9

Which Came First, the Farmer or the Ecologist?

The New Agrarians and Their Environmental Roots

When Peter Allen was pursuing a doctorate in restoration ecology at the University of Wisconsin, his view of the natural world was relatively straightforward: the best way to build a healthy ecosystem was to keep humans out of the picture. Before starting the PhD, Allen had this worldview reinforced while obtaining a master’s degree from UW in conservation biology and sustainable development and before that an undergraduate degree in environmental science from Indiana University. Allen was a vegetarian at the time, and the role of livestock in devastating the land played a particularly large role in his academic-based ecological worldview.

“I was coming from a traditional ecological restoration ecology perspective of humans are kind of bad on the landscape and we’re trying to restore some sort of native natural balance,” Allen told me on a beastly hot summer day. As he said this, we were standing on the upper slopes of a steep hillside overlooking southwestern Wisconsin’s Kickapoo River Valley. We had just hiked past his small herd of beef cattle grazing on the lower parts of the hill. Before that, we had toured other pastures, as well as a restored prairie habitat on his farm, while riding around in a solar-powered Polaris Ranger. Allen had stopped periodically to point out the other livestock he and his wife Maureen were raising on this farm—hogs, sheep, and goats—and which they sold to consumers looking for naturally raised meat.

To say Allen had modified his view of how to have a positive impact on the landscape is an understatement.

It turns out a surprising number of people with academic and professional backgrounds in natural resources fields are returning to the land as farmers, rather than as wildlife refuge managers, conservation officers, or ecological scientists. No official numbers are available, but interviews I’ve conducted over the past few decades show getting an agronomy or ag business degree from a land grant university—the traditional academic-based pathway into production agriculture—no longer monopolizes the way young people enter farming. A striking number of people are going into food production after receiving training and working in the fields of environmental science, wildlife biology, ecological restoration, and other areas related to protecting and studying the environment. These are people who went into the field set on the belief that by working for a natural resource agency or an environmental nonprofit, they could help leave the land better than they found it. But somewhere along the way, they took an off-ramp and dived into a profession many environmentalists see as the antithesis to a healthy ecosystem: agriculture. When I ask them why, the answer is invariably a variation on a theme: “I felt I could have a bigger impact on the ecological health of the land through farming.”

They aren’t buying into the narrative that farming and a healthy ecosystem don’t mix. In fact, as a result of advances in sustainable agriculture management and innovations related to everything from grass-based livestock production to cropping systems that build soil health, there’s a new generation of ecological agrarians who feel producing food and cultivating a healthy natural landscape go hand-in-hand. This is particularly true in a place like the Midwest, a region of the country where private acres in agricultural production is the dominant land use. National parks, wildlife refuges, and other publicly owned natural areas are few and far between. Want to have a positive impact on your eco-zone? Then figure out how to inject a little wildness into food production.

This may come as a surprise to other environmentalists and even the average citizen who reads all the dire agro-environmental headlines out there, but it’s a comment on just how far sustainable agriculture has come. And from what I’ve witnessed, these are no back-to-the-land, living-as-peasants fantasies these people are acting out. They are working to prove that wildly successful farming can be economically viable.

So, which came first, the farmer or the ecologist? As the farmers featured in this chapter are proving, that may be a moot point. Once they get established on the land, they are proving that the same skills that make them good ecologists are useful in generating a living on the land. As one of these farmers, Bryan Simon, told me, that shouldn’t be such a surprise.

“Ecology is all about seeing the big picture and not focusing on only one aspect,” he said. “Agriculturalists that are able to look beyond simply the number of bushels produced per acre and take a more holistic approach will be more successful and resilient in the long run.”

Redefining Agriculture

As we stood on that Wisconsin hillside, watching a curtain of rain march down the Kickapoo Valley, Peter Allen ticked off all the amenities that drew him to this 220-acre piece of ground. There is remnant savanna habitat, which, with its mix of oak trees and grasslands, is one of rarest natural habitats left in the Midwest. And there are also two springs and a wetland, which provide water for the farm as well as wildlife. Then there are the remnant native plants growing in the hillside pastures—as we zigzagged up the hill Allen pointed out bee balm, goldenrod, and black-eyed Susan.

“It’s got all the various ecotypes of the Driftless Area represented in this one place,” Allen told me excitedly, sounding like someone who had spent years studying ecology—which he had.

But then he looked down at what at first glance seemed to be the least interesting part of this farm, and got really animated. Below us, tucked into a pocket between the hillside and a trout stream called Camp Creek, was something all too common in the rest of the Midwest: a forty-acre field of soybeans. It looked flat from our perspective, but Allen explained that when heavy rains hit the farm, a surprising amount of the field’s soil washes into the stream. Any contaminants along for the ride in that runoff eventually make their way to the Kickapoo, which connects to the Wisconsin River and eventually the Mississippi.

This domesticated, monocultural reminder of industrial agriculture’s dominance of the landscape stands out in stark contrast to the naturalness of the rest of Allen’s ecological oasis, which he calls Mastodon Valley Farm. And he is thrilled to have the field there. It will provide him a prime opportunity to put into practice years of classroom training, reading, research, and, most recently, on-the-ground experiments. He can’t wait to begin the process of converting the field to prairie, and eventually making it part of the rotational grazing system he has set up for the livestock being produced here.

