Introduction

A Day on the Farm, a Night on the River

Dan Specht finished up hog and cattle chores, hopped into his pickup truck, and wound his way down to the Mississippi River, just a few minutes’ drive away from his hilltop farm in northeastern Iowa. He had fishing gear in the back, soil under his fingernails, and nutrient runoff on the mind. That wasn’t unusual for Specht. It was difficult for the farmer to separate his various passions—even if they seemed to come into conflict at times.

“I’m trying to be more efficient in my nutrient cycling,” the soft-spoken bear of a man told me that summer evening as he guided the pickup past corn, soybeans, alfalfa, and pastures before hitting the heavily timbered river bottom, which was home to, among other things, the ancient, humped structures of the effigy mound builders culture. “The thing is that corn and beans don’t create a very complex rotation. It’s a very leaky system. It’s annual, warm season row crops, and it’s the middle of June before the roots start picking much up. Before you know it, your drain tile lines are running full of nutrients the whole months of April, May, and June.”

There, in one succinct description given during a five-hundred-foot drop in elevation that carried us from the cultivated farmlands to the wild bottoms of the Upper Mississippi, Specht had laid out to me perfectly a problem that touched on plant physiology, soil biology, and hydrogeology. And because his beloved Mississippi flows down to the Gulf of Mexico, where all that nitrogen that’s escaping leaky farm fields has helped create an oxygen-poor “dead zone” that, as of 2017, was the size of New Jersey (approximately nine thousand square miles),¹ Specht’s description demonstrated he also understood Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology: “Everything is connected to everything else.”²

This conversation took place in 1999. I had called Dan and asked if I could visit him for a day to talk about the Gulf of Mexico dead zone and the role agriculture plays in it. The dead zone, which has decimated fisheries in the Gulf, has its roots in a midwestern farming system that has increasingly become dependent on monocrops of corn and soybeans. Raising corn, for example, requires heavy dosages of nitrogen fertilizer, and much of it—20 percent or more in some cases—escapes down into the soil profile, making its way into field drainage systems and eventually down the Mississippi to the Gulf, where it supercharges algal growths that gobble up oxygen.³ I’ve looked at historical charts that illustrate a clearcut mathematic equation: more corn + more fertilizer = less life in the Gulf of Mexico.⁴

I had read all the government studies on the topic, and perused the statements issued by the environmental community (“Farmers are killing the Gulf!”) as well as the agribusiness industry (“We can’t feed the world without nitrogen fertilizer!”). But to write an article that went beyond the science and the rhetoric, I needed someone to give me a ground-level view of the situation. Dan represented a way to put a human face on an incredibly complex and controversial topic.

I had met Dan a few years earlier at a sustainable agriculture workshop and was impressed with his knowledge of not just farming but the landscape it was set in. He was an avid hunter and angler, had studied wildlife biology at Iowa State University before leaving to go into farming fulltime, and later in life got a biology degree from the University of Northern Iowa. He was a bit of an expert (in a good way) on everything from local springs and karst geology to the birds that called his corner of Iowa home. It was all part of a blend, and Dan was the kind of guy who surprised you: after pulling a few words of small talk out of him, suddenly you realized you’d just gotten the entire history of the Big Spring Project, a pioneering research initiative in his community that set the standard for learning about and mitigating agricultural fertilizer pollution.⁵

And he walked the talk: Dan wouldn’t dream of doing anything to upset the delicate balance between farming and the land that he felt should exist. I’ll admit, at times Dan took blurring the lines between humanity and nature a little too far. Once, while I was eating a bowl of ice cream in his somewhat rustic kitchen, he opened his back door and grabbed a handful of mulberries that were sprouting from a limb scratching at the side of the house. He threw them into my bowl, stems, ants, and all. The resulting concoction was delicious, if somewhat more fibrous than I had bargained for.

