7

Wrapping Around the Wrinkles

Expanding the Land’s Potential by Recognizing Its Limitations

We could hear it draining from here,” Marge Warthesen told me while sitting in her and her husband Jack’s sunny farm kitchen one winter day. The sound they were hearing was a reminder of the vulnerability of the landscape they make a living on. What was draining was a pond just down the hill; it turned out a sinkhole had suddenly materialized beneath it, allowing the region’s Swiss-cheese geology, called karst, to reclaim all that surface water in a matter of minutes. A plastic liner was put over the opening the sinkhole had created, and a bulldozer was brought in to excavate soil beneath the pond’s dam so it could be used to cover the liner. Jack estimated that as much as ten feet of rich topsoil—topsoil that used to be higher up the slope—was dug up by the bulldozer. This represented decades of land abuse.

He concluded the story with a quip from the bulldozer operator: “Too bad horses can’t tip over.” In other words, the damage to the land started almost as soon as we hitched draft animals to plows.

The Warthesen farm sits astride a ridge overlooking West Indian Creek, a tributary of the Zumbro River in southeastern Minnesota. From the point where the creek drains into the Zumbro, the larger waterway flows another dozen miles before draining into the Mississippi River. The Warthesen farm is part of the Driftless Area, a series of bluffs, deep valleys, and hills clustered around where the Mississippi touches on southeastern Minnesota, as well as parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois. This landscape escaped the leveling effects of the Pleistocene glaciers, so it’s dominated by bluffs and narrow valleys. Such a wrinkled effect is beautiful to look at and makes for more surface area per square mile, but it’s tough to get around on. Walking some of these sidehills alone is a major undertaking and driving a tractor can be downright dangerous—roll-overs and collapsing sinkholes are all too common. As conservation biologist and historian Curt Meine writes when describing the Driftless: “The corrugated topography does not lend itself to ever-expanding economies of scale.”¹ As a result, mega-sized, monocultural agriculture has not gained a widespread foothold in this region.

In fact, when farmers tried a little too hard to bend the region to their desire for large, uniform fields of row crops, it rebelled, leading to horrific erosion in the early part of the twentieth century.² Just a few miles from the Warthesen farm in the Whitewater River Valley is a small country cemetery, pretty much all that’s left of the town of Beaver, an infamous footnote in soil conservation history. The town was founded in the mid-1850s, and after the surrounding hillsides were stripped of their trees and grass and planted to crops, the Whitewater River became uncontrollable due to all the runoff that resulted. One year alone, the town was swamped more than two dozen times by waters carrying soils loosened from the surrounding hills. Basements were filled with muck and bridges were raised three times in twenty-five years to keep ahead of growing piles of sediment. Finally, less than a century after Beaver’s first house was built, the flooding, silt, and mudslides had won—the community was abandoned, and it became known as the “Buried Town of Beaver.” Since then, the surrounding hillsides have been replanted with trees and much of the area is in public lands—a state forest, park, and wildlife management area are adjacent to the former Beaver town site.³

Given that history, it’s no surprise Minnesota’s first Soil and Water Conservation District was established in the Whitewater watershed as a way to promote more sustainable land use. In fact, on a wider basis, the region’s unforgiving geography prompted the creation of the nation’s first comprehensive watershed project. This took place in Coon Valley, which lies in Wisconsin across the Mississippi and south of the Warthesens. Aldo Leopold, along with teams of other University of Wisconsin experts and various government agency personnel, worked with farmers in Coon Valley during the 1930s, helping bring back the kind of diversified agriculture that was more amendable to the realities of the landscape.⁴ In short, farmers in areas like Coon Valley and the Whitewater watershed learned to recognize and respect the Driftless Area’s limitations, as well as their own.

Warp and Woof

To pass by a seemingly lifeless stand of grass or trees with Art “Tex” Hawkins is to gain an appreciation for how little one actually sees, even when looking. “It’s just bird heaven,” Hawkins said excitedly one summer afternoon as he and I, along with Marge and Jack, sat in a van. We had stopped next to a brushy fenceline on the Warthesen farm. A thirty-five-head herd of beef cows was grazing on the other side of the fence. Behind us was corn and hay. The living field border extended both ways and followed the contour of the ridge. Down the hill below the grazing cattle was a pond and beyond that, a thick stand of hardwoods that blocked the view of West Indian Creek.