Allen’s change of heart on how restoration ecology can be executed on the midwestern landscape is traced to some of what he studied while in college. Specifically, he had researched the ecology and history of the oak savanna ecosystem, which consists of hardwood trees like oaks interspersed with tallgrass prairies (bur oaks do particularly well in savannas, since their thick bark protects them from the effects of fire). In effect, oak savannas are the transition between prairie and the woodland, so you have the best of both worlds. These are highly diverse habitats because of this mix of trees and grasslands. One estimate is that by the time Europeans arrived, roughly fifty million acres of oak savanna habitat existed in a band stretching along the eastern edge of the Great Plains from Texas into southern Canada. There were also scatterings of this habitat in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. Most of the oak savanna habitat was wiped out to make way for farming in the latter half of the nineteenth century. At best, thirty thousand acres of the habitat remains in the Midwest today, with each parcel amounting to less than one hundred acres.¹ However, because of the difficulty of row-cropping some of the steeper hillsides that make up regions like the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa, and extreme northwestern Illinois, this region has prime pockets of oak savanna habitat remaining. In fact, scientists believe this region has the largest area of what they call “restorable” oak savanna.²

What Allen came to realize was that oak savannas are not a climax community—what, when left to its own devices, nature will aspire to. When the first European settlers arrived in regions like the Driftless, what they should have found was closed-canopy forests. But journals made repeated references to oak savannas, a habitat reliant on intervention.

“If you leave land alone, it doesn’t just turn into savanna,” said Allen. “It takes quite a bit of active management.”

It’s now commonly believed that Native American societies—with varying degrees of intent—managed these habitats using fire. The result was a habitat rich in herbivores like deer, elk, and bison, and which produced numerous nuts and fruits, including acorns, hazelnuts, prairie crab apples, plums, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, pawpaws, hawthorn haws, gooseberries, and highbush cranberries. In other words, the Native Americans’ management system was helping the land produce more food for human consumption. Just because the first European settlers didn’t recognize what they considered an agricultural landscape—squared off fields with fences and monocrops of grains—didn’t mean it wasn’t being managed to produce human sustenance.

Oak savannas also have the potential to produce lots of wildlife habitat, as well as to sequester greenhouse gases—the trees trap and store carbon for a hundred years or more, until they die, burn, or are cut down. The grasses, if they are managed well, can keep sequestering carbon in a continuing cycle (there is not yet scientific consensus on just how much carbon grasslands can sequester long into the future).

“Grasses and trees are duking it out in this never-ending battle,” said Allen. “And sometimes it’s going to be all grass, and sometimes it’s going to be all trees. Sometimes it will be a mix of both.”

While working on his PhD dissertation he developed a model of a farm patterned on oak savannas—it would integrate a polyculture of tree crops, fruit and nut production, as well as multiple species of livestock that are rotationally grazed. The animals would take the place of fire as a way to maintain open spaces between the trees. Such a management system would require actually removing trees to create that open space, an idea that Allen concedes “freaks out” his environmentalist friends. At about that time, Allen was in a bar talking about this idea with a friend who was into permaculture—a method of food production that relies on perennial species that don’t have to be replanted every year. “He was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s kind of like what Mark Shepard does,’” Allen recalled the friend saying.

Shepard’s New Forest Farm near Viola in southwestern Wisconsin has become a model for integrating, or “stacking,” various enterprises utilizing permaculture plants such as fruit and nut trees. Allen ended up going to New Forest Farm to collect data for a case study and, “All of a sudden this idea for a dissertation wasn’t just an idea in my crazy head—there was an example of it on the ground.”

In 2012, he pitched a tent on New Forest Farm with plans to spend a week. Allen was so struck by Shepard’s use of the agricultural savanna concept that he ended up spending an entire summer there with Maureen, who has a degree in zoology. They extended their stay through the winter by living in a shack on the farm, and Allen convinced some friends to go in on helping to buy six steers. By their second summer on New Forest Farm Peter and Maureen were grazing twenty head of cattle, as well as pigs, sheep, and poultry, among the hazelnuts and other woody species growing there. Allen was hooked. He was also convinced that he didn’t need to get his doctorate to accomplish his goal of using agriculture to restore oak savanna ecosystems. After spending a decade in graduate school, he dropped out six months shy of finishing. He and Maureen began looking for land that had that right mix of natural habitat and cropped land, and in 2014 bought what has become Mastodon Valley Farm, eight miles from New Forest Farm.

Allen’s decision to leave school was opposed by just about everyone he knew, including Shepard. But he felt putting off getting established on the land would cost him precious momentum—he was finished reading about ecological restoration, now was the time to put it into action. If he hadn’t jumped at this chance, “I would probably have a job teaching, talking about starting a farm someday, always talking about starting a farm,” said Allen. “Even when I was in the academy, I was always an outlier. I never quite fit in. Most of the ecologists thought I was crazy, because I’d talk about bringing in goats to manage invasive species, or we should bring cattle in to manage these grasslands. And then the ag people thought I was crazy because I was thinking about diversity and grassland birds and pollinators and these kinds of things.”