Not long before I had visited Dan’s farm for the first time in 1999, he traveled to the Gulf of Mexico as the guest of an environmental group, getting a firsthand look at the impact of agricultural pollution on the people and their livelihoods. The experience had reinforced his commitment to reducing the amount of nutrients leaving the five hundred acres he farmed at the time. Many farmers would approach such a problem in a reductionist manner: too much fertilizer escapes my land, so I will put in place a specific practice or structure to control it. Such thinking has resulted in innumerable terraces, controlled drainage systems, and even “bioreactors” (utilizing material such as wood chips to soak up excess nutrient runoff) on farms across the Midwest, often at taxpayer expense.⁶

They’ve had mixed results. Such practices have helped reduce pollutants on a local basis, but on a watershed-wide level, we still have major problems, and not just in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2015, the Des Moines Waterworks sued three northwestern Iowa counties, claiming drainage districts there act as conduits for nitrate to move from farm fields into the Raccoon River, a major source of water for five hundred thousand residents. Such contamination has forced the city to invest massive amounts of money in equipment just to make the water safe for drinking.⁷ Agricultural runoff led to massive algal blooms in Lake Erie during 2014. As a result, for three days Toledo, Ohio, had to shut down the drinking-water system that services four hundred thousand people.⁸ Such problems are caused by nonpoint source pollution runoff, which is particularly difficult to control since it comes from numerous places on the landscape, rather than one specific “point” source such as a storm sewer pipe emptying straight into a river. The latest U.S. Environmental Protection Agency National Water Quality Assessment shows that agricultural nonpoint source pollution is the leading source of water quality problems on surveyed rivers and streams, the third largest source for lakes, the second largest source of impairments to wetlands, and a major contributor to contamination of estuaries and groundwater.⁹ Climate change, which is bringing torrential rains to parts of the Corn Belt, is exacerbating the problem. In 2017, the journal Science published a paper showing that increased rainfall could increase nitrogen runoff as much as 20 percent by the end of this century, which would slash oxygen levels even more in not just the Gulf but places like Chesapeake Bay.¹⁰

As farmers like Dan Specht see it, the struggle to contain nonpoint source pollution is an indicator that stopgap conservation structures don’t encompass the big picture “system” approach to farming in concert with the land. Many of these mitigation measures are steeped in a basic mindset: How can we continue to raise corn in a manner that will keep the regulators off our backs? That’s the kind of thinking that predominates when people see themselves as “corn producers” only, rather than farmers who are willing, depending on the circumstances, to consider raising a variety of products.

Dan had the ability to raise a high-yielding crop of corn. But to him, such a crop was a means to an end, not an end itself. Therefore, he approached the leaky nutrient problem much more holistically. He asked such questions as, “Should I be raising corn on this particular piece of ground in the first place? Rather than raising corn and selling it to the local elevator so that it could eventually be fed to livestock, why not raise livestock on that land myself?” This kind of thinking led Dan to do such things as produce beef cattle on his hilliest acres utilizing a system called managed rotational grazing. Developed in France and New Zealand and modified to fit local situations, this system consists of moving livestock through a series of grazing paddocks on a regular basis—sometimes as much as once or twice a day—so that they don’t overgraze the pastures. It distributes manure and urine across the landscape evenly, providing grasses and forbs an opportunity to take up the nutrients at a sustainable rate that fits their needs. Because it eliminates overgrazing, such a system can extend the pasture season by a month or more in the Upper Midwest, which is a financial bonus for farmers, particularly beef and dairy producers.¹¹

As managed rotational grazing has caught on in this country, farmers and scientists have noted numerous other benefits: it sequesters greenhouse gases, while providing habitat for grassland songbirds and pollinators.¹² One other important benefit is that such a system can be set up at a lower cost than, say, a full confinement livestock facility reliant on high inputs of machinery, energy, and drugs. As a result, managed rotational grazing has provided an entrée into livestock production for many cash-strapped beginning farmers in recent years.¹³ Since managed rotational grazing provides an economically viable reason for keeping the land covered in perennial plants such as grass, it can be a way to counter the trend of more and more acres going under the plow to grow annual row crops like corn and soybeans.

I spent the day on Specht’s crop and livestock farm and saw firsthand how he utilized rotational grazing on his steepest fields while bobolinks and bluebirds flitted about in pastures surrounded by oaks. Most of Iowa is former tallgrass prairie and in many parts of the state any field that dares to rise even a few feet above the surrounding landscape is considered mountainous. But Dan’s neighborhood is part of the “Driftless Area”—a region dominated by rugged bluffs that were not shaved down by the last ice age. Some of his fields are so steep that people joke that squirrel hunting on this land involves aiming a .22 rifle down at the tree canopy. Dan reserved his flatter acres for raising corn and soybeans, and even in his row-cropped fields he utilized diverse rotations and soil-building cover cropping to keep nutrients on his land and out of the water. Such methods also kept topsoil in place. That’s not an easy task; during my first visit I noticed how a recent rain had washed soil and plant debris off a neighbor’s field, forming a dirty, stucco-like wall that plastered a fence line separating it from Dan’s property.

