STORYBOOK BIODIVERSITY
As a child, I never saw a farm. I grew up a city kid. The closest I came was a large incubator full of eggs and emerging chicks, a permanent exhibit on genetics just inside the entrance of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. But I knew about farms and forests from my adored storybooks and from Mother Goose nursery rhymes as well as the brothers Grimm. The pages were crammed full of joyful hand-drawn images, my favorite being Arthur Rackham’s beautiful watercolors for The Wind in the Willows. But I also held onto an indelible image of a lone grey donkey sitting at the river’s edge in Ernest Shepherd’s illustration for Winnie the Pooh. All the animals had distinct personalities. And they had compassion. They were independent of people but drawn as an integral part of the wilderness or the farm universe. If there were fences, they were of wood, low enough to climb over. No one was confined. Implausibly—and yet perfectly naturally—the animals spent their day resolving one another’s predicaments or sharing a meal or just enjoying a walk. I was drawn to the imagery. The Wild. Whether the forest was gloomy and terrifying or lush and inviting, it was always thrilling. The land and the river were dignified entities, beings with many moods. The meadows were deeply green. And all the trees were heavy with fruit. To my impressionable young mind, for a kid who lived by too many rules and a hefty amount of fear, this other world of endless space and freedom and plenty. It was exhilarating… though I didn’t know that word at the time.
I wanted to live in that world.
Ernest Shepherd illustration for Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
What I didn’t know was how quickly that world was disappearing – both the small family farm and the wilderness. Many of my books had been my mother’s. The world I grew up in already had warehoused poultry and hogs. Feedlot beef was becoming common in my grandparents’ youth. Crop farming in the midwest meant a monoculture for miles, mostly corn and wheat. The forests were being decimated. Only trees of commercial value were replanted, creating another monoculture. My fantasy world had lost its value. It was no longer efficient, modern, economically viable.
WHAT’S MISSING FROM THIS PICTURE
With the birth of our third child, I began a garden in the front yard of a small house on the cusp of Washington, D.C. (I wrote about the evolution of our garden to a small but sustainable ecosystem here (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-01-16/january-planting-an-idea). The garden grew into a jungle of plants, chickens and ducks and became a small but very productive city farm. At an agroecology conference, I was fortunate to attend a workshop with John Jeavons… of Grow Biointensive fame. Instead of planting one crop in long straight rows or beds, he explained how to interplant with diverse species for a more robust miniature ecosystem. His gardens were a mix of trees and shrubs, herbaceous plants and herbs. It was a revelation. When the third child left for university, we left for the mountains of Italy. I wanted to be entirely self-sufficient and sustainable, to farm the way it had been done for centuries. My husband wanted to be in a country where medical care is a right. Italy offered both. We lived in a hilltown while I looked for land. I wanted to be where the wilderness was still protected, respected. An entire mountain range forms the backbone of Italy running through the center of the country—a patchwork quilt of small farms cut into the forest. The land which grabbed us is partially wooded, part of the old oak/pine forest, in the middle of a heavily forested valley. The grandmother trees which border my gardens are more than one hundred years old.
Once we were planning and planting, I became acquainted with the many deer, porcupine, and wild boar on the land – animals not in my picture books. In fact, there were a number of vital images missing from those books. Predators for one. They are essential to a balanced ecosystem. They control the larger populations of herbivores which, without predators, would consume much of the forest and farm vegetation. Wolves, live on the periphery of our land, in the forest. Hawks circle high above. Owls live in our trees, bats in our belfry. Foxes and weasels make their nests and burrows in and around our hedgerows. Snakes live in the old stone walls, sharing accommodations with the exquisite green lizards. Predators all.
When we arrived, grey wolves and vipers had recently been re-introduced to the area. Long before, the grandfathers of our neighbors had hunted them both to extinction. But when the farmers became weary of the deer and field mice decimating their field crops, the wild boar and crested porcupines digging up their root crops and prize truffles, they reluctantly welcomed the wolves back (a little less reluctantly than the vipers) as sustainable crop protection. With the financial support of our local government in partnership with the EU, small sustainable farms have been encouraged to return to and support the area’s natural biodiversity, stabilizing the soil with a balance of wild grasses, as well as herbivores and their predators; rewilding with endangered animals and plants appropriate to the area; regulating tree cutting; and encouraging reforesting with a mix of fire-resistant tree species.