I had invited Hawkins to the Warthesens’ land on a kind of agro-ecological tour to get a set of professional eyes on what appeared to me a good example of a farm that had accepted the limitations of making a living in a landscape that is far from a silent sufferer. Natural resource experts and agronomists have told me that one of the problems with the deep, rich soils that lend themselves to intensive row cropping in flatter parts of the Midwest is that they tend to absorb punishment without showing any outward signs of suffering. That’s why the issue of sick soil has caught so many farmers and agricultural scientists by surprise in recent years.

This summer day was significant not only for what was being observed on the Warthesen farm but for who was doing the observing. At first blush, it may seem odd that someone like Hawkins appreciates the benefits that privately held land can contribute to ecological health. For several decades, his employer was the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is known for, among other things, managing federally owned wildlife refuges across the country. Hawkins was a watershed biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Upper Mississippi region, and after retiring a few years ago he helped launch a sustainability initiative at Winona State University in Minnesota. Like a growing group of natural resource professionals, Hawkins has learned that refuges do not have impenetrable walls around them. For example, runoff from farms in eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin is having negative impacts on water quality in the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, a 261-mile stretch of marsh, floodplain forests, and grasslands that begins a few miles from the Warthesen farm.⁵

I first met Hawkins in the early 1990s while following him and a group of farmers through a ridge-top dairy pasture on a midsummer day. It was in the capacity of “bird expert” that he found himself for a time taking part in a multidisciplinary initiative that brought farmers, scientists, and natural resource professionals together as a “Monitoring Team.” The Monitoring Team’s goal was to develop handy methods for gauging the sustainability of certain farming systems. Thanks in large part to Hawkins, one of the most effective and popular gauges of success adopted by the Monitoring Team farmers involved noting the numbers and diversity of grassland songbirds present in their fields. That’s a big deal, considering that monocultural agriculture’s hunger for perennial habitat has had major negative impacts on grassland-dependent species such as meadowlarks, dickcissels, and bobolinks, to name a few.⁶ Tex is the kind of guy who isn’t afraid to contort his mouth into various shapes in order to imitate birdcalls in front of a bunch of cattle producers. Over the years, I’ve had numerous opportunities to see him lead tours of farms and never fail to be amazed at how he can get a bunch of dairy and beef farmers to suddenly sound like members of the Audubon Society. Once the Monitoring Team farmers took notice of grassland songbird species like bobolinks or meadowlarks, they, in turn, set to figuring out what impacts their production systems were having on nesting success of these birds.⁷

I was impressed with how Hawkins had successfully utilized bird monitoring as the linchpin in a process that led to a group of farms becoming more wildly successful. Perhaps his ability to work with farmers should come as no surprise. Hawkins’ late father, Art Sr., was one of Leopold’s original graduate students, and, similar to what was done in Coon Creek, worked with farmers in south-central Wisconsin to help renew land and wildlife habitat that had been damaged by decades of highly erosive farming. While working in the area, Art Sr. fell in love with and eventually married a farmer’s daughter, Betty. So Tex has long believed strongly that working farms can produce healthy habitat. During many decades of working in rural areas both here and abroad, he has been impressed by operations that are able to draw ecological services from a working landscape. Tex is a particularly big believer in the idea that farms can create an ecological wholeness via what Leopold called, “a certain pepper-and-salt pattern in the warp and woof of the land use fabric.”⁸

The Warthesens toughed it out through the agricultural financial crisis of the 1980s, raised four children on the land, and, in general, are proving one can be financially successful while accommodating a little pepper-and-salt in a farm’s management menu. I thought their farm would be a good place to get Hawkins’ professional assessment of how successful Marge and Jack had been at pretty much letting the land have the final say in terms of how intensely it was managed. Near the abandoned town of Beaver, that philosophy has been put into practice by giving the land back to nature in the form of publicly owned preserves. But farmers like the Warthesens are proving that letting the landscape call the shots doesn’t always mean abandoning productive agriculture. In this case, it requires allowing your management style to follow the contours, twists, and turns of the geography—wrapping yourself around the wrinkles, so to speak.

Marge and Jack’s farm has always given me the sense of an operation that tucks a lot of ecological efficiency into a tight space—a little bit like the impressive amount of biodiversity that’s hidden away in the crooks and crannies of the Driftless Area itself. The home farm is 160 acres (across the road is another 160 acres of family land that the Warthesens farm), but one friend describes it as the “biggest little 160 acres he’s ever seen.” A drive around the perimeter of the land shows why: the undulating landscape, combined with the diversity of plants, gives visitors the sense that they are entering a different parcel every hundred yards or so. Drive past the cornfield and over a hump in the land, and suddenly there’s seven acres of native prairie restored on Conservation Reserve Program ground. Take a walk past a stand of timber and it quickly gives way to a hayfield or a small slough.

