The Lacassane Company

The Lacassane Company is a land management company, with a goal of sustainable land management using an environmental management scheme that involves a host of tools including holistic management. Located primarily in Jefferson Davis and Cameron parish, with property in Ragley, Louisiana, the company headquarters is in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Founded in 1929, by eight Lake Charles area businessmen, with land purchased from Jim Gardiner. The company was formed with 2250 common shares of stock with share-holders including, W. P. Weber, H. G. Chalkley, C. O. Noble, Henry Pomeroy, George M. King and Frank Roberts, M. J. Muller, and purchased 21,000 acres that included farm machinery, implements, stock, and cattle bought for $380,000.00, that included what was the Lowery and Illinois plantations, that became known as "The Illinois Plant", and "The Lowery Plant".

The Lacassane company continued with the previous form of tenant farming, increasing the original cattle herd, establishing trapping, hunting, oil and gas leases, and then the wetlands mitigation project. The Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1937, when the company sold 13,000 acres (5,300 ha) south of the Illinois Plant to the United States Government for $51,774.00.

The Illinois Plant is called the Lacassane Coastal Prairie Mitigation Bank and the Ragley property, in conjunction with the "Calcasieu Mitigation Bank" and partnered with Ecosystem Investment Partners (EIP), is known as the Bill Jackson Longleaf Savannah Mitigation Bank. Both have been designated (through The Lacassane Company) by the Corps of Engineers as a mitigation bank providing ecosystem services to the public in the form of Environmental mitigation (compensatory mitigation) to ensure the no net loss wetlands policy is followed to prevent Biodiversity loss that keeps the greenhouse debt in check. The Lacassane Company partnered with The Coastal Plain Conservancy to hold conservation servitudes on the land. The banks are monitored and maintained by Wildlands, Inc., an environmental consulting and plant propagation company.