"Yes."
He looked at her for several seconds. "That's not much of a rescue plan."
"I didn't say it was."
"What are you saying?"
"That we should find out what the land is before the bank decides what it is for us."
Warren rubbed the bridge of his nose. That sentence bothered him because it sounded too much like common sense. He had spent his life telling younger farmers not to sell cattle in a panic, not to buy equipment because a salesman created urgency, and not to sign contracts they had not read. Yet he was dangerously close to allowing Cornerstone's description of the lower acreage to become the only description that mattered.
Two days later Casey got a call from a man named Odell Marsh.
He was in his early sixties, soft-spoken, gray-haired, and dressed more like a farmer than the consultant Warren expected. He had spent years working on wetland delineation, habitat restoration, conservation transactions, and mitigation planning across several watersheds. He made it clear during the first five minutes that he was not there to promise Warren a fortune, and Warren liked him more for that than he intended to.
Odell walked the property slowly. He began at the drainage outlet, followed the ditch, studied the lowest depressions, dug small soil samples with an auger, and stopped often to look at plants Casey had photographed. He asked where water had historically stood after storms, how long the ground usually took to dry, whether Warren remembered springs where the lower field became difficult to plant, and whether there were older aerial photographs or USDA records showing former sloughs, wet meadows, or drainage features.
Warren answered as precisely as he could. The lower ground had always been difficult. In wet years, parts of it stayed soft for weeks. His father had installed drainage improvements before Warren took over. Warren himself had deepened ditches, maintained outlets, and spent money over the years trying to make the acreage behave more like the high ground.
Odell stopped when Warren said that.
"How much money?"
"Over forty years? More than I want to calculate."
"Tile?"
"Some old subsurface work. Mostly surface drainage and grading."
"Before that?"
"My father said his father called this the low flat. Sometimes the duck field, when he was in a bad mood."
Odell smiled slightly. "You have old photographs?"
"Some."
"Bring them out next time."
They spent nearly four hours outside. Odell never once called the property a mitigation bank, never once used the words jackpot or windfall, and never told Warren the flooded eighty acres were definitely worth more than cropland. Before leaving, he stood beside the fence, hands on his hips, and looked across the mixture of shallow water and emerging vegetation.
"I can tell you one thing," he said.
Warren waited.
"Your problem may not be that the land is too wet. Your problem may be that your family spent seventy years trying to make money from land that wanted to do a different job."
Warren's mouth tightened. "Land doesn't want things."
"Fair enough. Then call it hydrology."