While returning to the farmstead from the fields and forests, one gets a grand view of the Warthesens’ 3.8 acres of vegetable gardens, which raise enough produce for two local farmers’ markets. For several years the gardens also provided produce for a couple dozen local families who belonged to the Many Hands Farm Community Supported Agriculture enterprise Marge operated. She’s quick to point out that the garden enterprise has not only produced vegetables, but also its share of intern farmers, some of whom went on to launch their own agricultural operations. Besides beef cattle, the Warthesens also raise lamb, eggs, and poultry for direct sale to consumers. Of the 160 acres, about forty is timber, thirty is pasture, and ten is wetland/wildlife habitat. The rest is crop fields and vegetable gardens.

And the Warthesen farm is virtually one big hillside. Once, Jack showed me a map of the farm and I was struck at how it was basically all one series of contours, with each crescent-shaped field ending in a dead end. It was like a soil conservation textbook illustration of what a contoured farm should look like. The map was tattooed here and there with the initials HEL—Highly Erodible Land—a U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service designation for acres that are so steep that they will lose soil even when row-cropped using a well-managed system. “I’m constantly turning around,” Jack said of a typical day of field work on the tractor.

Such a layout makes for plenty of odd corners that don’t lend themselves to modern, large-scale row-cropping. The Warthesens’ method of managing the land is a combination of proactivity and going with the flow. For example, one crop field in a triangle-shaped area was difficult to turn field equipment around in, so they used USDA Environmental Quality Incentives Program money to convert it to a rotational grazing paddock for their beef cattle, allowing the feed to be walked out of there in a bovine’s belly; four hooves are much nimbler than a lumbering combine.

Even when it doesn’t make sense to crop those awkwardly shaped sloughs and corners, most midwestern farms tend to clear them out anyway out of a sense of giving the place a cleaner look. But the presence of the living borders, as well as the timber, sloughs, and other “wild” corners on the Warthesen farm, were not there as a result of neglect, an unwillingness to take the time and effort to “beautify” the farm. Quite the opposite.

Since they started farming this land, the Warthesens have made a conscious effort to combine food production with stewardship. It’s been a lot of hard work. Jack grew up across the road from this farm, and remembers as a kid when there were ravines so deep a D6 Caterpillar could work in their bottoms without being seen from ground level. “In places, it was just a huge bunch of ditches,” recalled Jack. “You couldn’t get across them. You could barely walk across them.”

Keeping soil on their hillsides and out of West Indian Creek drives a lot of the Warthesens’ farming decisions. Over the years, they’ve broken up large over-grazed pastures and replaced them with a series of smaller ones that are managed using rotational grazing, which helps maintain the health of deep-rooted, soil-friendly grasses while recycling manure. The Warthesens have also replaced contiguous crop fields with contour-hugging strips consisting of diverse plantings of hay, small grains, soybeans, and corn.

The farm utilizes a variety of government initiatives. Besides the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, Marge and Jack have used the federal Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to get paid a “rental fee” for keeping their most erosive acres blanketed in perennial vegetation. In addition, trees were planted and managed through a program run by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources called the Forest Stewardship Program. At one time the Warthesens were also enrolled in the Conservation Stewardship Program, a USDA initiative that paid them for, among other things, putting in food plots for wildlife, reducing fertilizer use, keeping the land in contours, and not applying manure to frozen ground. Their pastures are enrolled in the Grassland Reserve Program, which pays them to keep it in grass. “It’s a good program because the right person, or I should say wrong person, would plow up that hillside,” said Jack.

The Eyes of an Ecologist

I’ve been on enough farms to recognize when basic conservation has been set in place. But Tex Hawkins provided a way to go beyond the surface level, so to speak, and sneak a deeper peek into the Warthesens’ wildly successful strategies. For example, during our tour the wildlife biologist commented on a shrubby area that was full of game trails. It turned out a boulder was nestled in there somewhere, and Jack grew tired of moving cropping equipment around it, so he let it go back to nature. Marge drove the van close to the tree line above West Indian Creek. Jack pointed out a wildlife planting they established in the early 1990s—maple, black cherry, and pines were thriving. Trees are important to the Warthesen family. When Marge and Jack built a new house on the farm, they included half-a-dozen kinds of wood—oak, cherry, ash, etc.—harvested from the farm, and its dining area features a table made by Jack’s father of seven types of wood found on the farm. When planting trees, Jack followed the guidelines in Landscaping for Wildlife, a DNR booklet.