Arthur Rackham illustration for The Wolf and the Goat
The balance of nature is a lovely euphemism for natural predator-prey relationships throughout the food pyramid. At the very bottom of the pyramid is the rich and diverse soil community of interconnected organisms: the substrate for the entire plant community – the trees, herbaceous and woody plants, the grasslands, tundra, rainforests… Each successive layer of diverse organisms—the plants, the herbivores, the carnivores—depends on the layer below for its nutrition. And throughout, there are the decomposers which consume and transform the tissue of dead organisms. At the very top are the largest carnivores, the keystone predators. The stability of the community depends on species diversity at each level—the more complex, the more stable. A sustainable ecosystem requires a keystone predator to keep everything in equilibrium, allowing the system to remain diverse and integrated. In our valley, the keystone predator is the wolf, on which the entire natural system depends.
FINDING BALANCE
For years I credited our chickens with the farm’s success. Far beyond being egg providers, they are living rototillers, spending the day scratching in the dirt and turning the compost while searching for grubs and worms. All the birds—wild and not—are an important part of pest management. But most important, their manure is high in nitrogen; ideal for lots of green growth which was exactly what I needed. However, if I were going to grow a great many vegetables—or anything fruiting—I needed a vast amount of herbivore shit, which is lower in nitrogen. And the birds were simply not up to the task of reclaiming the future gardens from the brush and wild grasses which dominate the abandoned fields. We were missing a major herbivore for balance. Fortunately, we live in an area dedicated to returning endangered species to the land. We received a grant to sponsor animals through Programma Sviluppo Rurale Nazionale. https://www.psrn.it/psrn/ From a list of ten local animali in via di estinzione,we chose Sardinian donkeys, an excellent fit to our rocky dry mountain land. The grant also helped pay for fencing for their fields and a large cistern for rainwater storage.
Donkeys are gentle, patient animals. (My husband says they are thoughtful not stubborn.) They are also an invaluable asset to farming sustainably… for little to no expense. It could have been sheep or goats but they are currently not threatened with extinction. The choice of which species of herbivore one has for clearing brush, maintaining grasslands, and providing manure depends on the local climate, the terrain, and the right fit with the local plants as their major food source. Our donkeys are fenced out of gardens where we have herbaceous food plants. We don’t use them for carrying heavy loads or plowing fields, though I keep them in mind as back-up transportation to town some day. They live in a transitional area between the gardens and the woods, in the old fields where we are encouraging reforestation. Along with goats, they are the ultimate non-mechanical trash mashers and field excavators, turning 20 kilos of non-edible (to us) field plants into 20 kilos of balanced manure. Their dispersed manure is part of the soil health on the land.
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Nature is a powerful ally, if you respect her and her ways… Wendell Berry
We farm one hectare of the land surrounding the house, a scale the surrounding land dictated. We blurred the line from gardens to fields and woodlands, extending our food forest into the fields and woods, while allowing the wild to invade the gardens. We added hedgerows and small fruiting shrubs and brambles, with fruit and nut trees—all local plants. They were mixed in among the variety of species of oaks and pines; integrating our smallholding into the remaining 12 hectares. In spite of having a deed, we consider that land belongs to the wild. We are just a part of her support team. In the gardens, we are planting a diverse selection of food and medicine plants long adapted to the valley. We continue to increase the number of perennial and self-seeding plants. Our chickens, ducks, and donkeys are old breeds and have been here for hundreds of years. The only alteration to the soil is the chicken or donkey manure added on top of the soil (as a wild animal would), under each tree, on the garden beds, at the beginning of each season.
We have barns and just enough fencing and brambles to discourage easy access to the poultry by the top predators, though sometimes one of the ducks or chickens goes missing. However, we are clear that the wild animals and old trees with whom we share the land have property rights. Our dogs seem to keep the wolves at bay, though we have seen chomped off remains of deer and porcupine in the gardens. The fruit trees far from the house belong to the animals. Various plants are sampled from time to time and we are trying to grow more comfortable sharing ten percent with our immediate neighbors. Our plans, like the plants, are slowly evolving, nothing is static. We encourage those plants which are able to go with the flow as the climate is increasingly unpredictable. We plant biointensively, interplanting everything with herbs and flowers which tend to discourage predation while also singing seductive songs to the pollinators. Ironically, our most financially successful crops—the figs and the olives—are from trees in unfenced areas and are generally undisturbed by predation. But anything which falls on the ground is fair game.
WILD FARMING
A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. Aldo Leopold
There is a name for all the above… wild farming. We are members of the mountain community; a part of the forest and fields, the river, the myriad creatures, the old stone ruins, the land itself. After moving here, I was no longer a consumer of the land for recreation, using it as a resource, but part of it, dependent upon it, part of something much greater than myself. That doesn’t mean that I relinquish all responsibility. The land is temporarily in our care. Seeing the farm as part of the entire ecosystem, not something separate from it, can ensure that a healthy balanced biodiversity remains. What is created on our farm—the food, the beauty, the well being—is determined by the rest of the ecosystem—the water, the soil, the trees, the specific plants, the wild animal visitors… Part of my job description is being responsible for the health of the land on which I live… as well as the land surrounding it, as it has a direct effect on the growing food.
