10
Hubs of Hope
The Connection between Inebriated Grasshoppers and Your Dinner Plate
The danger of telling the stories of innovative farmers such as those highlighted in this book is that they can be seen as too much of an anomaly to be replicated. When Gabe Brown says, “There are people all over doing this. They just don’t have the mouth I have,” what he’s trying to convey is that his only outstanding attribute is his willingness to go public with his hits and misses. Indeed, for every Gabe Brown who’s on the speaking circuit, hosting international visitors, or starring in online videos, there are dozens of ecological agrarians who are more quietly blending the wild and the tame.
But there’s not enough of those kinds of farmers. The bulk of U.S. agriculture is as far removed from natural processes as a factory making circuit boards. And we’re paying the price in terms of dirtier water, sickened soil, out-of-control greenhouse gas emissions, decimated wildlife populations, and shuttered Main Streets. I will admit to a bias here: I believe there need to be more farmers on the land, not fewer. After spending so much time on agricultural operations of all kinds, I’m more convinced of that belief than ever. Wildly successful farming requires more eyes (and ears) observing, reacting, adjusting—and that monitoring needs to take place over a lengthy period of time. The short-term decision-making that characterizes industrial agriculture just doesn’t leave much room for natural processes. What works one year may not work again for several years down the road—if ever.
One huge advantage wildly successful farmers have over their more conventional brethren is a willingness to share information. That may sound strange, given rural America’s reputation for working as a collective; for example, consider the farmers’ co-op movement that revolutionized the grain trade.1 As I’ve written about in chapter 6, it was the willingness of innovators and early adopters to share their experiences with their neighbors that led to the rapid spread of hybrid seed corn.
But in the early 1990s, when I was working for a mainstream farm magazine that had as its readership some of the largest farmers in the country, I began running into a troubling trend. Some of these farmers were unwilling to be interviewed for stories about a particular innovative production or marketing technique they were using. “What’s in it for me?” was a version of the response I would get over the telephone. They expressed concern that sharing their “trade secrets” would put them at a competitive disadvantage with their neighbors—who they now saw as rivals—for land, market share, and profits. For someone who grew up in an era when farmers still got together to shell corn or bale hay communally, this was a real eye opener.
An increasing number of farmers were raising an increasingly undifferentiated product: corn and soybeans for the international grain trade, for example. When one was in a position to take advantage of a market opportunity that paid a little bit more—high-oil soybeans or extra-lean hogs, for example—the last thing they wanted was other farmers horning in on their financial success. And who could blame them? The agricultural economic crash of the 1980s put a large number of farmers off the land in a very short time. The path to profits became paved with raising more bushels on more acres (or more pounds of meat and milk per square foot of barn space). To survive, you had to be a hard-nosed business owner willing to expand constantly, often at your neighbor’s expense. The trouble is, that get-big-or-get-out attitude didn’t do those tough-talking farmers any good either. There was always someone bigger and more powerful to take market share. And that competitor wasn’t necessarily in the next township or county—the Cargills of the world don’t care if they buy their soybeans in Iowa or Brazil, as long as the commodity is as cheap as possible. Thus, farming has become what University of Missouri economist John Ikerd calls “a race to the bottom”—a race fueled by exploitation of land and people.2
On the bright side, I’ve witnessed in the past decade or so somewhat of a return of the farmers-helping-farmers culture. Actually, I suspect it never completely left, but just got overshadowed by the economic storms raging over rural America. Every week I run across examples of farmers sharing information and ideas openly. Partly it’s because when someone is doing something truly innovative—utilizing cover crops to cut fertilizer use and suppress weeds or using mob grazing to double a pasture’s ability to produce livestock, for example—they’re excited about it. It’s human nature to share such breakthroughs and get feedback on how to make them even better. I’m seeing even “conventional” farmers more willing to share with their neighbors these days. That’s particularly true when it comes to the current revolution in building soil health. As the corn and soybean farmers in Indiana are learning, injecting just a bit of the “wild” into their otherwise domesticated row crop fields can produce tremendously positive results. That’s exciting, and fun to share.
The internet and social media have made the trading of this information simpler than ever, creating communities across thousands of miles. Log into any e-mail listserv where people share innovative ideas about farming closer to nature, and you’re likely to feel pretty positive about the future of agriculture.
