Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature — Abstract

A good farm must be one where the native flora and fauna have lost acreage without losing their existence. — Aldo Leopold

We have collected, mulled over, and carefully considered the following essays over a three-year period and chosen them to provide the scientific, philosophical, economic, and cultural underpinnings for an emerging movement, conservation-based agriculture. A number of the essays also influenced a previous book, Farming with the Wild, a project that inspired a continental journey in pursuit of two questions. How much wildnesss can a farm or ranching operation support and still remain economically viable? And how much agriculture can take place in an area and still support optimal levels of biodiversity? The Wild Farm Alliance, the co-producer of this and the earlier book, has been engaged in these questions for nearly a decade and continues to be a leading voice for the re-integration of wildness in farming and ranching regions.

Our world is rapidly changing, and the actions we take today will have far-flung consequences. Many alarming trends cumulatively point to inevitable shifts in agriculture in the years ahead: Changing climate patterns. Limited cheap fossil fuels. Rapid urbanization and rising rates of industrial consumption. Approaching shortages of clean water. The collapse of critical ecosystems overburdened by industrial wastes. The irreparable loss of species, and with them, the planet’s evolutionary legacy as well as the genetic resilience to overcome pest outbreaks and other hardships. The pages ahead will reveal a broad platform of conservation- based solutions to many of these challenges.

Industrial agriculture has played an important, if not a leading, role in many of the problems listed above. Forty years ago, the pioneers of our contemporary organic farming movement set out to change that course with a vision for “sustainable agriculture.” Throughout four decades of hard work, organic farmers have become extremely successful at growing crops and raising livestock without the toxic chemicals deemed necessary for today’s industrial factory-based agriculture. In some areas of the country, many organic farmers and advocates have emerged as leaders in the conservation-based agriculture movement. But as a whole, the organic movement has fallen short of deep reforms because it failed to adequately address the interconnections between farms, ranches, and the landscapes that support them.

One hears, for example, a great deal about “biodiversity” in conversations about sustainable agriculture. This can refer positively to the protection of soil organisms, such as earthworms or mycorrhyzal fungi, both beneficial to farmers. Or it can refer negatively to the devastating loss of traditional crop diversity, in terms of the dwindling numbers, varieties, and breeds of plant and animal species grown and collected for human uses. It is far less often, however, that we hear about “wild biodiversity” in dialogues about sustainable agriculture. By this, we mean the healthy habitats needed to support a wide range of native flora and fauna where agriculture takes place.

This is understandable. Agriculture, after all, involves the domestication of the wild. Over the past three centuries, native habitats — from river valleys and grasslands, to wetlands, uplands, and woodlands — have been converted to agricultural lands. In the industrial economy, agricultural operations have reduced complex landscapes into zones of intensive production for just a handful of exotic crops or, more often, a single monoculture encompassing thousands of acres or feedlot “gulags” housing tens of thousands of animals. In order to compete in global markets, to pay for expensive machinery and inputs, to overcompensate for rising production costs and declining crop prices, or simply to create “clean farms” void of weeds, ever-larger swaths of habitats have been erased. With the clearing of habitat comes the loss of species. And wild biodiversity is pushed farther and farther into isolated pockets on the landscape.

This expansion — primarily to support the grain-fed confinement livestock industry — has sent shock waves across the landscape. As much as two-thirds of all public, private, and tribal lands are now used for agriculture, either in grazing, haying, or row cropping. Half of the wetlands in the continental United States have been lost in the past century. Human activities consume an estimated 40 percent of the earth’s daily photosynthetic output, while agriculture uses two-thirds of the earth’s available fresh water supplies. According to Defenders of Wildlife, as of 1995, 84 percent of all threatened and endangered plant and animal species in the United States were listed at least partially as a result of agricultural activities. The situation is not that different in other regions of the world.

It is also understandable that the conservation community — even the sustainable agriculture community — has sometimes kept its distance from mainstream agriculture. Yet, ironically perhaps, conservationists, restorationists, and all other citizens concerned about wild biodiversity have little choice but to engage agriculture for solutions to common concerns. The fragmented landscape requires that our existing wild areas (no more than 10 percent of the land base) somehow be reconnected through healthy watersheds and diverse habitat linkages. (A juvenile male mountain lion must safely cross hundreds of miles of territory to become an independent adult; a salmon must find the watershed of its birth to spawn and complete its noble cycle of life.) Many of these linkages and migrations must take place on privately held farms and ranches. Unfortunately, landowners cannot always easily receive compensation or technical assistance for such essential stewardship services.

Advocates of a truly sustainable agriculture must also embrace wild biodiversity as an essential foundation for a new farming and ranching regime, one that works with wild nature rather than industrializing it. Indeed, as shown in many of the essays that follow, some people are already working to combine agriculture and conservation in extraordinary ways.

While the authors of this book may not necessarily agree on approaches and outlook, or on how to achieve a balance between agriculture and conservation goals, it is safe to assume that they share a common value. Healthy human activities require healthy landscapes, and healthy landscapes require moving away from an eradication ethic toward coexistence with all species. The fate of wild nature will no doubt be deeply intertwined with the food and farming systems of our present and future. But this is a codependent journey. There will be no agriculture within completely degraded habitats.

These essays show us that we still know so little about the potential of working with wild nature in highly productive ways. But this is not a call to convert the earth into a “working landscape.” Wilderness must continue to be protected for its own sake, as well as to guide and inspire us. The broad concepts of conservation-based agriculture are ours for the taking: A grass farming revolution to replace the corn-soybean-feedlot juggernaut. A continental effort to restore habitat for native pollinators, wide-ranging predators, and vital watersheds. The preservation of migratory salmon populations. Vital farming and ranching regions in which native species may lose acreage without losing existence. These are ideas that just might save us.

— Dan Imhoff and Jo Ann Baumgartner