Dad’s Pride and Joy

My dad was always a conservationist. I still owe a post about all his awards. I’ve got a copy of the Indiana Prairie Farmer in the library where he was on the cover for his efforts at soil conservation in the 70s and 80s.

One of his proudest achievements was laying a bunch of drain tile to make the land more arable and better to farm.

And one of his other proudest achievements was plugging some of that tile right back up a decade later to allow the land to flood out.

A ten acre section spanning the corners of two of the fields at Helios became, over the span of a couple years, a huge wetland. Ducks and geese moved in, then the occasional beaver. Dad called it “the duck pond” and would go sit out on the sand hill that overlooks it and watch all the wildlife that he enabled.

Give it a watch, and see how many different plants, animals and insects you can see, along with a couple of old disused duck blinds.

As we move toward the transition to Helios the solar farm, the wetlands is one area that will be left alone. It serves too important of an ecological function to re-drain. One of the reasons we chose to partner with Doral Energy is because of their careful and forward-thinking approach to managing all aspects of the environment.