It’s not just the thrill of discovery that motivates farmers to swap ideas. Many agrarians I’ve interviewed in recent years are also adherents to the philosophy of writer/farmer Wendell Berry, who would rather have a neighbor than have his neighbor’s land.3 Dan Jenniges sees a direct connection between more grass on the land and more beginning farmers in his community. Marge and Jack Warthesen host beginning farmer trainings and have mentored newbies. Having the most wildly successful farm in the county means little if the rest of the community is basically abandoned. As writer Michael Pollan puts it when describing the “remade” state of Iowa: “The only thing missing from the man-made landscape is . . . man.”4
Perhaps the most positive trend I’ve witnessed in recent years is how beginners with little background in farming (or rural living) have been welcomed into agricultural communities by lifelong residents. Southwestern Wisconsin farmer Peter Allen expresses genuine surprise at how much he and his family are supported by their neighbors, even though he’s a refugee from the big city of Madison, Wisconsin, and that up until the time he stepped onto those hilly acres in the Kickapoo Valley, he had spent the majority of his adult life as an academic. “I think they’re just happy to see some young person out trying to farm, because none of their kids are doing it,” he told me. He’s right: the latest U.S. Census of Agriculture shows the age of the average farmer is fifty-eight years old, up from fifty-one in 1982. Of principal farm operators, only 6 percent are under thirty-five.5
Allen’s warm reception isn’t unusual. I’ve spent a lot of time in rural communities and talked to older farmers who are extremely happy to see young, energetic people participating in a kind of reverse brain drain. Sure, they may have some weird ideas about “organics” and “sustainability,” but they also share with those older farmers a love of the land. Even better, no matter what kind of farming these greenhorns are undertaking, they require information on local soils, climate, and sources of inputs—details they can’t glean from a textbook or YouTube. It’s a basic instinct to be needed, and the generational knowledge these veteran farmers have is needed now, more than ever.
But we still don’t have enough wildly successful farmers to support our communities—both natural and human. What will it take to make this kind of relationship with the land more the norm, and not a quirky abnormality? Well, first of all, I’m not sure this kind of agriculture will ever become commonplace, particularly when talking about an operation like the one Martin and Loretta Jaus have, which has seamlessly blended the agronomic and the ecological. In a way, their operation is a perfect storm: both farmers have academic/professional experience in natural resource management; they have livestock, which requires a diversity of plants to thrive; and they are being rewarded in the marketplace with an organic price premium. To top it off, they are very comfortable associating with the environmental community, which provides them the kind of positive reinforcement they may not get from their conventional farming neighbors.
But I do think that wildly successful farming can seep into the cracks and crevices of conventional farming. We’ve certainly seen this with the soil health revolution, and how methods such as cover cropping are helping mainstream corn and soybean farmers deal with such issues as herbicide-resistant weeds, compaction, and erosion. Dan DeSutter would probably still be using a deep ripper, and who knows how much diesel fuel, to break up compacted soil on his Indiana farm if he had not seen those ryegrass roots “bio-drilling” through the hardpan.
To be honest, an injection of a little bit of the wild into domesticated agriculture isn’t some sort of unhindered flow of ideas and techniques. Significant barriers remain. For example, an examination of conventional farmers’ current interest in soil health unearths one of the biggest challenges midwestern agriculture faces if it is to adopt on a wide-scale basis practices that contribute to a healthier ecosystem: integrating livestock back onto the land. Livestock help cycle nutrients and provide a way to add economic value to grass, small grains, and other plants that benefit the soil. “Livestock are the rock stars of building soil health,” Justin Morris, a soil expert with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, told me one day while standing near a rotationally grazed pasture in southeastern Minnesota. “Nothing else quite compares to four hooves and manure.”
But let’s face it, there are a lot of farmers who simply do not have the capacity or desire to “go back” to having a diversified mix of enterprises that integrate crops and livestock. That’s why it’s important to take seriously ideas for creating “community conservation” in a region, such as what is being proposed in Dan Jenniges’s part of west-central Minnesota. Such an initiative could allow farmers of all types—livestock, crop, vegetable, specialty, a mix of various enterprises—to operate while sharing resources. For example, a farmer looking to add economic value to a corner of the farm that grows good grass but not much of a corn crop, could borrow her neighbor’s cattle, much like wildlife refuges use livestock from the community to control invasive species. I’ve already seen examples of farmers who raise cover crops in their corn-soybean systems renting out those acres to cattle producers who get a month or so of grazing in the fall before winter snows blow in. This is being done on a limited basis, but there’s potential for it to be done on a bigger, region-wide scale. After all, the impacts of healthy ecosystems should be pretty much borderless.