When I visited Mastodon Valley Farm, Peter and Maureen were starting to wrap up their third growing season on the land. A lot had happened in a short time. They had built a cabin and were pretty much living off the grid, utilizing solar power and having to drive some eleven miles to utilize an internet connection. The livestock herd that was launched on New Forest Farm had been transferred to rotationally grazed pastures on the Allen place. They also started a meat marketing enterprise to help make their ecological restoration project economically viable. Like many of the ecological agrarians I’ve met, Allen is hoping to get the environmentally conscious consumer to financially support this method of managing the landscape.

“I talked to a guy once and he’s like, ‘Well, I’m not a farmer, I don’t have land. There’s nothing I can do to influence the landscape.’ I said, ‘You influence the landscape three times a day. Every time you put something in your mouth you are influencing a piece of ground,’” Allen recalled.

Mastodon Valley Farm sells its meat utilizing the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model. Consumers in Madison and La Crosse buy a “share” in the farm, which entitles them to a monthly delivery of beef, pork, and lamb. By their third season, Peter and Maureen had about sixty regular customers and were marketing roughly twenty beef cattle, twenty-five hogs, and twenty to twenty-five lambs annually using this model. Allen feels if they could double that amount it would fit their economic needs, but would still not overtax their land base. Around eighty acres of the farm is being grazed and one of their limiting factors is being able to pipe water for livestock to some of the more inaccessible areas. Allen is excited about the recent advances in rotational grazing that make it more possible than ever to manage such a rugged landscape with livestock. Portable electric fencing, solar energizers, and advances in watering systems all help.

Being in the business of producing livestock that are slaughtered for meat is quite a stretch for the former vegetarian, but the more Allen studied ecosystems like oak savannas, the more he realized there’s no such thing as grass without grazing animals, and these days, without an economic incentive to raise those herbivores, there’s no practical reason to have them on the midwestern landscape.

“Yes, Bos taurus is not a native species, but it’s a pretty close mimic,” he said. “It’s a lot better to have the function of herbivores on the landscape, even if they’re not native, than to be insistent on only natives, because it’s a little late for that.”

At one point, Allen showed me specifically what happens when those herbivores are excluded from the land. We examined a five-acre piece that the farmer estimated had been in corn for around 120 years before he planted it to prairie in 2015. He had used funds from a U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service pollinator habitat program to seed the spot with native prairie. The planting was coming along nicely, and once the contract expired, Allen planned on making it one of his livestock grazing paddocks. Why was animal disturbance an important part of this natural habitat’s future? We drove up the hill that dominates the farm to see the answer firsthand.

On the lower portion of the slope, an open pasture had a few trees interspersed—it had been exposed to sheep and cattle by the previous owners over the years. Suddenly, we came to a spot where the pasture seemed to have hit a rock wall. In reality, it was a barbed-wire fence that had kept livestock out of the upper reaches of the hill to maintain “hunting habitat.” The result was a dense stand of mature, 250-year-old oaks, 50-year-old maples, and other hardwoods, but also brushy undergrowth that made it all but impenetrable.

“There’s not a blade of grass in there—I mean it’s bare soil in there,” said Allen, adding that despite the impressive timber growth, the undisturbed woodland was much less diverse than the open mix of pasture and trees below it.

Learning how to manage such a habitat hasn’t been easy. The farmer conceded it has been a big adjustment to take what he had studied in academia and apply it to the land. “There were things I thought I understood from a book, but when you actually see it firsthand, it’s different. I always thought of plant communities as being relatively static year-to-year and being in the same place. I had no idea how dynamic they can be.”

He has adjusted his land management through observation as well as trial and error. Allen has also benefited greatly from the advice of neighboring farmers, who have insights into local weather and soil and plant conditions that a lifetime of university learning could never replicate. His long-term goal is to create a 50/50 mix of grass and tree habitat throughout the farm. Ironically, if one were to look at an aerial photo of his holdings, the conclusion would be that Allen has already accomplished this: it’s pretty much evenly divided between grass and trees. But location is everything when it comes to overall ecosystem health. The problem is, these habitats are clustered together—the trees tend to be on the tops of the hill, and the open areas lower down, where they are more accessible to livestock and cropping.

“We’ve got 50 percent of 100 percent canopy and 50 percent of 100 percent grass. They’re not integrated, they’re segregated,” said Allen. As a result, he’s cutting down trees to open up where it’s solid canopy, and planting trees in the open grassland. If that’s not a recipe for removing all doubt amongst your neighbors that you’ve gone around the bend, then I don’t know what is. But Allen’s point about the segregation of habitat reminds me of what’s happening on a larger scale in the Midwest. We’ve got ecologically healthy spots such as wildlife refuges, national parks, and forest preserves. And then we’ve got the places where we raise food. Satellite images would show that these two kinds of landscapes are highly segregated—they’re two ships passing in the night.

Creating that interspersed habitat means some good old-fashioned grunt work involving chainsaws and brush clearing. In a way, Allen sees himself trying to replicate what the mastodons that used to roam this valley did: removing entire trees and opening up the landscape, creating a mosaic effect that attracts grazers. When one is sweating over the chainsawing of a few maples, elms, and ironwood to let in the sunlight, thinking about the profound impacts megafauna had on the landscape over millennia puts things in perspective.

