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Beyond the Pond
How One Farm Measures Success
It was high summer, and Loretta and Martin Jaus had taken a break from crop work on their west-central Minnesota dairy farm to stand in tall grass, listening and watching for signs of success on their operation. To the right was a straight-line gash of manmade ditch, the kind that’s common in this part of the state. Across the ditch was a cornfield sitting on a former lakebed, made possible by the artificial drainage the ditch provided. But in front of the couple were eleven acres of shaggy wildlife habitat: a mixture of prairie and wetland. It was crackling with the sounds of bird life, including the buzzing zhee, zhee, zhee of the clay-colored sparrow, a relatively rare bird that is pretty picky about its habitat requirements.
Martin and Loretta were thrilled. They conceded that back in 1993, when they restored this habitat on prime farmland, there were scratched heads and rolled eyes in the neighborhood. They are just a few miles from Renville County, the state’s number one corn and soybean producer.
“Does it make sense financially to take that eleven acres out of production?” Loretta asked me rhetorically as she watched birds flit around after insects. “No, but we need it. For us it just made good sense because it’s important for us to have diverse numbers and species of animals and plants on our farm. If the place is good for wildlife, then we know it’s good for us.”
Martin put it more bluntly: “If those sounds weren’t there, we would consider ourselves a failure.”
This is a wildly successful farm, plain and simple, but not solely because of those eleven acres of avian paradise. Or because of the small amphibian and dove ponds they’ve established on odd corners of the property, or the one hundred bluebird houses mounted like tiny sentry boxes on fence posts around their grazing paddocks. (Martin estimates they can get one pair of bluebirds for every five acres of pasture. “The best year was thirty-five pairs,” he said once with the kind of pride that other farmers might reserve for talking about bushels-of-corn-per-acre yields.)
What makes the Jaus operation, and others like it, special, is its ability to integrate aspects of a healthy ecosystem into the “working” aspects of the farm. This is not the typical attitude in the agricultural or environmental communities. The argument is often made that profitable farming and quality wildlife habitat, for example, don’t mix. If we want to leave areas for birds, mammals, and even frogs, goes this argument, the best thing to do is create isolated wildlife refuges where no economic activity takes place. That way, farmers can be free to intensively cultivate every inch of their operations without having to worry about wetlands, shelterbelts, and grassy nesting areas.
Writing in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, scientists from the Australian National University and Stanford University provide a description of two dramatically contrasting manners of managing the agricultural landscape.1 In a “land sparing” scenario, acres are farmed intensively—large-scale monocultural operations raising crops such as corn and soybeans are used to produce high yields, for example. In theory, sacrificing these agricultural acres for food, and increasingly fuel, production, makes it possible to set up nature reserves separate from farms on land that normally could not produce high yields of crops or livestock. Usually these reserves are owned or somehow managed by the government or a nonprofit organization, since they do not produce the kind of income private landowners need. Or, in the case of the Conservation Reserve Program or Wetlands Reserve Program, the government pays the landowner not to farm certain “sensitive” acres.
“Wildlife friendly farming,” in contrast, is characterized by interconnecting patches of native vegetation scattered throughout the landscape, as well as a high level of spatial heterogeneity—in other words, a diversity of growing plants in a range of small fields while retaining habitat features within the fields, such as buffer strips or scattered trees along streams, wildlife travel lanes, or field borders.
Even groups like The Nature Conservancy, which has long focused on simply buying up vulnerable land and locking out all economic activity, including farming, is starting to see the limits to such a strategy and the benefits to working with farmers who are utilizing nature friendly methods.
“We realize that there isn’t enough money out there to buy up all the land. Besides, people make a living from this land,” Neal Feeken, who works on prairie recovery and renewable energy in The Nature Conservancy’s Minnesota office, once told me while we hiked the pastures of a farm in the western part of the state. “We need to show economic activity can take place on land that’s producing environmental benefits.”
Diversity = Stability
The Jaus operation is certainly proving economic activity and environmental benefits can cohabitate. During the growing season, their sixty-cow dairy herd gets its nutrition by grazing on a series of small paddocks utilizing managed rotational grazing. Because the farm is certified organic, the Jauses are able to sell their milk for a premium; the level of that premium varies, but can be as much as double the conventional price. It’s a nice financial reward for taking the extra trouble to avoid toxic chemicals and petroleum-based fertilizers, among other environmentally friendly practices, and is allowing the family to make a comfortable living without milking several hundred cows and cropping thousands of acres. The fact that neither Martin nor Loretta are working off the farm is significant—it’s rare these days to find a family farm where at least one spouse doesn’t have a “town” job to, at the least, get access to an employer’s health insurance plan.2
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program does include the level of a farm’s biodiversity as part of its compliance assessment for certification.3 But there are no widespread food labeling systems that pay producers premiums for reclaiming an eleven-acre marsh, putting in five miles of shelterbelts, erecting bluebird boxes, or putting in a small pond just for frogs.