The positive repercussions of this kind of community ecological restoration could extend the benefits of wildly successful farms beyond watershed, county, or even state boundaries. One of the more fascinating papers I’ve read in recent years was a research editorial published in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation. The paper, which is based on an analysis of studies from around the world, describes how it’s becoming increasingly clear that healthy soil has a huge potential to sequester greenhouse gases—the higher the organic-matter content of soil, the more carbon stored. For example, our soil holds three times the amount of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere, and 240 times the amount of gases emitted by fossil fuels annually. Increasing the amount of carbon stored in soil by just a few percent would produce massive positive benefits. And since farmers deal directly with the land, they could play a significant role in developing what’s being called “climate-smart soils.”6
As a result, any farming practice that can prevent soil from blowing or washing away, as well as keeping it biologically healthy, is going to have a major positive impact on our climate. That’s why the authors of the Soil and Water Conservation editorial recommend a farming system that gets as much land as possible blanketed in continuous living cover 365 days a year. Their solution? Get livestock out on the land. The key phrase here is, “out on the land.” Producing pork, beef, and milk in intensive confinement, where feedstuffs are trucked in and liquid manure becomes a waste product that must be stored in massive quantities before eventually getting disposed of, is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.7 In addition, such systems are reliant on monocultural production of corn, soybeans, and other crops. This results in emissions as a result of tillage, as well as the production of the petroleum-based fertilizers, fuels, and pesticides involved in crop production.8
But when livestock are raised on grasslands and other forages, the soil can be a sink for greenhouse gases, both because it is not being eroded and exposed to the elements, and because the world beneath the surface is building up soil organic carbon. It’s important to keep in mind that it matters how those animals are being grazed. Simply turning them out onto open pastures or rangelands and allowing them to roam at will creates its own problems. Overgrazing destroys plant communities and is a major source of erosion and compaction, not to mention water pollution.
Rather, managed rotational grazing systems like what the various farmers I’ve described in this book have in place helps keep the grassland healthy above and below the surface by spreading nutrients sustainably and allowing plant life to rest and recover. The Journal of Soil and Water Conservation editorial cites studies showing how this system—they call it “regenerative adaptive multipaddock conservation grazing” (there’s a mouthful)—can actually sequester more greenhouse gases than are being emitted. Such a system can even make up for the greenhouse gases ruminants produce in the form of belched-up methane.
What’s particularly exciting about this journal article is the emphasis the authors place on integrating livestock, pastures, and crop production—a perfect mix of enterprises in the Midwest, a mix that I’ve seen firsthand on many wildly successful operations. They outline a working lands scenario where a carbon-trapping farm may have some permanent pasture that is broken up into rotational grazing paddocks. But it could also be producing corn and soybeans in a system where cover crops like cereal rye or tillage radish are used to blanket that row-cropped land with growing plants before and after the regular growing season. These cover crops could provide low-cost forage for cattle and other livestock, taking pressure off the perennial pastures and helping justify the cost of the cover crop establishment while protecting the soil from erosion and building its biology. Cover crops can also cut a farm’s reliance on greenhouse-gas-producing chemical fertilizers.9
The paper outlines the greenhouse gas emissions potential of several farming scenarios in North America: from keeping our current industrialized system (an increasing amount of grassland plowed under to make way for row crops while keeping livestock confined in large concentrated animal feeding operations) to utilizing a combination of managed rotational grazing and conservation cropping systems that involve no-till, diverse rotations, and cover crops. Not surprisingly, the current industrialized system would make our climate change problem worse, according to the researchers. But the scenario that involves getting more animals out on the land as part of an integrated system would build soil health to the point where agriculture becomes a net carbon sink.
This last scenario wouldn’t necessarily require every farm to become a diversified crop/livestock operation. In his book Grass, Soil, Hope, conservationist Courtney White describes how some Western cattle producers have taken up “carbon ranching” through a combination of rotational grazing and soil improvement methods such as composting. He’s describing practitioners who are committed to the business, and lifestyle, of raising livestock through thick and thin, so managing animals as carbon builders dovetails nicely with the way they do things.10 But as I’ve pointed out, many midwestern corn-soybean farmers are committed to raising crops and nothing else. Under a more community-wide, integrated system, diversity could be adopted on a regional basis. Even crop farmers who do not have livestock could utilize their neighbor’s animals to add economic value to cover crops or that piece of pasture that hasn’t fallen under the plow yet.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? But the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation editorial—and other scientific analyses like it—recognize that there are major barriers to integrating livestock grazing/row cropping in a soil-friendly manner, not the least of which is government policy that promotes the production of a handful of commodity crops and penalizes diversity. “Rather than reducing ruminants and encouraging destructive agricultural land use by providing price subsidies and other subsidies, rewarding regenerative agricultural practices that focus on increasing soil [carbon] and that lead to greater adoption by land managers is essential to creating a robust, resilient, and regenerative global food production system,” conclude the authors of the editorial.11
Or, as Martin Jaus put it to me more succinctly: “A lot of the crops you see here aren’t even considered crops, according to the Farm Bill. It seems that the more the crop is harmful to the environment, the more they want to support it.”
