On Thursday, a federal judge in Cedar Rapids rejected an attempt by the owner of a farm in Delaware County to overturn a 40-year-old law protecting wetlands. Judge C.J. Williams, the chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, issued a summary judgment in the case after determining the company that owns the property, CTM Holdings, LLC, lacked standing to sue the U.S. Department of Agriculture over its designation of nine acres of a 72-acre farm property as wetlands.
Those nine acres had been designated as wetlands by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in 2010. CTM Holdings, which owns more than 1,000 acres of Iowa farmland that it rents to other farming operations, bought the Delaware County property 12 years later. CTM Holdings wants to convert the designated wetlands to part of a farm field, but did not want to face the consequences doing that would result in under the Wetland Conservation Compliance Provisions of the farm bill President Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1985.
The provisions, commonly called the “swampbuster law,” are intended to prevent a parcel of farmland designated as a wetland by the NRCS from being drained, filled-in, cleared of vegetation or otherwise substantially altered. Violating the swampbuster law doesn’t result in criminal penalties or even civil fines, but a farmer would become ineligible to receive certain USDA benefits. According to the attorneys for CTM Holdings, that loss of eligibility constitutes an unconstitutional taking of private property by the federal government, in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
CTM Holdings was represented in its lawsuit by two conservative public interest law groups, Liberty Justice Center and the Pacific Legal Foundation, which often sue over regulations. In their filing, the groups argue, “The law, nicknamed Swampbuster, egregiously places the burden of preserving wetlands for the benefit of the entire nation on the backs of farmers and their private farmland.”
In his ruling on Thursday, Judge Williams wrote that “the conditions Swampbuster places upon benefits likely do not amount to a taking.” But that’s not why he issued his summary judgment dismissing the case.
In 2023, CTM Holdings, whose principal owner is retired Chicago attorney Jim Conlan, requested the NRSC conduct a “redetermination,” to see if the nine acres still qualified as wetlands. Or at least, it meant to. According to the NRSC, the company actually requested a review of a different section of the 72-acre property. During the March hearing in the case, Judge Williams noted that correspondence between the company and the NRSC was confusing, and the whole lawsuit appeared to be based on a misunderstanding between the parties.
After determining that CTM Holdings hadn’t requested a review of the nine acres in question, he concluded the company had no standing to sue. That was the basis for dismissing the case. CTM Holdings has not said if it plans to appeal the ruling.
Regardless of whether the company appeals, this is unlikely to be the only challenge to the swampbuster law. Since the Republican-appointed majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has demonstrated its willingness to overturn decades of legal precedent to produce results favored by conservatives on a wide range of issues, from reproductive rights to presidential immunity, and especially on issues of environmental regulations, it’s probably only a matter of time before a challenge to swampbuster reaches the justices.
According to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, “Prior to European settlement, wetland basins covered 4 to 6 million acres, or approximately 11% of Iowa’s surface area. Wetlands were part of every watershed in the state, but nearly 95% of them have been drained.”
Most of those lost wetlands were drained and converted into farmland.