It’s obvious those additions to the farm help feed the couple’s passion for all things wild, a passion that they’ve nurtured all their lives. Martin grew up on this farm, and always loved the less tame parts of it. So when he graduated from high school, he enrolled in the wildlife management program at Central Lakes College in Brainerd, Minnesota. He met Loretta while working at a wildlife research facility in Illinois—she was doing an internship there while studying wildlife biology at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. By 1980, they found themselves back on the Jaus family farm, which had been homesteaded by Martin’s great-grandfather in 1877.
“I figured, well, that was a waste of my wildlife degree,” quipped Loretta.
While in college, Loretta had dived deep into learning everything she could about wildlife and couldn’t wait to get out in the field and do the kind of work she envisioned her education had prepared her for. She loved ornithology and all the other “ologies,” but wasn’t as thrilled to be required to take classes such as soil science. Loretta also vaguely remembers reading Aldo Leopold’s writings and gleaning something from them about the importance of not letting immediate economic value govern which aspects of the land are retained, and which are tossed.4
“You know, where the first precaution of intelligent tinkering is to save every cog and wheel,” she told me.
Soon after they arrived on the farm, Loretta and Martin decided they were going to produce milk in harmony with nature as much as possible. At the time, the Jauses were not familiar with the idea of practicing organic agriculture on a commercial scale, but the farm was already producing milk with few chemicals after Martin’s father noticed increased abortions in the cattle and linked it to herbicide use. All the couple knew was that chemicals were not good for wildlife, and they wanted to at least attempt to make the operation somewhat friendly to the birds, mammals, and insects they loved to see on the land.
One early connection the couple made between wildlife and good conservation farming is when they planted trees as windbreaks to reduce the rampant wind erosion that can rake across this part of Minnesota’s former prairie. A variety of birds, including flashy species like Baltimore orioles, responded by making the farm their summer home. It turned out the windbreak was good for the wild (birds) and tame (crop fields) aspects of the farm. Maybe this was a sign there was a way to connect their wildlife management background with their agricultural profession?
Thus began a series of changes to the farm that included the addition of diverse crop rotations, implementation of a managed rotational grazing system, and establishment of natural habitat. They eventually certified the land organic in 1990, and after hearing about an organic market for milk, got the same designation for their cow herd in 1994 (they now sell to Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative based in La Farge, Wisconsin). The first few decades on the farm were full of trial and error. Some things, like monitoring the impacts of their practices on bird life, came easily to the trained wildlife biologists. Others, like building a diverse crop rotation without the help of chemicals, involved a steeper learning curve.
Ironically, Loretta didn’t really get Leopold’s concepts until she and Martin were deep into the transition of the farm to organic. She also started to appreciate the soil science she had been forced to study.
“I now understand the art of intelligent tinkering and not tinkering so intelligently,” she told me during one of my visits to the farm, adding that there is no more apt place to apply such a concept than the world beneath our feet. “I began to understand the soil is where everything starts. I was now managing subterranean wildlife.”
The Jauses have made use of government conservation programs to help alleviate the cost of planting trees and turning those eleven acres back into a marsh, but in general they do not get paid directly by the marketplace for establishing natural habitat on their farm. Nevertheless, they’re convinced such ecologically based tweaks here and there benefit the farm’s overall economic health. The Jauses’ five miles of shelterbelts provide wildlife habitat, but also shelter their cows and prevent soil erosion on their crop fields. They’ve planted native warm-season prairie grasses in their pastures, which provide habitat for beneficial insects and help build soil. These plants also provide the kind of diversity that can help get their grazing areas through the “summer slump” that afflicts non-native, cool-season grasses. And since they are certified organic, there are no chemicals to kill off all the insects, birds, and other wildlife that can keep pest species in check. For example, the tree swallows that thrive on their pastures help control flies and other bugs.
“The more diverse the plant and animal species, the more stable, including stability for the farm,” Loretta said.
They also have in place a crop rotation system that not only protects wildlife but is good for all the subsurface critters that help make good soil. The Jauses see row crops such as corn as soil depleters; small grains such as oats as relatively soil neutral; and grasses, hay, and other perennial forages as soil builders.