Children of the Corn
He’s not that far off. Time for a little Federal Ag Policy History Lesson 101. Modern agriculture policy was launched in the 1930s as a helping hand for farmers wracked by the double catastrophe of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The chief architect was Henry A. Wallace, a seed corn pioneer, Depression-era agriculture secretary, and southwestern Iowa native—he was born one county over from my home farm—who sought financial support for producing certain crops such as corn. He saw government support for raising commodities as a way to ensure an “ever-normal granary.” Since then, federal farm policy has evolved into an amalgam of subsidies, crop insurance initiatives, cost-share funds, and loan guarantees.12 Despite the many reiterations it’s undergone, at its core, farm policy has stayed true to what Wallace wanted: producing lots of a few crops and lots of one in particular: corn. “In the Midwest we are children of the corn,” University of Minnesota economics professor Steven Taff told me.
Even supposed “market-based” incentives like creating demand for corn by distilling it into ethanol has a basis in policy: the industry would be a fraction of its current size if it wasn’t for such federal programs as the Renewable Fuel Standard.13 When the focus of policy is to produce commodities full-bore, it doesn’t leave much room for biodiversity, or even basic measures that inject some ecological health into the system.
“The system for conservation is backward,” said southern Minnesota farmer John Knisley, who, as I explain in chapter 9, has created an island of biodiversity in a sea of corn and soybeans. “We took our own initiative to do this, and there’s no support for me taking land out of production at all, or planting a prairie. But if I destroy it, they’ll give me money to restore it. At the same time, I feel the environment we’ve created here gives the land better balance, so we get a droughty year, or we get a really wet year, the land, because of the way it’s been treated, can take that, whatever the environment kind of throws at it.”
Indeed, I visited his and Brooke’s farm during a particularly wet July in that part of Minnesota. The Knisleys’ low-lying farm was thriving, a stark contrast to many of the drowned-out spots I saw in area corn and soybean fields. At one point, I saw a field where tall corn stalks became shorter and shorter as they marched toward a small pond that had emerged as a result of heavy rains. This is a reminder that this area was traditionally the home of wetlands—large marshes as well as smaller ephemeral potholes. When it rains enough, the land reminds farmers and others that wetlands aren’t always an historical artifact. The land remembers what people and government policy forget.
The federal Farm Bill comes up for renewal every five years or so. Since I started my career as an agricultural journalist, I’ve seen five Farm Bill “cycles” (at this writing, I’m beginning my sixth). The sustainable agriculture community has been successful each round in making federal farm policy slightly more “green.” For example, the Conservation Stewardship Program, which was the brainchild of the late Minnesota farmer Dave Serfling and other members of the Land Stewardship Project’s Federal Policy Committee, actually pays farmers to produce positive environmental benefits—everything from cleaner water and healthier soil to pollinator and wildlife habitat restoration. Other Farm Bill initiatives, like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, provide cost-share funds so farmers can establish sustainable infrastructure such as rotational grazing systems.
Such greening of farm policy is a positive trend, but the vast majority of the Farm Bill’s resources continue to go toward growing more corn and soybeans in a monocultural, industrialized system. It’s like conservation is running a race that gave industrialized agriculture a several-decade head start. The Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper reported in 2015 that for every dollar taxpayers spend protecting water from the negative results of industrialized farming practices, farmers receive five dollars in subsidies that encourage them to do more of the same.14
At times, one has to admire the ability of the supporters of such a system—commodity groups, multinational grain traders, meatpackers, food manufacturers, and ethanol producers, to name a few—to refashion a set of policies just enough that they look like reform, but in the end, accomplish the same task: produce more and more commodity crops on more and more acres. For example, in recent Farm Bills the federally subsidized crop insurance program, which was originally set up in the 1930s as a safety net so farms wouldn’t be wiped out by weather disasters, has mutated into a program that encourages crop production on land that would otherwise be considered too erosive, wet, or otherwise “marginal” to produce a decent crop. In economics, this is referred to as a “moral hazard”—basically a situation where one person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of such risk taking.15 Since taxpayers foot the bill for at least 60 percent of the cost of a farmer’s typical crop insurance premium, we’re all caught up in a bit of a codependent situation here.
A U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) analysis blamed crop insurance, along with the National Flood Insurance Program, for inflating the cost of recovering from disasters by increasing risky behavior. “While federal law prohibits crop insurance from covering losses due to a farmers’ failure to follow good farming practices . . . some of these practices maintain short-term production but may inadvertently increase the vulnerability of agriculture to climate change through increased erosion and inefficient water use,” concluded the GAO.16
In other words, by taking the risk out of planting row crops on land that normally would be considered too marginal to produce a profitable yield, crop insurance is subsidizing farming practices that are making our land less resilient. Providing a safety net is good policy; stifling innovation is not.
“Crop insurance subsidies are probably the biggest limiting factor when it comes to adopting innovative soil health measures like cover cropping. They incentivize practices that go against building soil health,” Indiana farmer Dan DeSutter told me. “Without crop insurance, you could make the land much more diverse.”