The fishing trip we took at the end of that informative day was not just a way to blow off steam over a few beers—to Specht it was part and parcel of the personal seminar he was giving on farming, fishing, and fertilizer. It became clear as he, neighboring farmer Jeff Klinge, and I cast lines and talked about everything from agricultural policy to water chemistry to geology, that there was no divide between what took place up on the nearby hilltops and the results down on the bottomlands, all the way downstream to the Gulf, almost two thousand miles away. It was all interconnected.

“It’s really fragile,” Dan said at one point while a freight train rumbled along the Wisconsin side of the river. “It’s vast, but it’s fragile.” He was referring to the point where the Mississippi meets the Gulf, but it was clear he had his own neck of the woods in mind as well.

Making Connections

I thought about that jam-packed day more than a dozen years later while standing on a sidewalk in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’d just gotten the news that Dan had been killed at the age of sixty-three in a haymaking accident on one of those steep fields that made up his farm. I had spent the intervening years writing about other farmers that refused to separate food production from ecological processes, and Dan had been the spark that ignited my interest in this kind of agriculture.

Frankly, farmers like Dan Specht are not the norm. I’ve seen innumerable examples of farms that place a wildlife pond here or a windbreak there in the name of “conservation.” Every year farmers throughout the Corn Belt are given awards by commodity groups or Soil and Water Conservation Districts for owning and operating some version of an “Outstanding Conservation Farm.” Invariably, when the press release is issued it provides a shopping list of practices and structures the winners have put in place: a wildlife planting or grassed waterway, planting cover crops to protect soil between the regular cash crop growing seasons, switching to no-till to avoid exposing fields to erosion.

These practices are all well and good, and when taken together make an impressive scorecard. There is no doubt, for example, that no-till farming, which does away with using the moldboard plow to disturb the land, has saved billions of tons of soil in recent decades.¹⁴ But these disparate practices don’t always add up to an integrated system, and thus are vulnerable to being dropped as soon as market, regulatory, or other incentives disappear.

But occasionally over the years, I’d run into someone like Dan Specht, who wasn’t just cherry-picking a practice here and there in order to provide a short-term solution to a problem. They have a comprehensive view of a world where agriculture and ecology are deeply interconnected, and realize any real, long-term sustainability must be rooted in taking advantage of these connections in a positive way. Such a worldview is not easy to come by. I know, because it didn’t come naturally to me.

Growing up on a 240-acre farm in southwestern Iowa during the 1970s, I considered farming and the natural world to be two very different animals. You raised corn, soybeans, hogs, and cattle up on the DeVore hill, and wildlife thrived in those hidden, and somewhat mysterious, hollows down in the bottomland where a scrappy little stream called the 7-Mile cut a gash through our neighborhood. That belief was reinforced by the fact that the 1970s was witness to a “fencerow-to-fencerow” grain production explosion, when farmers were encouraged to farm every last acre in the name of “feeding the world.”¹⁵ Wildlife habitat was a luxury on “real” working farms. My home place succumbed to this thinking, but not nearly to the extent of other farms. My dad removed plenty of trees and a few brushy fencerows—more out of a need to see things neat and tidy than any desire to “feed the world.” He had hunted, fished, and trapped back in the day, but now he was a farmer, and his interaction with the land began and ended with how to wrest a living from it.

I had always preferred spending more time in the untamed bottoms of the 7-Mile than the domesticated tops of our farm, so when I went to college I studied fish and wildlife biology and journalism, thinking I was going to be the next Mark Trail, the outdoor writer of newspaper comic strip fame. My belief that farming and the natural world did not mix was reinforced early by a professor who was a big believer in the role wildlife refuges, parks, and other publicly owned natural areas could play in preserving remnants of nature. During a field course called “The Ecology of the Missouri Ozarks,” we drove by section after section of farmland so we could visit federal and state wildlife refuges, waterways that had been protected via the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and national forests.

