by Abby Qillen, via Yes! Magazine
“Frogs are an indicator species,” Jack Gray explains, leaning over a small, muddy pond to look for tadpoles.
Here on the 170-acre Winter Green Farm, 20 miles west of Eugene, Ore., Gray has raised cattle and grown vegetables and berries for 30 years.
It’s a sunny April day, but water pools in the pastures, evidence of the rains this part of Oregon is known for.
Gray is in his mid-50s and agile from decades of working outside. He built this pond to provide habitat for native amphibians, because bass in another pond were eating the red-legged frogs and Western pond turtles.
Cows graze in a field behind him; wind whispers through a stand of cattails, and two mallards lift off. Gray points out the calls of killdeer, flycatchers, and blackbirds. Up the hill a flock of sheep chomp on long grass. “They’re part of a controlled grazing to try to control reed canary grass, which is an invasive species,” Gray explains. “It tends to smother areas. It makes deserts almost.”
Gray, his wife, Mary Jo, and two other families co-own Winter Green Farm. They are committed to something Jo Ann Baumgartner, director of the Wild Farm Alliance, calls “farming with the wild.”
The words “wild” and “farming” may seem at odds. In the last century, with the development of petroleum-based pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, farms were increasingly modeled on industry. “Fencerow to fencerow,” mono-crop farming emphasized high production and minimized the importance of biodiversity. Farmers ripped out vegetation, cut down forests, shot predators, and filled in wetlands and streams. Today, agriculture is a major cause of the habitat loss that puts endangered species at risk.
Practitioners of wild farming, also called conservation-based agriculture, seek to reverse industrial agriculture’s devastating effects on wildlife by adopting farming methods that support nature. They envision a landscape where farms meld into the environment and mimic the natural processes that surround them. If wild farming sounds like organic farming, that’s because both are based on a similar vision: that farms should be managed as natural systems. Most wild farmers employ organic practices, like nontoxic pest management, composting, and crop rotation, all of which encourage biodiversity.
However, farming with the wild goes a step beyond organic and looks at how farms can support nature and wildlife at the larger ecosystem or watershed level. For a farmer, that might mean planting native plants and hedgerows along the borders of fields to provide habitat for wildlife and beneficial insects, finding ways to accommodate fish and large carnivores, preventing genetically engineered organisms from interacting with native species, and networking with other farmers and agencies to create wildlife corridors that connect wilderness areas.
The Mountain Lion and the Lamb
Wild farms exist all over the country, from North Dakota’s grasslands to Florida’s marshes, and by their nature, they vary based on the farm and the geography. In the Bridger Mountains of Montana, at Thirteen Mile Lamb & Wool Company, Becky Weed and Dave Tyler are committed to predator-friendly ranching. They use guard llamas, instead of guns, traps, or poison, to protect their cattle and sheep from coyotes, bears, mountain lions, wolves, and eagles. They take a risk with their non-lethal approach to predation and occasionally lose sheep, but they support a healthy ecosystem where predators control populations of their natural prey, like mice, rabbits, gophers, and deer. They also qualify for certification from Predator Friendly, an “ecolabel” that touts the sustainability of their products and helps ranchers get premium prices from conservation-minded customers.
In the arid Mimbres Valley of Southwestern New Mexico, at the No Cattle Company, Michael Alexander and Sharlene Grunerud grow fruit, vegetables, and flowers using an ancient Spanish “acequia” canal system for irrigation. They’ve installed bird perches and bat boxes on the sides of their fields, and the free-tail and big brown bats they attract feed on their worst insect pests: codling moths, cucumber beetles, and corn earworm moths. Alexander and Grunerud also see benefits from accommodating larger wildlife at their farm, like bears, foxes, mountain lions, bobcats, and coyotes. The bears feed on fallen apples, eating the codling moth larvae inside, and the coyotes, as well as ravens and hawks, help control the population of pocket gophers.
The families and farm animals at Winter Green share their land with elk, deer, coyotes, beavers, possums, skunks, osprey, black-shouldered kites, red-tailed hawks, and other wildlife.
Click here to read the rest of this article at YesMagazine.org.
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