I read a lot of references to Aldo Leopold now; that we have a moral responsibility to the land—the plants and the animals, that nature does not have a price tag, it is beyond value, with an intrinsic right to exist. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community… It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” But the natural world is also invaluable because our health is inextricably connected to it. One small example: along the river bank which borders the lower part of the land, an abundance of medicinal plants are growing. One in particular is a medicine I depend on. Rather than wildcraft these plants into extinction, I have uprooted a few of each species, brought them back to my gardens, rooted them and they have multiplied. Just walking along the river now, without removing a single plant, is a therapy session, a time out. It is also a check on which plants and fungi are proliferating and which are disappearing. For me, the health and the number of plants as well as the height, swiftness, turbidity of the river, is an invaluable indicator of what is occurring with climate change. But the natural world is also invaluable because our mental and physical health are inextricably connected to it.
Now comes the inevitable question…
How do we feed eight billion people in the world if we restore our ecosystems, our forests, farming only a small percentage of them? My answer: we can do both; we could do both right now. We have squandered the land on which we grow food. The USDA estimates that between thirty to forty percent of the food supply is wasted and that seventy percent of the soybeans grown in the U.S. go to animal feed, poultry being the number one livestock sector. (And soy is not part of a chicken’s natural diet.) Waste begins at the farm where 1.2 billion tonnes per year, approximately 15.3% of the food produced globally is lost. https://earth.org/food-waste-on-farms/ In animal agriculture, the largest waste is from a high mortality rate. (I will leave that one to your imagination.) “Supermarkets impose strict cosmetic specifications to farmers and only buy produce that fit size, shape, and colour specifications regardless of its nutrition, taste, and value.” https://earth.org/food-waste-on-farms/ And “food waste accounts for one-third of all human caused greenhouse gas emissions…” https://earth.org/how-does-food-waste-affect-the-environment
The longer I farm, the more alienated I am from the entire un-natural food system, including much of what is called organic. I will not purchase food packaged in plastic or any food which has been shipped, anything which cannot be grown where I live. (Well… er… except the occasional coffee… and, of course, chocolate.) I know from my own work how quickly the food I harvest loses freshness and vitamins. Commercial farming and nature are increasingly at odds with one another. I want food which has a deep connection with the local small farms integrated into the landscape. I want integrity. And health. We need to demand quality food for all, as we demand health care. It’s the same thing. And we need to see ourselves as part of the natural world. When the two are combined—food grown on farms within the natural world—farming can become a joy, a passion, a cause worth fighting for. The goals to preserve both are the same and the reciprocity of natural systems is invaluable. Restoring health to our abused farmland, encouraging new life in battered ecosystems and sustaining the existing ecosystems can be the work of the farmer. And perhaps, seeing it from that perspective makes what has been maligned as a career of hard work and debt into an enriching and meaningful life.
As much as there is enormous satisfaction in knowing that I can grow food and contribute to the well-being of the community, it has become essential for me to be surrounded by beauty, an abundance of real life—emerging, growing, reproducing, dying, and emerging again. I see myself as ridiculously privileged. I can feed myself, my family, and my friends. I can put a roof over our heads (although, in fairness, my husband and partner in grime had something to do with that). I have ENOUGH. I have no heavy machinery on which I owe money. I have a waiting list of clients and students. (And thus, do not need an employee.) There are days where I absolutely need to have my hands in the earth. During two sieges of Covid we never missed an early morning cleaning and feeding of the animals. They ground us as much as the physical earth. It is the only way we want to begin our day. But one of the real thrills is living inside a landscape painting.
It is always exhilarating.
To live and work attentively in a diverse landscape—made up of native woodlands, pastures, croplands, ponds, and streams—is to live from one revelation to another, things unexpected, always of interest, often wonderful. After a while, you understand that there can be no end to this. The place is essentially interesting, inexhaustibly beautiful and wonderful. Wendell Berry
RECOMMENDED READING (Can’t help myself. I am always teaching.)
Aldo Leopold The Sand County Almanac
Masanobu Fukuoka The One Straw Revolution
The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame, illustrations by Arthur Rackham
Winnie the Pooh AA Milne, illustrations by Ernest Shepherd
Film: The Gleaners and I (2000) by Agnes Varda