Crop insurance makes it so all those sloughs, hilly pastures, and just plain odd corners on a farm that are difficult to raise a good crop on—think the Jack and Marge Warthesen farm—are now worth tilling. And as cattle producers have discovered, when you are renting pasture ground that was traditionally considered too rough to be row cropped, crop insurance can suddenly make it lucrative for your landlord to plow up the grass, tear out the fence, and plant corn and soybeans. And that’s exactly what’s happening. Analyses of land use patterns have made a connection between the growth of crop insurance and the destruction of grasslands, wetlands, and other marginal habitats.17 Farming is inherently risky, given the vagaries of weather and markets, and that’s part of the reason programs like crop insurance were created. But there’s a difference between cushioning the blow and fueling endeavors that have negative consequences. In many ways, the morphing of crop insurance from a basic safety net into a risk promoter that damages the landscape is yet one more example of a regrettable substitution in agriculture.
Public Good
The crop insurance example illustrates that until wildly successful farming is recognized as a public good, the overall farm policy bias toward monocultures will remain, plain and simple. The stakeholders that drive agriculture policy—major agribusiness firms and commodity groups—simply make too much money from the current dysfunctional mess. Real change will need to be triggered by a constituency that is generally silent during farm policy discussions: the general public. Specifically, people who care about clean water, wildlife habitat, the climate, and healthy soil need to make a connection between how the land is farmed, what they eat, the state of the environment, and what policies they support.
We now have a farm policy system that consistently forces many farmers to undertake activities that go against their own ethical standards. Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram is famous for his experiments in which study subjects thought they were advancing science by exposing humans to painful shocks. “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process,” Milgram once said.18 That could describe a lot of farmers.
For farmers like the Jauses, ag policy’s bias against the way they farm is not about the money, although they do lose out on certain kinds of subsidies by being so diverse. Perhaps an even bigger blow is that federal farm policy, by ignoring or penalizing Loretta and Martin, is sending a strong negative message: your kind of farming is not valued by society, it is not a public good.
No, not all farms in the United States will become wildly successful. But we do need enough of these kinds of operations to serve as models of what to strive for. I see them as nurturers of innovation that other farms can selectively harvest ideas from. A wildly successful farmer’s methods for improving soil health could be adopted by a corn-soybean farmer. Rotational grazing systems could be copied by a conventional dairy or beef producer. Establishment of pollinator habitat benefits a vegetable or fruit producer who needs the services those insects provide. A corn farmer could “borrow” the livestock of a diversified neighbor to add economic and agronomic value to a cover crop. If such partnerships take off, there may be a time when wildly successful farms are seen as a positive addition to a rural community, and not just because people enjoy seeing bobolinks or want to hunt pheasants. Such farms could be considered integral to the long-term sustainability of row crop agriculture, especially as the downside to a chemical- and energy-intensive, tillage-centric system becomes increasingly evident. Who knows? Commodity groups like the National Corn Growers Association or American Soybean Association may someday use their immense lobbying power to promote policy and public research that supports wildly successful farming.
In the meantime, a handful of wildly successful farms cannot be the hub of inspiration for the entire country, or even a state or county. We need more of them to inspire change in every watershed or township. How many? When asking that question, I like the answer Tom Will, a bird ecologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, gave during a recent visit to the Jaus farm: “I don’t know how many we need, but I know how many I want—when I look at the landscape and it feels right.”
In other words, we should strive for as many as possible. Get enough of them, and we don’t just have wildly successful farms, but wildly successful communities, which is what big picture ecosystem health is all about. That brings us back to creating the right atmosphere for developing as many of the next generation of wildly successful farmers as possible. There are plenty of young people interested in blending the wild and the tame. But to encourage them, and inspire others while supporting them financially, we need to create that constituency I described earlier. Such a constituency can be generated around a big picture issue, such as clean water, or a smaller issue, like protecting grassland songbird habitat. I’ve even seen people who are concerned about the future of red-headed woodpeckers reach out to farmers like the Warthesens who are willing to keep a dead snag or two in a fence line.
There is also a constituency that includes all of us: eaters. In his book, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Jedediah Purdy makes the case that the relatively new foodie movement—people wanting to know how and by whom their food is produced, and putting their money where their mouth is—can help make a critical connection between how farmland is treated and what’s on their supper table. Purdy argues that for too long the environmental movement saw “ecological farming” as an oxymoron. Before that, nature was not really nature if it was trammeled by humans.19
Big picture environmental change came about in the 1970s and 1980s when the dumping of raw sewage and toxins was seen as a public health threat. Here in the U.S., it’s rare to see a factory or a municipality sending their waste straight into the water anymore. Stopping such “point pollution” practices didn’t require the general public to identify with factory owners or even a city council member. It just required raising enough hell to trigger regulation of some of the most outrageous practices.