At one point, we visited a Missouri lake that was inundated with boaters and swimmers on an early spring day. It was a cacophony of activity, and quite frankly, did not show American outdoor recreationists at their best. It was particularly jarring after spending several days in the more “natural” parts of the Ozarks.

“We need areas like this,” my professor explained as he slowly guided our college van through the crowds. “It’s like a safety valve that keeps people away from real nature.” By extension, farming the hell out of the best soils kept farmers away from those “natural areas” as well, I assumed. This would mark a common belief I ran into in subsequent years: it wasn’t just farmers who thought agriculture and the natural world did not mix, so did many ecologists and government natural resource professionals.

And during my college years in the early 1980s, farming and nature seemed more alienated from each other than ever. I wrote articles about studies showing that agrichemical contamination of Iowa’s drinking water wells was ubiquitous, while wildlife habitat was shrinking to all-time lows. I’m reminded of the first magazine story I tried to write as a student journalist. It was supposed to be about how farming could actually help wildlife. My first interview was with a well-known bird expert at Iowa State University. When I presented him with my thesis for the story, he said something along the lines of, “I’m not sure if there’s a story there. Farming does more harm than good to wildlife.” He then went on to talk about how harvesting corn with combines left the fields so denuded of grain that there wasn’t even anything left over for the wildlife to glean. I ended up doing the story anyway, but it was pretty lame—something about farmers planting wildlife-friendly windbreaks along fence lines sticks out in my head. To be sure, this was 1983 or so, and we had just come through the 1970s and its decimating fencerow-to-fencerow planting fever. That ornithologist was right to be pessimistic.

It turns out there was a very important human element to all this bad news that I missed at the time: as farms became less numerous and larger, environmental degradation increased. There were simply fewer people on the land to care if a pasture was plowed or a brushy fence line bulldozed. It turns out the fate of the family farmer isn’t just tied to the price of corn—there is a real connection to the health of the land as well.

Somewhere along the line, my view of agriculture’s relationship with nature changed. I’m sure it was a combination of things, but one experience stands out. One of the farmers who farmed on the bottomlands of the 7-Mile had hunted, fished, and trapped with my dad back when they were young. But this guy, perhaps because of his nearness to the creek, had never quite lost his interest in woods and streams. One day he told me about a book he had just read. “You might be interested in it,” he said nonchalantly. “It’s about this guy who kind of takes you through the seasons and describes our relationship with the land, things like that.”

That book was A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold. Even though it had been written almost half a century before I picked it up, it set my brain on fire. I loved the descriptions of nature, and Leopold’s ability to observe one small aspect of the land and extrapolate it into a larger way of thinking. But what really drew me in was his “land ethic”—the idea that we have a moral responsibility to the land and its wild flora and fauna, that not every “cog and wheel” in nature must justify itself economically in order for us to give it permission to exist.

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” wrote Leopold. “It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”¹⁶

When I first read those words, I didn’t know enough about “biotas” or “ecosystems” to judge what land practices were preserving “integrity and stability.” All I knew was I didn’t like the cold feeling I got in my gut when I saw a stand of hardwoods bulldozed and burned, a creek straightened, or a pasture plowed up and planted to corn. To be honest, when I was younger my opposition to such “land improvements” was rooted in self-interest. I remember when a neighboring farmer ripped out a brushy fencerow soon after he bought property in our neighborhood. My first thought was, “Well, I’ll have to find another place to hunt rabbits.”

But Leopold helped me begin observing the workings of the land less as a consumer of outdoor diversions and more as a member of a community, one that was much more interesting than I could have imagined. When we stop viewing land as mere property, the possibilities, for us as well as that land, are opened wide. Ironically, some of those possibilities are actually based in economics. For example, farmers in recent years are discovering that by ignoring all that “useless” soil biota and focusing exclusively on adding to their fields’ financial value with high-priced, artificial inputs like petroleum-based fertilizer, they are sacrificing the long-term viability of their land.¹⁷ That would not have surprised Leopold, who called it a false assumption that “the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts.”¹⁸

And I liked what Leopold said about how an all-encompassing ethic should apply not only to pristine wilderness areas but to where we live and work every day. When one considers such an ethic in terms of agriculture, the health of the land in rural areas is best served when food production and wild areas exist side-by-side, rather than as separate entities performing seemingly unrelated tasks. Such a way of looking at the world was highly appealing to a wildlife-loving farm kid who was living nowhere near a national park, wildlife refuge, or nature preserve. If I was to have any interaction with nature, it had to be in the pastures, crop fields, and ditches that made up my agrarian world. Seeing my family’s 240 acres through Leopold’s eyes suddenly made that farm seem much larger and layered.

