“You can’t just look at water, you can’t just look at soil, you have to look at all the natural resources together because they all affect each other,” Thomas Drewes of the Natural Resource Conservation Service told about 40 environmentalists and local officials who gathered on the Nevius Street Bridge in Raritan for to announce the joint venture. “If you take care of the land it will take care of you.”
The NRCS, an agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will help Duke Farms restore and preserve 528 acres of wetlands along the Raritan River and Duke Farms 2,700-acre property.
“Once this whole project is completed you’ll have sediment trapping here so as the river rises and the water comes out carrying all the stuff that comes with it during a flood, a lot of that will settle here in the trees and it won’t make its way downstream causing additional damage,” said Janice Reid of the conservation service.
Children of Duke Farms’ employees, participating in “Take Your Child to Work Day” today, helped out by planting river birch, white oak and black willow saplings.
The trees are a part of the $90,000 Emergency Watershed Protection Program, funded through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which will be used to plant and maintain the trees and shrubs on 133 acres at Duke Farms.
Contractors will remove garbage and clear the land of invasive plants, then plant native trees with deep roots that will grab sedimentation and divert water into the ground instead of over it.
Duke Farms, one of the largest privately-owned parcels of undeveloped land in the state, is home to about 30 endangered species.
“It’s one of those ‘build it and they will come’ phenomenons, that’s what happened with the eagles,” Gene Huntington, a Duke Farms employee, said of the family of eagles currently nesting on the property.