But when it comes to agriculture, things get trickier. All those thousands of farms of various shapes, sizes, and structures don’t lend themselves to cookie-cutter environmental regulations. The largest concentrated animal feeding operations can be regulated in terms of how they dispose of the millions of gallons of liquid manure they produce, or how much hydrogen sulfide they emit, but what about the family-sized operations raising a few dozen pigs on pasture? In that case, outright regulation may not only be ineffective, but it may actually stifle innovation. It may also put that smaller farmer out of business, and that land will be gobbled up by the larger CAFO.
Purdy says that true environmental change requires people to identify personally with the way business is being done. People’s interest in how their food is produced offers such an opportunity. Farming could become a public good, much like green space or a national park. “As a cultural matter, the food movement offers a way to make abstract ecological values concretely one’s own,” writes Purdy.20
Part of the reason environmentalists have long wanted to separate nature from working farms is the ongoing threat our pristine wilderness areas face from development—everything from mining, drilling, and recreation to, of course, agriculture. Blurring the lines between food production and working ecosystems could be just one more way to justify encroaching on areas like Yosemite, Zion, or Bob Marshall. That’s a justifiable concern. There are certain natural jewels that should be off limits to even the most ecologically sound farming practices.
But in Wildness: Relations of People and Place, Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer pull together a series of essays by ecologists, farmers, scientists, environmental advocates, and activists to examine the entangled relationship between our wilderness areas and the human-made world.21 Can the world survive without the Boundary Waters Canoe Area or the Maroon Bells Wilderness? Perhaps a better question, many of the writers argue, is whether humans can survive without “wildness” and what it contributes toward creating a working ecosystem, whether it be in a remote mountain range, or in our parks and cities, as well as on our farms.
“Wildness is not an all-or-nothing proposition. There are variations, ranging from the sunflower pushing through a crack in a city alley to the cultivated soils of a watershed cooperative to thousands of acres of multigenerational forestlands,” writes Van Horn.22
Designated wilderness areas are important, but in farm country we need to blur the lines between natural and agricultural, and between producer and consumer. Buying certified organic milk and grass-fed beef, or patronizing the local farmers’ market helps, but it needs to go one step beyond to where people consider eating, as Wendell Berry puts it, “an agricultural act.”23 On one visit to the Loretta and Martin Jaus farm, I started to see a little bit of this kind of ethic taking shape.
A Bountiful Table
On an unpleasantly hot Saturday in mid-June—a one-two punch of humidity and haze had triggered an air quality warning in the region—a couple dozen people gathered in a loose group between a newly sprouted cornfield and a windbreak. This field day was taking place on the Jaus farm, which wasn’t unusual—they often host people who are interested in learning more about their techniques for producing organic milk. What was out of the ordinary was what the field day participants carried. Almost to a person, they were armed with binoculars and field guides. Some were even equipped with smart phone apps that can help identify birds via their calls.
This tour was being sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of the Audubon Society as well as Birds and Beans, a marketer of shade-grown coffee, and Organic Valley, the organic dairy cooperative the Jauses sell their milk to. The nature of the sponsorship was no accident. Titled “Food, Farms, and Feathers: How Sustainable Agriculture Supports Healthy Ecosystems,” this field day was set up to help birding enthusiasts and other environmentalists connect more birds on their life lists to what kind of coffee or milk they consume.
“Our decisions to consume products in an ecologically sustainable way makes a difference,” the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Tom Will told the crowd. “Our choices make a difference.”
This was an excellent opportunity to make that connection. Will explained how songbirds such as bobolinks and dickcissels that make their summer home on the Jaus farm fly thousands of miles to spend their winters in South American countries like Columbia or Nicaragua. “And every place they visit contributes to their wellbeing and health,” he explained. “So it’s critical, for example, for those birds to find a gem of a place like this farm where they can respond to organic farming practices, healthy farming practices, lots of energy, lots of insects to feed their young. And that fuels their ability to make that long-distance journey all the way back to South America and hopefully find a similar environment there where they’ll encounter a healthy environment relatively free of pesticides and things that would make it more difficult for them to return to us the next year.”
Roughly half a century ago, coffee growers in the Southern Hemisphere started cutting down forests to provide coffee bushes with more full sun. This caused the bushes to produce beans faster and was more profitable for the farmers, but it also caused serious erosion and decimated the overstory wintering songbirds require. The farmers, as well as other people in these communities, also had to deal with the inevitable chemical regimen that comes with replacing a diverse habitat with a monoculture. In the 1990s, organizations and businesses began certifying coffee that was grown with the overstory intact. Called “shade-grown” coffee, this burgeoning market provides a price premium for farmers who are willing to grow their coffee without removing vast tracts of forest habitat.24
Birds & Beans is one of the companies importing this bird-friendly coffee. This is a good example of putting your money where your ethics are. Anyone who enjoys seeing Baltimore orioles in their backyard should be drinking shade-grown coffee. It’s a clear and simple link between our actions here and results thousands of miles south. But what hasn’t always been so clear is how our consumption of products produced right in our own backyard impacts these same birds. Since they summer here, such a connection would seem to make sense. But let’s face it, midwestern farmland is not as charismatic as a South American forest.