“I’ve cleared a few acres—I’ve got a hundred to go,” Allen said, his voice trailing off as he laughed. “I turn thirty-four next month—I have plenty of time.”

Signs of Life

“Corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, beans,” is how Brooke Knisley summarized the general landscape of her neighborhood while taking a break from picking beans—the green kind, not soy—on Alternative Roots Farm one evening in late summer. She wasn’t exaggerating: while driving to Brooke and her husband John’s vegetable farm and orchard in southern Minnesota, I negotiated a curve in the road where corn crowded in so closely I felt like I was driving through one of those car-sized holes bored through giant redwoods during a less enlightened time. It gave one a sense of monocultural myopia.

But once I arrived at the Knisleys’ four-acre island of biodiversity, and took a tour of the strip of restored tallgrass prairie that separates their garden and orchard from all those acres of corn, my brain was challenged to take in all the sights, sounds, and smells—it was like plunging from a desert island into the waters of a tropical ocean reef exploding with life. First the sights: wild bergamot, grayhead coneflower, golden alexander, blazing star, anise, black-eyed Susan, goldenrod, and, perhaps the coolest named one of them all, rattlesnake master. “I was hoping so much to get this one to grow,” said John, as he grabbed the bristly edges of the rattlesnake master’s leaves. “It’s the only native yucca plant in Minnesota. It’s cool.” With equal excitement, he pointed out a cup plant, a tropical-looking sunflower-like aster whose leaves, indeed, form cups. Water collects in these natural bowls, which goldfinches often drink from. A red admiral butterfly fluttered by as I examined it.

Then the sounds: the air was an electric cacophony of bees (twelve different species by the Knisleys’ count), wasps, and innumerable other insects, as they droned from flower to flower, completing the sexual dance so key to flora and fauna. As the summer evening wore on, the undulating thrum of cicadas started up. I was reminded of something environmental writer Craig Childs penned after spending two days backpacking in a north-central Iowa cornfield: “I listened and heard nothing, no bird, no click of insect.”³

And finally, the smell: I noted some bees emphatically working over the purple flowers of a mint called anise hyssop. John invited me to take a flower, crush it, and hold it up to my nose. The overwhelming but pleasant aroma of licorice engulfed me immediately.

At first glance, this thirty-foot buffer of fragrant hurly-burliness simply served as a kind of demilitarized zone between the Knisleys’ plot of garden/fruit trees and a strapping stand of their neighbor’s corn. But as my short hike in among the forbs and grasses that made up this prairie made clear, it was more than that—it was a significant link between Alternative Roots Farm’s food production enterprise and the natural environment. And the food produced in the midst of this natural habitat, in turn, was a link between the land and the eaters who purchase the vegetables, fruit, and pork produced here.

“Yeah, it’s fun to see it come to life,” said John, referring to the prairie and the micro-farm itself.

Finding a way to bring the land back to life was the Knisleys’ goal back in 2011 when they moved to the area after getting degrees in environmental-related fields and working for conservation agencies. Brooke and John actually took the same environmental economics class while they were both at Bemidji State University, in northern Minnesota. John got a degree in environmental policy and planning, which he saw as a natural follow-up to his upbringing—he grew up in New Ulm, just twelve miles from Alternative Roots Farm, and spent his youth hunting, fishing, trapping, morel mushroom and ginseng gathering, as well as splitting wood for a wood stove.

Brooke grew up in Eden Prairie, a Twin Cities suburb. She majored in environmental studies at Bemidji State and focused on ecological restoration and invasive species management. She eventually got her degree at the University of California-Santa Cruz, where, perhaps not surprisingly, John proposed to her inside of a giant redwood tree.

Both Brooke and John worked for conservation agencies in the Bemidji area after college. Brooke was with the Natural Resources Conservation Service for a time, and John was on staff with a local Soil and Water Conservation District office. Those jobs, among other things, involved working with farmers to help them to adopt basic conservation measures like wildlife plantings and grassed waterways for erosion control. Through these jobs, the couple garnered insights into what measures and government incentives are available for such practices; it also sparked an interest in getting out on the land and practicing some of this stewardship themselves.

“The entire time you’re trying to incentivize people to do better on the land,” said John of this government agency work. “We were kind of armchair conservationists, and wanted to put it into practice on our own. I mean what would be better than to do it ourselves, and really practicing what we’re preaching and kind of living it?”

But was there a way to do it that could combine their backgrounds in environmental education and outreach with on-the-ground ecological restoration? While living in Bemidji, the Knisleys belonged to a CSA produce operation, and were impressed by the connection the owner/operators of the enterprise had with the eaters who purchased shares in the farm. What if they could use such a connection to raise food in a way that was in sync with nature, and thus help the wider community develop a closer relationship with the land?

In 2011, the Knisleys moved back to the New Ulm area when a job became available for John in a county planning and zoning office, doing environmental education and outreach, among other things. It was a great opportunity, but the reality of moving from Minnesota’s lake country to what amounted to an agri-industrial landscape soon set in.

“It became really evident when we first came down here that like, wow, we live in the breadbasket of the United States, but no one raises anything you can eat,” recalled John. “It’s kind of crazy.”