Marge parked on a small rise that turned out to be a check dam; in amongst a thick stand of trees and cattails was standing water. Indiangrass above the catchment provided deep-rooted soil protection. Below the dam, a ravine covered with trees plunged sharply toward West Indian Creek, just a quarter-mile downhill. The waterway is a premier trout stream, and the DNR has spent a lot of tax money on it to improve fish habitat.

“This would have delivered a lot of sediment down into the stream,” said Hawkins of the ravine. “Now look how it’s buffered.”

Up the hill was seven acres of CRP set-aside ground that, with the assistance of DNR funds, the Warthesens had planted to oak, ash, and walnut, among other species. Toward the end of the tour, Marge parked the van next to a cornfield, got out, and led the way through a thick stand of hardwoods as a hidden warbling vireo sang its heart out. “They don’t even take a breath all summer—sing, sing, sing,” said Hawkins with a laugh.

Throughout the entire tour with Hawkins, the Warthesens proudly described how they see bluebirds, tree swallows, meadowlarks, dickcissels, and bobolinks along their fence lines as well as in the pastures. At one point, as if on cue, three adult turkeys emerged from a cornfield a couple hundred yards away on a sidehill and strolled over a hayfield. One of the turkeys was unusually light-colored, almost blond or golden in the July sun.

“God, we got meadowlarks!” Jack exclaimed at one point. They credit rotational grazing with providing good, diverse habitat for these types of grassland birds; research on other midwestern farms backs up this belief.⁹ One particularly flashy resident that benefits from the Warthesens’ willingness to resist removing a dead tree here and there is the red-headed woodpecker. These birds used to be quite common in the Midwest, where they’d chisel out their homes in dead branches, which they often found in brushy fencerows along pastures. But clean farming has little patience for live trees, let alone dead ones, and North American red-headed woodpecker populations have declined 70 percent since the 1960s.¹⁰ The Warthesens have participated in an Audubon Society initiative called the Red-headed Woodpecker Recovery Program by purposely leaving dead snags and other trees up so the woodpeckers have cavities to nest in. And through the Bluebird Recovery Program, another Audubon initiative, they’ve mounted nesting boxes on fences.

Hawkins was impressed with how all these separate efforts had been linked to create a contiguous landscape.

“The thing about the field borders and pastures is that they’re all connected together with these wonderful fences that are woven together with all these different species of crawling vine as well as low shrubs,” he said at one point. “You’ve got these long strips—they’re very narrow, but they’re excellent habitat for catbirds, and a lot of other fruit and seed-eating birds like to perch along the fence line. I like the connectivity of the whole situation.”

But Marge and Jack’s concern for the land goes beneath the surface and beyond their fence lines as well. Next to some old barbed wire, Marge pointed out a small sinkhole, a sign of the karst geology that is a major conduit for contaminants such as agrichemicals, manure, and human sewage to make their way from the surface down to groundwater. That’s one reason why rural wells in this part of the state are routinely so contaminated that the water they produce isn’t safe for drinking. One estimate is that 20 percent or more of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to farm fields doesn’t stay to feed the crop, but rather escapes into the environment. As a result, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency water sampling shows that 70 percent of nitrogen in Minnesota streams is coming from crop fields.¹¹

A few yards beyond the sinkhole, Marge stood on the lip of a cliff. Some two hundred feet below was Highway 4, and on the other side of that was an oxbow-kinked West Indian Creek. A neighbor had planted corn in the bend of the river right up to the bank. It was a beautiful view, but also a reminder that no farm is an ecological island. All the efforts the Warthesens are making to improve soil and water quality, as well as wildlife habitat, are dwarfed by landscape-level impacts elsewhere in the watershed.

“There’s not much of a buffer strip around that creek where the corn is and in the spring the erosion and the falling off of that field is just atrocious, just atrocious,” said Marge as she gazed at the bottomland. “It doesn’t take much rain to create havoc down on the Zumbro anymore.”

