The News-Journal's Everglades editorial attributes actions and attitudes to sugar farmers that are highly inaccurate and ignores the past 10 years of accomplishments toward Everglades restoration. As senior vice president of U.S. Sugar Corp., I know that farmers are neither weeping nor heading to court. 

In fact, the state of Florida and the Florida sugar industry, which is upstream of the Everglades, have been working on and achieving substantial on-the-ground improvements based on the 1994 Everglades Forever Act. Nearly a decade of work and more than $500 million in public and private funding have resulted in significantly cleaner water going into and improving the health of the Everglades. 

Sugar farmers have gone far beyond the state's requirements, investing tens of millions of dollars in improvements on their own land to reduce farming's impact on the Everglades. The law required farmers to eliminate 25 percent of the mineral phosphorus (a naturally occurring nutrient in the soils) from our water, but we actually removed 73 percent of the phosphorus this year. As cleaner water reaches the new marshes, they in turn are able to discharge water even cleaner than had been anticipated. 

In the Everglades Agricultural Area, four massive new marshes already have been built and are working to provide wildlife habitat and deliver clean water to the surrounding Everglades. Nearly 20,000 acres of new, critically placed marshlands are making a difference. In 2003, another 21,830 acres of marsh come on line. This is the largest creation of new wetlands in history. It sets the stage for the federal program of reconfiguration of canals and levees, deep wells, storage wells and water conservation that is yet to come -- the $7.8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan that Congress approved in 2000. 

About 95 percent of the Everglades today, including all of the pristine areas and Everglades National Park, are at or near the water quality standards proposed by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. No one should minimize the challenges ahead in reaching final water quality standards and in continuing the larger federal restoration effort, but neither should anyone deny the success of the state's initiative in putting our once-suffering Everglades on the road to recovery.