"Cattails don't pay the bank."
"I know."
"Ducks don't pay fertilizer bills."
"I know."
"Then what are we talking about?"
Casey tapped the photographs. "We're talking about the fact that this isn't behaving like temporary stormwater anymore."
Warren stared at her.
She took a breath. "I think we need someone who knows wetlands."
He almost laughed, but something in her expression stopped him.
"Casey, a wet field isn't a wetland just because it ruined my spring."
"I know that too."
"Then say what you're saying."
She looked toward the dark window above the sink, where the reflection of the kitchen hid the field outside. "I'm saying I don't know what it is. But I think we're making a mistake if we decide what it's worth before we understand what it became."
Warren looked at the photographs again.
For the first time, he did not push them back across the table.
Casey spent the next morning making calls. The first three led nowhere useful. One office told her to contact the county, the county referred her to the state, and a receptionist at another agency politely explained that a person could not simply call standing water a wetland because it had ducks on it. Casey agreed, wrote down the name of the program she was told to research, and kept calling.
By late afternoon she reached a biologist at the state wetlands office who was willing to explain the basics without pretending the answer was simple. Hydrology mattered. So did vegetation, soils, history, and the question of whether the site was naturally predisposed to wet conditions or had merely been temporarily inundated by an artificial event. If Casey was imagining that the state would look at a few photographs and declare the Puit farm suddenly valuable, the biologist told her gently, she should put that idea aside.
"I'm not looking for a declaration," Casey said. "I'm trying to understand what we're looking at."
That answer seemed to help. The biologist explained that restored wetlands, conservation easements, habitat programs, and mitigation projects could produce economic value under specific circumstances, but none of those systems treated water alone as money. A mitigation bank, for example, required an approved instrument, defined service area, ecological lift, long-term protection, monitoring, financial assurances, and verification before credits could be released. Existing wetlands could present additional questions because a project generally needed to demonstrate restoration, enhancement, establishment, or preservation that met the applicable program rules. Nobody was going to pay Warren simply because a drainage mistake had drowned his soybeans.
Casey took five pages of notes.
When she explained it to Warren that evening, he leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.
"So now we have a flooded farm and homework."
"That's one way to put it."
"And no guarantee."
"None."
"And we'd probably have to hire people before knowing if it qualifies for anything."