With help from GreenTrees, Mississippi business visionary embraces new role as environmental steward in the Delta

Jim Ingram has experienced plenty of business success. The founder of Ingram Consulting LLC has supervised the leasing of approximately 11 million square feet of office properties in the Southeast and Southwest. In his decade as chief investment officer of Hertz Investment Group in Jackson, Mississippi, he led the acquisition of 31 office properties, totaling $1.7 billion in investment. Prior to that, he spent 23 years at Parkway Properties, where he bought and sold more than 130 office properties valued at approximately $4 billion.

But aside from his business acumen, Ingram has a palpable love for the natural world and is taking actions on behalf of our common future. He owns 760 acres near the tiny hamlet of Satartia, Mississippi (population: 41 as of 2020), about 45 miles north of Madison on the banks of the Yazoo River. Of this, he counts 120 acres as “virgin timber” hardwoods and 640 acres under contract with the USDA’s Wetland Reserve Easements (WRE) program, which provides a contractual opportunity for private landowners to rehabilitate their low-lying landscapes to provide habitats for migratory waterfowl and other wetland wildlife. The program is also designed to improve water quality, reduce flooding, recharge groundwater and provide educational and scientific opportunities.

Upon purchase, Ingram’s new property was already under contract with GreenTrees, but he didn’t know what that might mean for his future land use. Steve Burgess, a GreenTrees forester since 2012 after a 35-year career with the Mississippi Forestry Commission, was able to give insight into what Ingram could achieve by simply letting his trees grow.

“Steve called one day and said that GreenTrees wanted to replant hardwoods all around my property – for free,” Ingram recalled. “I said, ‘Really? Let me get this straight. I’m going to get paid to do a good thing for the environment?.’”

Ingram said Burgess provided “fabulous” satellite imagery of his property, detailing where replanting in hardwoods could reduce flood damage. That was a big deal, since flooding is a perpetual threat in the Mississippi Delta. Many in the region still remember the events of February 2022, when a carbon pipeline ruptured due to heavy rains and shifting subsoil, causing dozens of Satartia residents to become ill and evacuate.

Ingram felt that by growing trees on his land, he was making a long-term investment for himself and the planet by doing his part to mitigate flooding and store more pollutive carbon dioxide every year. He also wanted the property to reflect his background as a hunter by becoming a wilderness of healthy forests, forming a vibrant, native ecology for native wildlife. GreenTrees fits the bill perfectly.

“I’m getting paid to do a good thing for the environment,” he said. “Carbon capture isn’t something that a lot of people know about or understand yet, but how can you go wrong? And, everyone I’ve worked with at GreenTrees has been wonderful. This really looks like the wave of the future.”

Ingram especially prefers Nuttall oaks, a relative of the pin and red oak that thrives in the floodplains and bottomlands of the Delta region, for his GreenTrees replanting. Nuttalls are a tough species of hardwood that latch on to the unsteady soils of a wetland environment, stabilizing the soil while providing copious amounts of acorn mast for native wildlife.

Currently, GreenTrees is replanting most of the 640 acres in the WRE program, but landowners should know that not all of one’s property must be enrolled in replanted hardwood forest to qualify for WRE or GreenTrees participation, as other environmentally friendly land uses are welcome.

“It’s the new WRE timber, the growing hardwoods now at 10 to 15 feet tall, that GreenTrees is directly involved with,” Ingram said. “Older oaky woodlands ultimately store more carbon, but they sequester it much more slowly than the younger, carefully managed forests that GreenTrees works with.”

Ingram has also carefully set aside 70 to 80 acres for wildlife food plots for corn, Japanese millet, wheat, and rye. While the region’s perennial struggle with river flooding and threats from rooting feral hogs has reduced the numbers of ground-nesting turkeys and quails on Ingram’s land, Ducks Unlimited has provided eight water control structures on his property through DU’s “wetlands and flood attenuation” program, which he hopes will provide more durability for a wetlands habitat. A low-lying 80-acre portion of his property is flooded before duck season through the end of March, providing excellent waterfowl habitat and hunting opportunities.

All of this means that Ingram is taking steps to put his Mississippi land in the best position to be a quality natural resource for decades to come and “a family property for life.”