In fact, finding a farmstead suitable for raising vegetables on was difficult—everything was being sold off in large allotments hundreds or even thousands of acres in size. In many cases, the houses and outbuildings had been bulldozed to make room for more row crops. In fact, the first two farmsteads the couple looked at have since been plowed under. They eventually bought four acres near the small community of Madelia—the parcel had originally been part of a 160-acre farm and it consisted of a house and a few outbuildings. It was basically a blank slate, which was what the couple was looking for.

They soon set about establishing a large garden and planting fruit trees, and converted an old chicken house into a produce-packing shed. During the winter of 2011–12, they took Farm Beginnings, a beginning farmer course offered through the Land Stewardship Project. One requirement of that course is that participants develop a vision for their farm and set long-term goals. Like many young farmers with lots of energy, the Knisleys had big plans for their blank slate, and soon had to pare back their ambitions to fit the reality that at least one of them would be working off the farm full time. Although they may have wavered a bit on the details of just what kind of farming they were going to do, one part of their plans remained deeply rooted.

“The farm as ecosystem—we’ve never really seen any other way than to do it that way,” said Brooke definitively. “It’s always been our goal, to make it as diverse as possible and nurture those different parts—pasture and crop rotation and little pockets of wildlife—wherever we can.” Just as important, she added, their goals center around nurturing people’s connections to the land. “That’s why we chose CSA—we want that direct connection with our customers, and for them to know directly how their food is raised, but also for them to know how it impacts our ecosystem.”

The Knisleys are now raising certified organic vegetables on half-an-acre for a small CSA enterprise and a local farmers’ market. Through the CSA and other share agreements with customers, the farm serves about fifty families. They recently erected a passive solar deep winter greenhouse on the farm so they can offer a winter version of the CSA. The farm markets a little over a dozen pasture-raised hogs a year directly to consumers. The pigs, which graze between fruit trees and at the edges of the garden plots, create the kind of closed-loop nutrient cycle the Knisleys believe is integral to developing a healthy ecosystem.

Perhaps the fastest growing part of the farm business is the fruit enterprise, which consists of fifty varieties—mostly apples, but also plums, apricots, pears, and raspberries. The couple raise the apples on their own place, as well as a small orchard they manage near New Ulm—it had been neglected for a decade but the owner is allowing the Knisleys to manage it as long as they do it organically. They market the fruit through the CSA, as well as at a pair of food co-ops, and have some 350 apple trees on their home place that are set to begin producing in the next few years. The couple recently purchased an acre of land adjacent to the farm; they hope to plant more fruit trees on it and use a Quonset hut that’s on the property to process fruit.

After growing quickly the first few years, Brooke and John, who are in their midthirties, decided to level out their size and customer base, giving them a chance to concentrate on managing the land as an ecosystem. The farm currently may not generate enough profit to sustain both of them, but the Knisleys are proud of the fact that they don’t subsidize their agricultural enterprises with outside income—it’s self-sustaining.

The farmers could expand their market by selling into the Twin Cities region, but serving their local community is important to them. “It’s our local community that’s supporting us and what we’re doing and we need to have reciprocity and do the same for them and provide them with access to good food,” said John.

And that means access to a feeling that by supporting Alternative Roots Farm, eaters are also supporting a more sustainable way of treating the land. After a while, “dinosaur kale is dinosaur kale,” as John put it. But they hear from customers, some of them natural resource professionals, about how they like what they are doing with establishing and maintaining natural habitat in and around their food-producing areas.

Differentiating Alternative Roots kale or apples from other produce available at the farmers’ market or grocery store means telling a story about how that food is the product of agro-ecological integration. “So, they know when they get that apple, it’s not just an apple that came from a tree. The pigs were there, and they’re helping control all the pests and all that. It’s all part of a system,” said John.

As he said this, we were looking at the various pig pastures bordering the edges of the farm. In one, hogs were browsing a wide variety of forages: crimson clover, white clover, red clover, and alfalfa. Swine, with their propensity to root, can be hard on a pasture. But what was striking was that the Knisley pastures that had pigs in them just a few weeks before were almost completely recovered. Lush green growth blanketed the ground between rows of fruit trees—pigs had been rotationally grazed there just that spring.

“We have a tight system,” said Brooke, adding that through their newsletter and website, they extend environmental education to the food itself and the stewardship of people’s own bodies through healthy eating. Off the farm, John is able to use his relationship with the land at his job in the county’s planning and zoning office. He does everything from coordinate recycling and inspect septic systems, to administer wetlands regulations and conduct education programs for school children. “When I talk to kids I talk about soil and geology and I throw in pollinators and tell them it has to do with water planning,” John, who is a Master Naturalist, said with a conspiratorial laugh. He’s also excited to be serving on a local soil health team, which consists of a couple of dozen area row-crop farmers who are trying out soil-friendly practices such as cover cropping and minimum tillage.

Such education goes both ways: the Knisleys enjoy working with researchers so they can learn more about the impacts of their practices and ways of monitoring them. The University of Minnesota Plant Pathology Department is doing a native mycorrhizae fungi trial at the farm. Their deep winter greenhouse is also part of a state research initiative on season extension.

“Good nerdy fun,” said Brooke with a laugh.

