better than grains. And, our moist soils feed the ducks both in the fall and the spring on their return migration. Hard to beat God's perfect plan for duck food...

As far as requirements, a means to raise and lower the water is essential. We have 4 tubes with stop gates on our property. Your ground needs to be essentially dry or near dry in the spring. Sun needs to be able to get to your moist soils for them to grow. There can involve significant effort managing your water structures. We have large amounts of silt along the Illinois River and this can lead to large equipment work which is costly. Good mud flats are necessary to host the moist soils. We have plenty of them at our place. This also draws teal and shovelers because of the invertebrates the mud flats and shallow water hosts. When it all works, it's amazing. Some pictures of our place... Pat


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[Michael McCord]

I think there's lots of resistance to moist soil because, as humans, we have an innate need to domesticate everything. the notion of letting an area "grow wild" doesn't come natural to us even when it's perfectly adequate.

 

[Eric Patterson]

The contributions here have me thinking maybe there are some upsides if our WMAs turn to MSM. You guys have given some interesting food for thought. I attended a meeting Saturday evening where I asked the area manager if they were going to MSM in the dewatering areas, as it was rumored. She replied, as a waterfowl biologist she'd like nothing better than to convert all of the dewatering areas to MSM, but recognized the hunters would oppose such a move and therefore would continue grain crops in those areas most suitable and would use MSM in areas less suitable to grain crops.

I must admit I have been biased against MSM due to seldom seeing ducks use smartweed heavy areas during Dec and Jan. I know of numerous swamps with incredibly thick smartweed vegetation and duck numbers are thin. They just don't seem interested. On the other hand I see flooded corn fields covered in ducks, in spite of hunting pressure at times. In my estimation the MSM foods are more palatable to waterfowl during warm or mild weather, but when hard weather hits they want carbs and these are the same times they come off the refuges and seek food on the WMAs so I'm concerned we will lose those best days. My other concern is we have serious problems with invasive aquatic vegetation (alligatorweed and water primrose) on the WMAs in the dewatering areas and MSM will be the perfect environment for them to gain even more ground. With the current system the farmers take care of tillage and herbicide in support the grain crops for which they take a partial harvest in exchange for free use of the land. This helps keep the invasive vegetation at bay. Without the farmers equipment I believe the state lacks the resources and manpower to combat the invasive vegetation and therefore it will choke out the desirable vegetation one typically gets from MSM.

I guess time will tell how this all work out but I have my concerns but am encouraged by the positive reports from those actually implementing MSM on their properties. Thank you.

Eric