I actually think there's a good example in North Dakota and Minnesota, where the Red River Basin Commission has actually implemented these kinds of ideas. They've had really good landowner cooperation. In some cases they've actually, as you suggest, acquired the properties and made them permanent water storage areas. Sometimes these are areas that were not very productive agriculturally to begin with, and it was only through rising commodity prices and economic pressures on the farm budgets that they tore these wetlands up and drained them and tried to farm them.
So given the opportunity, landowners quite often—well, in every instance they cooperated down in those jurisdictions so that they would set aside those properties permanently. Not only does it give you this opportunity to prevent flooding in the springtime but in-season excessive precipitation events can be mitigated. What they found is they actually demonstrated that they can protect a lot of the agricultural land adjacent to these projects from these major precipitation events. Because the water is stored there for a longer period of time, rather than just to prevent a flood, there's a very efficient nutrient interception.
Storing water temporarily doesn't really do much for helping save the lakes from nutrient loading, but storing it for a long term and actually deliberately growing biomass crops, even cattails—on which we're doing research here in Manitoba on how to harvest them and create a bit of a bioeconomy—will do a great deal to prevent those nutrients from getting ultimately into our freshwater lakes.