At one point, she and John showed off a research initiative that the untrained eye could easily miss. Tucked away under the eaves of outbuildings were a dozen or so rectangular blocks of wood with various-sized holes drilled into them. A close inspection showed some of the holes had bits of vegetation dangling from them. Residing inside were grass-cutting wasps, mason bees, and leaf-cutter bees. This was part of a project Alternative Roots was doing with the U of M Bee Lab, which is in the thick of trying to figure out ways of keeping both domesticated honey bees and wild pollinators like bees and wasps from disappearing completely in farm country.

It’s a perfect research project for a farming operation that not only relies on pollinators for its economic livelihood but sees their presence as a key indicator of ecosystem health. All that the Knisleys do, from figuring out their gardening rotation and selecting what fruit varieties to plant, to seeding prairie and moving pig pastures, is filtered through the lens of how to make the farm a working ecosystem. Such a big picture view can be overwhelming at times without a solid pivot point to work from, one that is so basic and foundational that anything done to support it provides wide-ranging benefits throughout the entire ecosystem. When that indicator is doing well, it’s a sign the rest of the system is healthy. For the Knisleys, that pivot point is pollinators.

That means keeping flowering plants on the land as long as possible throughout the year. Entomologists I’ve talked to repeatedly make the point that pollinating insects don’t just need flowering plants in June and July—they need something to feed on basically from early spring until the final frost of the season. That’s why Brooke and John grow a wide variety of flowering shrubs—red-osier dogwood, gray dogwood, elderberry, juneberry, serviceberry, and hazelnuts—and planted fifty different kinds of forbs when doing the prairie restoration. Sometimes, it’s the small things that count: like leaving a compost pile unturned so bumblebees can nest safely, or making sure there is some sort of plant cover between rows of fruit trees. The farmers realized that pig wallows can produce micro pools of water, a valuable source of mud for pollinators that require it for their nesting material (the wallows also provide water for birds that evolved with the prairie potholes of the region).

On this particular day, John’s love for pollinators was being tested—he was limping from where a wasp had stung him on the foot. “I’m really hating on wasps for a while and coming to terms with the fact that they are probably the best insect in the entire area,” John said as we started a walking tour of the farm. “And I was hating on the wasps the year they tried to nest in the packing shed with me,” Brooke added with a laugh.

Other invertebrates also offer indications that the land has come to life. Just a couple of years into their use of rotations, composting, and habitat establishment on ground that had formerly grown chemical-intensive row crops, they noticed what Brooke called an “explosion” of beneficial insects. One video they recorded while weeding the garden shows soil clinging to roots, and bugs, in turn, clinging to the soil.

“When we took the weeds out of the wheelbarrow, all the soil’s just crawling with life in there, whether it’s ground nesting beetles, baby lady bugs, ants, or what have you,” John recalled. “I know we have a lot of predatory beetles in our garden, because we do a lot of mulching with straw, so they have places to hide and hang out.”

But all that life basically stops at the property line. Alternative Roots is a garden spot in an industrial park. Despite the contrasting manners in which they manage the land, the Knisleys say there have not been any major clashes with their monocropping neighbors, who tend to be conscious of not spraying on days when prevailing winds may send toxins into the garden at Alternative Roots, for example. Such neighborliness goes both ways: the Knisleys work to keep what row crop farmers would consider noxious weeds from spreading over the property line.

“We have this island with all these really great flowers and insects and everything, but unfortunately this is the only place they have to live,” said John.

As he said this, I looked past the pig pasture. A solid mile of corn and soybeans separated Alternative Roots from a low-slung confinement hog facility. I grew up around swine production, but later, as I drove past the hog barn, the plume of odor escaping the operation slapped me like a scoop shovel to the face. Gates closed off the driveway, and a “No Entry” sign was posted.

There was no sign of life.

The Curse of Knowledge

A few years ago, when Bryan Simon returned for a visit to his alma mater, the University of Minnesota–Morris, he ran into one of the professors he had studied under while getting a bachelor’s degree in biology at the school.

“He asked me what I was doing, and I said, ‘Oh, I’m farming.’ And you could just see the look on his face,” Simon recalled. “It’s like, ‘Oh, what a waste—you have a liberal arts degree in biology and now you’re farming.’ And I was like, ‘But you’ve got to understand what kind of farming I’m doing.’”

As Simon related this story, he and his wife Jessie were sitting at the kitchen table of a former hunting lodge on 195 acres of farmland in west-central Minnesota’s Grant County while their two children, Charlie, four, and Annella, two, played in the yard on a wet July morning. Beyond the yard was Lakeside Prairie Farm, an enterprise characterized by a mix of restored prairie, rotationally grazed livestock pastures, and oak savanna habitat, broken up here and there by small wetlands. The farm thrusts peninsula-like out into nine-hundred-acre Cormorant Lake, where ducks, along with Canada geese and pelicans, could be seen floating on the water. It was clear the kind of farming the Simons were undertaking blended the principles of ecological restoration and wildlife biology with good old-fashioned agronomy and animal husbandry.

But as is evident by the view beyond the Simons’ driveway, a different kind of agriculture dominates the majority of the midwestern landscape: acre after acre of annual row crops like corn and soybeans, a duo-culture covering soil just a few months out of the year on land once dominated by prairies rich in hundreds of different species. And as evidence mounts that everything from grassland songbirds and waterfowl to pollinator insects and amphibians, not to mention water quality, is suffering as a result of loss of habitat at the hands of industrialized row crop agriculture, conventional farming is not exactly viewed as friendly to long-term environmental health.

