Two contractors earned a total of $53,000 for completing soil surveys of approximately 43,500 acres of Cook County land this summer and fall.
The contractors, J. Campbell and T. Dewitt, completed the work in 1,177 hours. Cook County paid the contractors but will be reimbursed by the Minnesota Board of Soil Resources (BSWR).
Of the 1,027,191 acres of land in Cook County, about 16% is considered wetland and 9% is “deepwater.”
According to a Cook County Soil & Water Conservation District report, over 90% of land in Cook County is taxexempt. About 70% is federal land, 15% is state land, and 5% is tribal land. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), which is on U.S. Forest Service land, comprises 30% of the entire county.
Cook County Soil & Water Conservation District Manager Kerrie Fabius reported to the county board Tuesday, October 19, 2010 that next summer, the plan would be to hire contractors to survey as many as 44,000 more acres.
After that survey, 36% of the county’s non-federal land will have been mapped. The only two counties in Minnesota that do not yet have complete soil surveys are Lake and Cook counties. TheU.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service is the impetus for completing soil surveys throughout the entire state.
The U.S. Forest Service has surveyed about 520,000 of its land in Cook County, mostly outside of the BWCA.
Mapping data will be available online by 2012.
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