Part of the Jauses’ responsibility on this particular day was to fill in the tour participants on the midwestern end of the cycle, and to show that working farms like theirs are just as valuable in supporting healthy bird habitat as an ecologically mindful coffee operation in Nicaragua. After brief introductions, we took a hay wagon tour of the farm, during which Martin described their method of producing milk, interrupting himself periodically to identify a bird. As we went at a parade pace by the orderly pasture paddocks bordered by windbreaks, the farmer explained their grazing and chemical-free cropping systems. He also gave a little history lesson. In 1877 this farm was homesteaded by Martin’s great-grandfather. In the 1960s, modern drainage ditches came in and replaced bird habitat, he said with an air of melancholy. It wouldn’t be the last time he reminded the field tour participants of a wilder time with a sense of sadness. He pointed to the south where a lake used to be. “My dad used to go fishing there,” he said. “That’s all gone now. The landscape has changed.”
But he made it clear we can’t completely blame the lack of wildlife habitat on trends set in motion by decisions made decades ago. “What did you see on your way here in the road ditches?” Martin asked the group rhetorically. “Mowing. It’s prime nesting season. That’s something that really bothers me.” Another result of the takeover of the midwestern rural landscape by corn and soybeans is that farmers desperate for livestock forage are baling up the grasses found in road ditches.
During the tour, Martin returned repeatedly to the theme of historical, and not so historical, landscape-level destruction. But the tour participants also saw what one committed farm family can do to bring their own piece of property back to life in a matter of decades. Such signs of life were everywhere we looked: dickcissels clinging to waving grasses like pole vaulters caught in mid-arch, making their dry, insect-like call; tree swallows swooping through the grazing paddocks, picking insects out of the air; a young red-tailed hawk riding thermals above the fields; a clay-colored sparrow with its zhee, zhee, zhee song; raucous red-winged blackbirds dominating the cattails; eastern kingbirds balancing on barbed wire; and male Baltimore orioles, flashing their orange feathers as they weaved in and out of trees.
We drove past beehives that honey producers have set up near the Jaus farmstead next to some grazing paddocks and a windbreak, a reminder that this farm is good for pollinators as well. At one point in the tour, Martin reminded us of another public service the farm provides. They have a “living snow fence” of green ash and red cedar. Since they put it in, the county road department has not had problems with the byway drifting in. Yes, this farm had been brought back to life. But there are limits. At one point as we rode along a gravel road past a drainage ditch, Martin talked about how they plugged tile lines to reclaim an eleven-acre marsh. But it can be hard to do that beyond a limited basis, since one farm’s drainage infrastructure is sometimes intertwined with a neighbor’s system, much like the storm sewers in an urban or suburban area.
“It’s difficult to bring back a wetland,” Martin said in his typical understated way.
While on the tour, the participants, which included a birding columnist for a city newspaper, had a host of questions:
• How long does it take to become certified organic? (There is a three-year transition period.)
• How do you control weeds without chemicals? (A flame weeder and mechanical cultivation.)
• How do you deal with being surrounded by genetically modified crops? (Plant later than the neighbors to avoid cross-pollination.)
• What did this area once look like? (When it was homesteaded, it was all marsh and tallgrass prairie.)
After the hay-ride tour, we gathered at the field road next to the cornfield and passed through the windbreak, where we walked a winding path through a dense stand of woody wildlife plantings. We emerged into an open area next to a long, rectangular pond. A white open-sided tent had been set up with tables and folding chairs. At one end was a locally sourced meal laid out buffet style. North of us were grazing paddocks. Orioles darted in and out among the trees near the pond. The well-kept barn and farmstead were to the west. The set-up made it look like the editors at Birds and Blooms, Bon Appétit, and Successful Farming magazines had decided to save money and hire one photo stylist for the day.
A chalkboard next to the buffet table listed the menu:
• Beef tenderloin with creamed mustard greens and arugula pesto.
• Heirloom bean salad with arugula, micro-buckwheat, and mustard vinaigrette.
• Beet, dill, cilantro farro tabbouleh.
• Summer greens with radish and turnip and honey vinaigrette.
• Cornbread muffins.
And, because it was that time of year in the Midwest, the meal was topped off with locally sourced rhubarb pie.