Given all that, it’s not surprising that a professor dedicated to teaching about natural resources protection would be disappointed to learn a former student had gone into farming. Perhaps it’s akin to an art major becoming a highway engineer.

In some ways, the Simons’ passion for nature was sparked about as far away from the farms and small towns of west-central Minnesota as one can get. A biology teacher at a high school they attended in St. Cloud would regularly lead teens on month-long canoe trips into the Canadian wilderness. Both Bryan and Jessie, who are now in their midthirties, participated in these trips, which went as far north as Hudson Bay (they were a few years apart in high school, and didn’t meet until after graduation).

“That made me want to get into conservation,” recalled Bryan of those trips. “Being in a pristine ecosystem with no visible human impacts—to be able to observe that and live that for a month was eye-opening.”

The Simons carried that passion through high school and into college. Jessie ended up getting a master’s degree in environmental education from Hamline University and now teaches second grade, where she uses her environmental background as much as possible in the curriculum. “I try to do things with my students that get across the message that your actions affect more than just you,” she said. “I try to be intentional about going out as a class and taking note of phenology throughout the year.”

After getting his biology degree at U of M–Morris, Bryan did seasonal work with the Student Conservation Association, which placed him with the U.S. Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management in places like Idaho, Texas, and Hawaii. Through that work, he led crews of interns, doing invasive species control and native seed collection. Bryan later worked for The Nature Conservancy in eastern South Dakota, where he did fire management and plant monitoring.

The ideal natural resource career trajectory, right? But nestled back in Bryan’s mind was a seed of an idea about the role working farmland conservation could play in restoring and maintaining habitat. Yes, he had seen pristine wilderness untrammeled by humans, and yes, he had worked for organizations that protected natural areas. But while growing up in St. Cloud, Bryan had frequently visited his grandparents’ farm near Morris. There he realized that the environmental fate of the majority of the midwestern landscape is in the hands of farmers, who are out there working the fields daily. One day, there was a discussion going on in a college landscape ecology class about whether consumers or farmers have more responsibility for the way food is produced and its environmental impacts.

“I took the position that the farmer could have the greatest influence on the landscape,” recalled Bryan. “They have the most control over land use and they ultimately decide how well the land is taken care of.”

Later, while pursuing a master’s degree in ecology at South Dakota State University, Bryan conducted research at EcoSun Prairie Farms near Brookings, which had been set up by one of his professors as a large scale experiment to determine if grass-based farming could make returning prairie to the landscape a profitable venture.⁴ Bryan, by this time passionate about prairies, was inspired by the experience. He became convinced there was a way to make it so natural habitat and significant food production could occupy the same piece of ground.

While in graduate school, Bryan took Farm Beginnings, enrolling in the class with Ryan Heinen, a friend of his since seventh grade who had a similar academic/professional background in natural resources. Simon and Heinen share a passion for the prairie, and thus went into the Farm Beginnings class knowing what kind of farming they were going to do: grass-based livestock production. Innovations in managed rotational grazing systems, portable fencing, and pasture improvement in recent decades have made it possible to graze cattle and other livestock on grasslands in ways that not only improve forage quality and extend the grazing season, but benefit habitat for wildlife like grassland songbirds and pollinators. In recent years, managers of nature preserves and wildlife refuges have recognized the benefits of utilizing rotational grazing as a way to control invasive species in prairie systems and maintain healthy grassland habitat (see chapter 3). Graziers, for their part, like that the native warm-season grasses and forbs in prairie systems can help get them through the traditional “summer slump,” when the cool-season grasses found in domesticated pastures tend to go dormant.

As a requirement of the Farm Beginnings course, Simon and Heinen had to develop a business plan, which turned out to be a critical tool for getting access to the 195-acre farm in Grant County. At a sustainable farming conference they were introduced to Joe and Sylvia Luetmer, Alexandria, Minnesota, residents who were looking to buy a farm and get some beginners started on it. The Luetmers liked the young farmers’ plans for utilizing rotational grazing and other methods to support a healthy farm landscape. Soon after, the Grant County farm came up for sale. The owner had been renting out the tillable acres for corn, soybean, and wheat production, along with utilizing the small house as a hunting cabin. There are approximately twenty-five acres of wetlands, and a remnant of oak savanna dominates one end of the property. In other words, it was perfect for what Simon and Heinen had in mind: start a farm that blended the wild and the tame. In 2012, the Luetmers bought the farm and began renting it to the beginning farmers. The Simons moved into the former hunting cabin, and Bryan and Ryan started putting in place their eco-based farming operation by clearing out invasives, converting cropland to prairie and erecting fencing for rotational grazing of livestock. In 2016, Ryan and his wife Barbara decided to pursue their own dream of grass-based dairy farming and moved to a different part of the state.

The Luetmers have agreed to eventually sell the property to Bryan and Jessie at the same price they originally bought it for. In addition, the Simons are utilizing a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service program that puts the farm’s grassland acres in a permanent easement. The easement allows grazing of the acres, as long as they are kept in perennial grasses. The ultimate effect of the arrangement is that it reduces the “economic value” of the farm, since it can’t be cropped or otherwise developed. That, along with wetland banking credits they hope to get from the government, will eventually make the land much more affordable to Bryan and Jessie.