“So with our crop rotation overall we try to be soil neutral—some years we deplete, some years we build up,” Martin explained. “We’ve done a lot of little things. Somehow it’s all come together.”
Sometimes those little things can produce big results.
A Message from the Underground
In 1989, west-central Minnesota was in the last year of a four-year drought. One of the results was a grasshopper invasion that could have come straight out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. One of the Jauses’ neighbors had only skeletal stems and leaf veins left on his soybean plants after the insects ratchet-jawed their way through the field. When Martin and Loretta would walk into their house, fearless grasshoppers would be clinging to them while others would be creeping around the windows and doorframes in a nightmarish horde. Insecticide sprayers worked on an emergency basis day after day to save the remaining crops in the neighborhood.
The timing of the outbreak was particularly bad for small grains such as oats, which are crucial to the Jaus rotation. These plants had just started to head out, producing a succulent banquet for the voracious hoppers. After swarms passed, some small grains fields looked like they had been run through with a sickle mower. Loretta and Martin dreaded even going to the part of the farm where they had their small grains planted. But they steeled themselves for a visit, figuring that at least they could use the leftover stubble for straw.
“I still remember rounding a bend in the road and it was ragged around the edges but the rest of the field was harvestable,” Loretta recalled. “We were just dumbfounded. We had no idea why that was when right across a grass buffer strip there was a neighbor’s field that was pretty much decimated.”
She and Martin did some ecological detective work and concluded that because their farm had more biodiversity, the grasshoppers had gone for the easier pickings in their neighbors’ less varied fields. Pests love it when they happen upon one big monocultural expanse of real estate, making it possible to feed continuously without disruption. Just think what would happen if each portion of your meal was located in a different room in the house, rather than on one table. A landscape broken up into different species of crops and interspersed with perennial vegetation such as grass and trees simply makes for a more frustrating suppertime. The Jauses also wondered if maybe the grasshoppers had found something in the eleven-acre marsh that was more to their liking and were simply drawn away from their grain fields by that. The experience left them feeling positive about their decision to make biodiversity a cornerstone of their operation.
But five years later the farmers learned that the answer to this mystery had deeper roots, so to speak, than they could ever imagine. While Loretta was telling the “grasshopper story” during a bus tour of the farm, a veterinarian who works with organic farmers interjected to explain what really happened. It turns out diversity had saved their fields: all those rotations and other soil-building measures had cooked up such a complex, healthy biome that their fields produced grains extremely high in sugars. Sugar is a critical ingredient in making intoxicating beverages—I remember an uncle of mine talking about how back in the day he mounted heavy-duty shock absorbers on the back of his coupe so he could make money hauling lots of sugar for moonshiners. When the grasshoppers began feeding on the Jauses’ plants, the sugars metabolized into alcohol, which proved fatal, or at least “discouraging” for the suddenly drunken invertebrates.
“Don’t feel too bad about it—they died happy,” Loretta recalled the veterinarian telling her and Martin.
It’s a funny story to tell over a beer or coffee. But it was also an important lesson for the always observant Martin and Loretta. Don’t always assume your first guess is correct and, frankly, you aren’t always going to understand the nuanced connections between a farm’s agronomic and ecological systems.
“It was definitely an epiphany for us,” Loretta told me. “This particular example just really inspired us and set us on a new course of thinking and respect. We don’t always understand why things work the way they do, but we have faith.” In a sense, it’s another way of saying the first lesson of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. You must accept that sometimes the land has answers to questions you haven’t even asked.
The soil-friendly system has also paid off for the larger community beyond the farm. The Jauses are at the headwaters of the middle branch of the Rush River, which runs some twenty-three miles south before draining into the Minnesota River. The Minnesota, which eventually dumps its load into the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities, is considered one of the most polluted waterways in the Upper Midwest, due in large part to the fact that it flows through an area that’s intensively farmed.5
One day in their kitchen, the Jauses pulled out a pair of photographs taken in the aftermath of a rainstorm and laid them on the table in front of me. One showed water flowing out of a pipe that drains a local field planted to row crops. It was saturated with chocolate-colored sediment and the volume was so great that the pipe’s mouth wasn’t visible. The other photo was of water leaving one of the Jaus pastures. The flow was low and clear. Martin and Loretta are low-key and humble—the opposite of show-offy. But a few years after those pictures were taken, in a don’t-try-this-at-home moment, Martin allowed himself to be photographed drinking water straight out of a tile line draining one of his pastures. To get an idea of just how risky such a stunt is, consider this: in many rural parts of the Midwest, farm wells are so contaminated with nitrogen fertilizer and other agrichemicals that newborn babies must be fed bottled water purchased from town. Some dairies have been forced to drill new wells at significant cost in an attempt to gain access to water that won’t contaminate the milk they produce.6
Working for Wildlife
Profitable milk production, healthy soil, and clean water—these are nice indicators that what the Jauses are doing here is good for them, the land, and the community. But spend any time with Loretta and Martin and it becomes clear that what really provides them the signs of success they’re looking for is the wildlife. They take note of numerous mammals in their fields, including lesser-known species like meadow jumping mice. Even frogs and other amphibians, key indicators of the health of the environment, are making a comeback on their farm. And then there are the birds. The Jauses have seen the number of bird species on the farm increase from around a dozen to over two hundred over the years, including increasingly rare loggerhead shrikes and, most recently, egrets. A research team from South Dakota State University has come out to study the Jaus wetland and was excited to find clay-colored sparrows, which are increasingly hard to find in farm country.