A local restaurant had prepared the food, and the owner talked to us about the importance of sourcing locally to “make connections” like we saw here. We were also encouraged to keep in mind the $3 million in salaries her restaurant pumps into the local economy. Aimee Haag, who runs Rebel Soil Farm with her husband Andy Temple, had provided the vegetables and she gave a short presentation on their operation. The young farmer got emotional talking about the importance of sourcing locally and how a local foods restaurant can contribute to the community’s economy.
“When I see all you can do on these acres it makes me excited about what we can do on our four acres,” Haag said to the Jauses.
After lunch, Kristin Hall, the conservation manager for Audubon Minnesota, talked about the “powerful changes” we can make with our food choices. “Not all of us can buy a farm,” she said, re-emphasizing that what we can do is support this kind of farming with our buying habits. “Not every farm can be like this, but there’s hope.”
She then introduced a panel discussion involving Will and Loretta, as well as Katie Fallon, author of Cerulean Blues: A Personal Search for a Vanishing Songbird and the co-founder of the Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia. Will and Fallon, who have both studied birds in the Southern Hemisphere, reinforced the connections between a midwestern dairy farm, South American tropical forests, and the food choices we make. Will talked excitedly about new developments in ornithology and about cutting-edge information that has been gathered from tiny backpacks on migrating birds. As they spoke, the dickcissels in the nearby grazing paddocks sang incessantly—dick, dick, dick . . . cissel, dick, dick, dick . . . cissel.
Fallon talked about the human connections that migrating songbirds can forge. On cue, a Baltimore oriole started whistling clearly from near the pond.
“That Baltimore oriole could have been seen by somebody at a coffee farm in Nicaragua,” said Fallon. “Some person picking coffee beans could have heard that fluty song and looked up and said, ‘Wow, that’s a really cool bird.’ So just seeing that Baltimore oriole links you to someone thousands of miles away who could have looked at that bird and had the same reaction—‘Wow! Look at that thing.’”
By the time Loretta got up to speak, I realized she had a tougher case to make. During the picnic, an Organic Valley tanker truck had driven into the nearby farmyard and completed its once-a-week pickup of the Jaus milk, draining the bulk tank in the eighty-eight-year-old stone barn. As cues go, Fallon had her oriole, Loretta had her truck. “I heard the rumble of the truck go by and I was thinking about how much simpler our life would be if we just went for the biggest milk check,” she said. But by being certified organic, they don’t hoe the easy row. And in fact, they have chosen an even tougher path than many of their organic colleagues. Besides the ban on toxic chemicals and petroleum-based fertilizer, among other things, organic certification has certain stipulations about retaining wildlife habitat and making sure cows get the bulk of their feed during the growing season from well-managed pastures. That’s important. The chemical restrictions and pasture requirements alone make organic farms much friendlier to wildlife and pollinators, not to mention the soil universe.
But organic certification does not require a farmer to restore a wetland or put up bluebird boxes, as the Jauses have. In fact, surveys show that shoppers consistently choose organic products because they think consuming them is healthier for their family.25 Whenever a food scare flares up in the industrialized system, organic sales spike. That’s great, and it’s supporting farmers like the Jauses. But let’s face it, the consuming public is fickle. As soon as some sharp marketer convinces them that a different kind of food is healthier, they lurch to that side of the ship.
And then there’s the fact that the Organic Valley truck will be driving through mile after mile of monocropped fields that come autumn will be stripped of all plant life as a result of economic and policy based choices. Granted, several participants in this small tour pledged to purchase organic dairy products from now on, but buying “green” doesn’t have the same long-term, generational impact that adopting a new ethic toward the land does, an ethic that means you will support a certain kind of farming in as many ways as possible—from the decisions made in the grocery store to those made in the voting booth.
So what did Loretta do? She told a story. It was the one I shared in chapter 1 about the time the grasshoppers got inebriated feeding on the Jauses’ small grains because of the high biological activity in the farmers’ soils. It’s a perfect story to tell to just about any crowd, since it contains all the great elements of a narrative: drama, tragedy, mystery, humor—even an aha moment. It also conveys an important message that even when we think we know everything, we really don’t. Most important, those grasshoppers, those plants, and that soil were making it clear that the land is part of a whole. Farmers, and by extension the people they feed, are only fooling themselves if they think they are not members of that same community.
“We learned to watch for things like that,” Loretta said at the conclusion of her story. “We have a lot of faith in the land. We were definitely making the management decisions on the farm that we did because we felt it was the right thing to do, without really understanding the full ramifications and potential of what we were doing. What the grasshopper story taught us was that we can run the farm, and that we should run the farm, with respect for the principles that are operating the natural systems and that in the end it will pay off in big ways, not only in terms of success of the farm, but in terms of the other living things we share the farm with.”
She stopped and let the story soak in while the rest of us glanced around, perhaps seeing the land in a deeper way.