In his essay “The Farmer as a Conservationist,” Leopold eloquently described how woodlands, meadows, sloughs, and wetlands, those odd corners where ecological services quietly go about their business, can coexist with corn production, pasturing, and other farming enterprises.¹⁹ Wilderness areas, national forests, and wildlife refuges are important. But as Dana and Laura Jackson point out in a book I contributed to in 2002, The Farm as Natural Habitat: Reconnecting Food Systems with Ecosystems, too often people see their presence as an excuse to sacrifice a functioning ecosystem on good farmland: “Farm the best and preserve the rest.”²⁰

The result of this segregation on a landscape scale is pristine preserves such as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on one end of the spectrum and ecological sacrifice zones such as the Corn Belt on the other end. On an individual farm scale, it often means gradual elimination of residual habitat fragments on the assumption that displaced wildlife can simply take up residence on public land somewhere else. The whole concept of wetland mitigation fits this mindset—in a state like Minnesota, highways, housing developments, and other such projects can often be allowed to displace a natural wetland as long as developers provide the means for a replacement marsh to be established elsewhere.²¹ It’s a nice idea, but ignores the concept that perhaps there was an important ecological reason that wetland was located in its original spot.

An integration of the tamed and the wild not only makes economic sense by saving soil and protecting water quality, for example, but it provides a certain “wholeness” that is so critical to the overall success of a farm. Wrote Leopold: “No one censures a man who loses his leg in an accident, or who was born with only four fingers, but we should look askance at a man who amputated a natural part on the grounds that some other part is more profitable.”²²

In the seven decades since Leopold wrote those words, it has become clear he was right in more ways than one. The sustainable agriculture movement is based on the idea that all aspects of a successful farm—from its soil, croplands, and pastures to its woodlands and sloughs—are part of a healthy whole. Farmers and scientists are realizing that an agricultural operation too far removed from its biological roots is more vulnerable to disease, pests, and uncooperative weather—in other words, it’s less resilient.²³

Leopold was writing in a different era, when industrial agriculture and agroecological thinking were both in their infancy. But recent research and real-farm experience have proven him right. Environmentalists are now aware that creating islands of natural areas is not sustainable in the long term. To be sure, waterfowl benefit from state and federal wildlife refuges, but when migrating they rely on the food and shelter present in the potholes and sloughs found on farms across the Midwest. A protected waterway may be safe from having factory waste dumped straight into it, but what about the non-point runoff from all the farms present in the surrounding watershed? It can be ecological death by a thousand hidden, and not so hidden, cuts.

In places like the Midwest, working lands conservation (of course, it could be argued that all lands “work” in terms of ecosystem services) is more than a nice concept—it’s a necessity in a region where vast tracts of publicly owned acres are few and far between. Pore over a map where shades of green indicate the percentage of land devoted to agricultural production and you’ll see the midsection of America resembles the dominant clothing choice for a St. Patrick’s Day parade. In Iowa, almost 89 percent of the land area is farmed. Even in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, with their timberlands and lakes, 54 percent and 45 percent of the landscape, respectively, is in agriculture. Nationally, privately owned croplands, pastures, and rangeland make up about 40 percent of the terrestrial surface area, and are managed by just 2 percent of the population.²⁴

And a tiny subset of that 2 percent makes support of a functioning ecosystem a priority when producing food. But when one gets an opportunity to see such a philosophy in action, the psychological impacts can have an outsized effect. Soon after I went to work for the Land Stewardship Project in the mid-1990s, I had the opportunity to encounter numerous farmers, such as Dan Specht, who blended the natural world and their farming systems almost seamlessly. As I wrote in The Farm as Natural Habitat, some of these farmers were prompted to make major changes in their operations by health concerns (a well contaminated with agrichemicals), while others were triggered by economics (seeking a premium price in the organic market, for example).²⁵

I’ve always been fascinated by what prompts a farmer to make changes that are likely to invite the derision of others in the community, particularly other farmers. But the stories I find particularly intriguing are those of farmers who I call “ecological agrarians”—people who never really separated the natural world from food production. Sometimes they seemed to be born with this inability to disconnect the two. Other times, early life experiences forged this connection.