In 2014, bird experts from the Minnesota chapter of the Audubon Society and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, among others, came out on a June day to survey the farm’s avian life. Kristin Hall, the conservation manager for Audubon Minnesota, said at the time a lot of her fellow birders didn’t want to take part in such surveys in agricultural areas, instead opting to go to northern Minnesota, which, with its vast stands of forest, are more “birdy.” In a sense, Hall felt she had drawn the short straw. But she agreed to join Tom Will, a Midwest regional bird ecologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, on a tour of the farm.
“I thought, ‘Well this will be interesting.’ I hadn’t really been birding in agricultural Minnesota, and I really didn’t have any expectations,” recalled Hall.
But she knew something was different when they approached the farm and saw the grass, brushy fence lines, bluebird boxes, and most important, the birds. Birds everywhere. It was a stark contrast to the miles of corn and soybeans she and Will had just driven through. It was as if all the birds in southern Minnesota had gotten the call that an oasis of shelter and food was present on one little dairy farm north of the town of Gibbon. Hall and Will tallied over fifty different species on the Jaus property that day, including a nesting pair of relatively rare long-eared owls.
“I think meeting Martin and Loretta changed my philosophy as to what farming should be, not necessarily what I expected it was,” Hall told me later.
Will was similarly impressed. With the practiced eye of a professional ornithologist, he noted the presence of nesting habitat, insects, and general biodiversity, and knew this farm was no typical agricultural operation. But the feeling he got while spending the day roaming the Jaus land went beyond wildlife biology 101.
“As a scientist I shouldn’t say this, but I think the birds know,” he said. “The birds somehow can tell when someone cares. That day was one of the peak days of my life.”
The birds know that wildly successful farming requires more than a pond here and a hedgerow there; it must be integrated into the daily working aspects of the operation as well. And when it is, not only the wildlife benefit—farmers can have their load lightened considerably as they go about trying to make a living on the land. Martin and Loretta made that clear one fall day when leading me and a group of natural resource professionals representing various agencies—U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the local Soil and Water Conservation District, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service—on a tour of the farm.
They knew their audience, so the couple started the day by showing off the restored wetland-prairie area, their ponds and some wildlife habitat plantings. The agency staffers, some of whom were trained as wildlife biologists, were appropriately impressed and asked questions about what and how many species visited these areas. Then the tour moved to the pastures and crop fields that make up the operation. These areas were the heart of the farm, and served as the setting for an important message the Jauses wanted to convey: there is more than one way to skin the conservation cat.
“Normally when you think of conservation projects, you think of areas like this that are just set aside for wildlife,” Martin said while gesturing in the direction of the eleven acres of prairie and wetland habitat. Then he pointed to the grazing paddock we were now standing next to. “But a well-managed pasture is also a conservation area. There are different ways a farm can help the environment.”
He then walked us over to a hayfield and used a potato fork to turn over a fragrant double handful of black, black soil. It was seething with worms, bugs, roots, and the stuff of life. Given the right circumstances, soil can be so buzzing with life that it can literally generate an electrical current, and this clump was high voltage. The clean smell of actinobacteria—a sign the soil’s organic matter was so healthy it was cranking out its own fertility—wafted up from Martin’s hands. People crowded in to eye it and take in the sweet fragrance like it was vintage wine.
Finally, before the natural resource professionals climbed into their vehicles and headed back to their office cubicles, computers, and spreadsheets, the farmer brought his lesson home by doing what came naturally to him: sharing his joy of living on land that is home to more than a steady income.
“Every day we see something that just amazes us,” he said with a smile. “One day I was making hay and I had four raptors strike mice within twenty feet of the tractor. It was two red-tails, a Swainson’s, and a kestrel. A lot of people don’t get to see that.”