Downstream the Zumbro River empties its contents into the Mississippi, right near the top of the Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge. “And at the mouth of the Zumbro you’ll see the results—a huge mud plume coming out,” said Hawkins. “People are losing a lot of ag ground on the bottoms too, because the river’s going crazy and ripping out the banks.”

Land isn’t eroding because farmers want it to. The reality is that for the Warthesens and their neighbors to stay on the land, they have to make a viable living from it. Rotational grazing can be a low-cost, profitable way to raise livestock. And the recent demand for locally produced foods has been good for the family’s vegetable business. But the fact remains that every acre of land planted to trees or grass is an acre not producing corn or some other cash commodity that is easy to market in today’s economy, and which is supported by government farm programs. For decades after the harsh conservation lessons of the 1930s, many of those odd corners on farms that were too hilly, wet or otherwise “marginal” to produce a profitable crop on were often safe from the plow—farmers simply avoided them or used them for grazing. But changes over the past decade or so in the federal crop insurance program have now taken much of the economic risk out of farming these rough acres, eliminating an important safeguard for even the smallest smatterings of rural habitat.¹² It turns out government policy does not recognize the limitations of the land.

USDA conservation programs can help relieve the burden of establishing a land-friendly farming system like managed rotational grazing, and the Warthesens have taken advantage of programs that support tree and habitat establishment. But on this summer day, the shadow of farm economics and policy loomed large over their “non-productive” land. At one point, the Warthesens were receiving seventy-eighty dollars an acre annually for renting their CRP ground to the government. A neighbor with land equally as steep as theirs had received over double that amount of cash rent from a crop farmer. When government policy and grain markets determine the value of land, it has repercussions downstream. What goes on in the halls of Congress and at the Chicago Board of Trade has just as much impact on that wildlife refuge as any dam or factory pollution event directly on the river.

Hawkins, mindful that what happens up on this ridge has profound impacts on the river below, noted that one way to make stewardship pay would be through “ecosystem service payments” that would reward farmers for providing such public goods as cleaner water in the watershed. He said such a system has been used in Costa Rica, where he has assisted on conservation projects off and on over the past several decades. “They have a number of different categories of ecosystem service payments that the landowners get,” he said. “Costa Rican farmers can receive annual payments to help maintain forest cover, financed in part through European carbon offsets, and this helps sustain clean local drinking water sources, as well as the songbirds that spend their winters in the tropics and raise their young each summer right there on the farm.”

“Well, keeping the creek clean would be a public service,” said Marge as we climbed back into the van.

It’s easy to get down about public policy and market situations that make vulnerable even the least “farmable” parts of that pepper-and-salt landscape. That’s why it’s important to spend time on a place like the Warthesen farm, where it’s clear the siren call of subsidies and even international grain markets falls on deaf ears. The political and economic realities of modern agriculture make being a good steward difficult, but farmers like the Warthesens are highly motivated to work around such barriers. They go to this extra trouble because nurturing the farm’s natural habitat is ingrained in their philosophical approach to life and work.

Jack is an avid outdoorsman, the type that finds benefits even in having hollow trees on the place because they provide homes for raccoons, and thus plenty of hunts for hounds. “I’ve loved wildlife ever since I was little,” he told me. A few years ago he wrote a letter to the editor of the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, a DNR magazine, reminding readers that we can do both: farm and support wildlife. One sure sign that the land is truly one with the Warthesens’ cultural DNA is the way it sneaks its way into even their small talk. Whether telling a story about coon hunting (a jumper mule used for chasing hounds going down basement stairs as part of a poker bet), ice fishing (a guy getting caught on his own line as he scrambles to turn in a giant carp to win a TV), or deer hunting (a black bear shambling by a tree stand), Jack punctuates the story with “Holy balls!” and a deep laugh. His colorful stories are fueled by the landscape he lives and works on.

Marge’s love of the land comes from growing up on a farm ten miles north of Rochester, Minnesota. “I always knew even when I was little I was going to farm. I’d rather be poor on a farm than live in the city,” she told me one day while serving up chili made from local ingredients at the kitchen table.

Such an attitude is the difference between living on the land, and simply making a living from it. When a farm is allowed to become a patchwork quilt of biodiversity, it’s simply a more interesting place to spend your days—there’s more to it than the county accessor’s acreage valuations show. And it doesn’t hurt when someone else appreciative of ecological agrarianism comes along once in a while and confirms that all those seemingly unrelated spots of shaggy wildness add up to one smooth unified whole that benefits the wider community.