Wildly Successful Farming

No matter what the avenue or the timing, the result is, as Art “Tex” Hawkins refers to it, “wildly successful farms.” Hawkins is a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service watershed biologist who went on to start a sustainability initiative at Winona State University in Minnesota, and his late father, Art Sr., was one of Leopold’s first graduate students. The younger Hawkins has worked closely with many of these farms that are blending nature and agriculture, helping them, for example, monitor the health of the ecosystem via bird identification. He sees them as the living embodiment of what good can come from refusing to separate the ecological from the agronomic.

I like the term “wildly successful,” partly because it’s a play on the title of a well-known farm magazine, Successful Farming. Just as a pop musician pines to be on the cover of Rolling Stone, it’s long been acknowledged in the agricultural world that to have your farm featured in a magazine like Successful Farming is a sign that you’ve arrived. Farm magazines like this offer up lots of practical advice, but like their glossy counterparts in the suburbs and cities, they also have an aspirational component to them. “You too can be a successful farmer!” is the message their profiles and photographs convey.

Such success is measured by how many bushels are being produced on how many acres utilizing what kind of technology and inputs. However, there have always been groups of farmers who measure success based on how well their production systems interact with the land’s natural functions. When done right, these farms are able to succeed not only ecologically but financially and from a quality of life point of view. These are the wildly successful farms I refer to in the title of this book.

And we’re not just talking about farms that are homes to ducks and deer. “Wildness,” in this case, extends beneath the surface as well: healthy soil is perhaps the most diverse ecosystem on earth and maintaining its diversity to the point where natural systems can function has repercussions all the way up the food chain, to us. So, this book isn’t just about marshes and prairies—it’s about farms that give a variety of natural forces the opportunity to interact with human-driven forces in a positive way, literally from the ground up. Some of those interactions happen through a hands-off approach; others are more directed. Either way, thought and conscious decision-making must go into the process for it to be successful. This is, after all, for all intents and purposes the Anthropocene, a geological epoch dominated by the actions of human beings.

This book tells the stories of farmers across the Midwest who are balancing agricultural productivity with a passion for all things wild. These farmers are utilizing a wide range of techniques and strategies, but they are united by a single philosophy, which is to approach working lands conservation as, to quote Leopold, “a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence or caution.”²⁶

Whenever people read or hear about a farmer who is doing innovative things to balance food production with a healthy, functioning ecosystem, a natural response is, “Nice story, but what does it mean in the bigger picture?” In other words, are these examples fated to be feel-good tales that have no real relevance when it comes to making our overall food and farming system more sustainable? I don’t think so. This book also describes how wildly successful farmers can have impacts beyond their field borders—all the way to research test plots and our supper tables. That said, I don’t want to mislead readers into thinking that this book is reporting on some sort of regenerative farming revolution that’s sweeping the U.S. Corn Belt. These stories are about farmers who are returning resiliency to their particular piece of the landscape. Given the catastrophic environmental threats our entire region faces, it can be difficult to accept the fact that wildly successful farming is an outlier.

But for now, it is—we will need to seek our optimism in the isolated, but powerful, examples profiled here. I’ve chosen to focus on the Midwest in this book because in many ways its landscape has been thoroughly reshaped by production agriculture to a greater extent than any other region in the country. If wildly successful farming can get a foothold in an area where, in some counties, 95 percent or more of the landscape is blanketed in either corn or soybeans during the growing season, then there’s hope for other places dominated by a version of the “Corn, Bean, Feedlot Machine,” as Montana rancher Becky Weed calls it. To use an agronomic metaphor, wildly successful farms are seeds and it remains to be seen whether society provides fertile soil—both in the marketplace and the public policy realm—for them to sprout the kind of growth that spreads widely.

This is no shop manual on what that seedbed should look like, but I’ve included in these pages what I see as some of the common traits shared by farming operations that have in some way become wildly successful. Teamwork, cutting-edge science, curiosity, a willingness to ignore the conventional wisdom adhered to by peers, the ability to foresee (or at least weather) unintended consequences, and, of course, personal passion all play key roles. That’s a complex formula, one that makes creating a standard template for being wildly successful pretty much impossible. But when was the last time something truly transformational came out of a neatly organized toolkit?