“That’s the best thing we’ve got going for us right now, as far as the economic side of farming,” Bryan told me, only half-joking, adding that the perpetual nature of the grassland easement is both good and bad. “The good is all of our work here restoring the prairie and putting in all this high diversity mix will be preserved. It will be prairie, hopefully, forever. But from a farming point of view, who knows what the future holds? It does tie the hands of the future generation a little.”

On the summer day I visited the farm, the future generation was enjoying the open landscape of the here and now. Charlie and Annella accompanied their parents as they walked up the farm’s long driveway to check on a twenty-acre piece of land that the year before had been converted from row crops to an eighty-species prairie planting. Perimeter fencing had been erected so the prairie could be grazed; on the other side of the fence in another former crop field, a recent seven-acre planting of rye and oats was preparing the soil for the next grassland seeding. The restored prairie was doing well: the yellow of brown-eyed Susan plants added a bright pop to a hillside shrouded in a July mist. Prairie phlox was also thriving, as well as, to the Simons’ chagrin, plenty of Canada thistle. Bryan wasn’t happy about the fact that they had to use herbicides to control the thistle in order to get the prairie established, or that in actuality a prairie like this should have three hundred different species represented. But such compromises are the bargains one must strike when undertaking ecological restoration in farm country.

An eastern kingbird and a dickcissel called out from pastureland across the driveway. The Simons have identified ninety-nine different species of birds on their farm. “Well, now, we’ve only identified ninety-nine different species,” said Bryan sheepishly. “There’s more here that I haven’t put a name to yet.”

In the hilly pasture, twenty-nine head of beef cattle, representing various breeds—British White, Angus, Devon, and Hereford—grazed. Closer to the house, two sows served as the foundation of the Simons’ new pastured pork enterprise. Beyond the pig pasture, there were glimpses of Cormorant Lake through the understory of a stand of 150-to 200-year-old bur and white oaks. This view of the lake was a result of a labor-intensive buckthorn removal effort that’s ongoing; over seventeen acres of the invasive had been cut at the time of my visit, some of which was being burned in the Simons’ wood stove as a kind of red-hot revenge.

Bryan and Jessie are hoping a combination of mechanical invasive species removal and utilizing livestock grazing to keep the understory open will bring back forty acres of oak savanna habitat on this farm. Sedges, jack-in-the-pulpit, Dutchman’s breeches, and snow trillium were already responding to the opening up of this habitat—as was, unfortunately, the invasive weed burdock.

They were also using livestock grazing to thin out the reed canary grass and cattails that were choking out the shallow marsh and wet meadow regions of the farm’s wetland habitat. This runs counter to a common misconception that wetlands and livestock should never mix—just as native grassland restoration can benefit from animal disturbance, so too can semi-aquatic habitat.⁵

The Simons are aware the livestock aren’t just here to maintain natural habitat—they, and these acres, must earn their way. Lakeside Prairie Farm started out also producing vegetables, chickens, eggs, oats, and wheat, but they eventually narrowed its enterprise focus to grass-fed beef and pastured pork. When I visited the farm, Bryan and Jessie were direct marketing about a dozen head of cattle and approximately the same number of hogs each year, which wasn’t enough to make the farm financially self-sustaining. Their goal is to double the number of beef animals they sell, and market as many as one hundred pigs annually.

But access to grazing land limits their production potential. It takes time to refashion row-cropped acres as productive grassland, especially when one’s goal is to have native species be a major part of the mix. On one part of the farm, Bryan pointed out seventy acres of land that had been idled for several years under the Conservation Reserve Program. Invasive red cedar had actually been planted on the idled ground, all but ruining it as a grassland. The contract was soon expiring, and it was clear the Simons couldn’t wait to use chainsaws and cattle to bring back the grassland habitat on these acres—it would provide much-needed feed, while allowing them to test yet again the theory that farming and natural habitat restoration can be integrated.

The young farmers know that in order to attain their dream of balancing ecological health with financially viable farming, they will need help via public policy as well as the marketplace. Bryan is frustrated that the bulk of federal farm policy doesn’t see diverse, ecologically healthy operations like theirs as a public good, and that it instead promotes monocultural crop production. However, they have received funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to set up rotational grazing systems, seed native species, and take on invasives removal.

Marketing a product that is good for the environment can also be frustrating at a time when consumers seem to favor convenience and price over sustainability, no matter what the long-term costs to the landscape and communities might be. Bryan is hopeful consumers can adjust their priorities. After all, he himself was able to go against the conventional wisdom that a healthy environment and farming are mutually exclusive. “Once you gain that knowledge that it’s not either one or the other, you’re cursed; you can’t go back to being ignorant,” he said as we headed back to the farmyard. “And with that knowledge, you seek to bridge those worlds.”

Bridging those worlds means inoculating consumers with the idea that what they eat influences not only their own health, but the health of the land. There are signs that people are willing and able to make such connections. Bryan was surprised when a customer all the way from the Twin Cities found them on the internet and ordered beef from Lakeside Prairie Farm. “I asked him why he was buying from us,” recalled the farmer. “He said, ‘I like what you guys are doing ecologically.’”