The official newsletter of the Land Stewardship Project
DECEMBER 1997 VOL. 15, NO. 6
In a world where farmers live & die by yield monitors & bottom lines, these families are looking to the skies for a different sign of success.
By Brian DeVore & Jodi Dansingburg
The aging Chevy Suburban truck bounced along the fence-line, its occupants blurting out the names of birds flitting about in a nearby pasture.
"Flycatcher!"
"Grackles!"
"Eastern kingbirds!"
"What's that? A savannah sparrow?"
"No, it's a fence tightener," announced one of the birders with a laugh after a quick check with the binoculars.
This wasn't a group of urban ornithologists talking excitedly about the difference between a songbird and a hand-sized piece of ratcheted steel. On this recent summer day, farmers were the ones packing the binoculars and field guides on a tour of the Brian and Carol Schultz farm in south central Minnesota. They were being given a mini-course on the feathered residents by Art "Tex" Hawkins, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, and Art Thicke, a La Crescent, Minn., dairy farmer and avid birder.
These farmers were not only out looking for birds, but doing it at the height of the growing season, a time when most agriculturalists are more interested in "growing degree days" than goldfinches. But these producers see birds as important indicators of how successfully they are farming the land. A record-breaking corn yield may be a good gauge of the farm's ability to produce one commodity, but it doesn't provide a measure of the operation's environmental sustainability. It doesn't even give a fully accurate quality-of-life picture.
Monitoring more than money
Birds are one way farm families can fill in the gaps when trying to get a big picture view of how they, and the land, are faring. Finding and utilizing such indicators is particularly important on a farm that is attempting to replace reliance on chemical and energy-intensive production methods with good management. That means monitoring all aspects of a farming operation - from the amount of money each enterprise generates to the number of earthworms under a cow pie - in order to determine the sustainability of the whole farming operation. It even means noticing whether that pair of bluebirds has returned to nest in a rotted-out fence post yet one more spring.
Such measuring sticks are at the root of the Monitoring Project, a collaboration involving two dozen individuals who have come together to develop and test indicators for gauging the ecological and financial health - as well as quality of life - of six farms families. The Monitoring Team is a joint effort of the Land Stewardship Project and the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and includes farmers, biologists, soil scientists, an economist, a rural sociologist and government agency staff. During four years of meetings, field days and mini-tours - all of which usually occur on one of the farms - team members have discussed and implemented several methods for monitoring the land's transition toward sustainability. The speed with which birding became the most popular measuring tool shows that effective monitoring that's fun and user-friendly can put the development of sustainable management techniques in the hands of the farmers themselves. All the sophisticated soil and water tests in the world are of limited use down on the farm if the landowners aren't willing or able to conduct them on their own. But noting, for example, a meadowlark's song or a loggerhead shrike's freshly impaled kill seems to dovetail nicely with many sustainable farming practices.
Grazing's avian promise
The team's original six farm families are pioneers in the use of "management intensive grazing," a method that utilizes the natural ability of cattle to harvest their own feed in the form of grass and to return nutrients back to the land in the form of manure. This technique has proven to be a low-cost, profitable way for producing milk and meat in the Midwest and across the country.
Managed grazing has also proven to be a boon to water and soil quality, and now ecologists are studying its effect on wildlife, particularly grassland songbirds. The stakes are high. In the Midwest, populations of meadowlarks, bobolinks and other grassland-dependent species have suffered severe setbacks as open fields increasingly given over to monocultural plantings of row crops. In addition, row crops are often reliant on heavy doses of pesticides, which can disrupt the natural food chains birds are part of.
While farm country isn't experiencing a Silent Spring just yet, birdsong has grown increasingly muted in recent decades. And help for avian residents like the bobolink or meadowlark is difficult to come by. Farmers have long planted windbreaks or special food plots to help out pheasants, waterfowl or other game birds. Songbirds can benefit from game bird habitat improvement, but is there a way to consistently improve the farming landscape in such a way that a wide variety of birds benefit? And can such habitat improvement be made a natural part of a profitable farming operation?
Some ecologists and sustainable agriculture practitioners believe recent developments in management intensive grazing - portable fencing, efficient watering systems and improved management techniques - can offer just such a win-win situation.
There's no doubt pastures offer superior songbird habitat when compared to endless corn fields. But can a rotationally grazed pasture offer a better habitat than one that is not broken up into separate paddocks? A University of Wisconsin study conducted between 1994 and 1995 recorded more than twice the number of nesting grassland songbirds in rotational paddocks when compared to the same acreage of continuously-grazed pastures. These kinds of research results are exciting to the farmers involved in the Monitoring Project.
"Learning that the habitat for some threatened birds could be improved by the grasslands our grazing paddocks provided peaked our interest," says Monitoring Team member Jennifer Rupprecht, who has a pasture-based beef operation near Lewiston, Minn.
Birding stands out
The state of the bird is far from the only indicator used by members of the Monitoring Project. The team has developed a "tool box," a packet of materials that helps farmers monitor everything from economic well-being and quality of life to frog populations and soil quality on pastures and cropland. Non-team farms - such as the Schultz operation - have been testing a prototype of the tool kit, and preliminary feedback is reinforcing what team members such as Thicke have already experienced: Because it can be worked into livestock chores like moving cattle and fixing fence, birding is a handy way for gauging some of the impacts - positive as well as negative - a farmer is having on the land. It's also more pleasant than grubbing up soil samples.
"I think of all the monitoring tools, birding is the most fun," says Thicke. "It's addictive."
By the third year of the monitoring initiative, bird sightings and activities were among the first items farmers mentioned during their monthly reports. When they got together for meetings or field days, farmers were not bragging about their corn yields, milk production, or even improvements in soil structure. But they were quick to let each other know about the number of successful bluebird or bobolink nestings they had witnessed on the land.
The Fish and Wildlife Service's Hawkins spent time walking the fields with the farmers. Hawkins - the kind of guy who's not afraid to stand in front of a group of livestock farmers and make "chewy-chewy" noises with his mouth to demonstrate a bird call - also trained several local Audubon Society members with excellent birding skills to assist the farm families with initial counts.
"We were just used to common birds," says Thicke. "When Tex walked around the farm with us and was all excited about the variety of species he was seeing in our pastures, well we started getting excited too."
The more commonly known meadow-using birds were among the first species to catch the eyes of the farmers.
"The bird that first hooked me was the eastern kingbird," recalls Mike Rupprecht, Jennifer's husband. "I would see them by the cows, darting after flies. It was quite entertaining. We sure enjoy the show of them chasing other birds."
As their birding skills increased, the farmers, with the help of some local bird enthusiasts, were able to identify and record some of the more threatened grassland nesting birds such as meadowlarks, bobolinks and dickcissels, as well as vesper and grasshopper sparrows. When cutting grass in a paddock one farmer noted seeing a meadowlark with six young flying up from the grass. This sighting suggested that these grassland nesters were raising young in a pasture which was rotationally grazed. This was of particular interest given that a recent Breeding Bird Survey conducted in southeastern Minnesota has shown extremely low numbers of meadowlarks.
As they became more aware of the bird life on their farms, the farmers began to discuss concerns they had about nesting disruptions caused by haying, pasture clipping (a method for keeping the grass more palatable for livestock) and even grazing. Although several of the farmers observed that cattle were sometimes able to graze the paddock with an active nest in it without destroying the nest eggs or nestlings, the results weren't always as positive when it came to mechanical forage harvesting.
"One time when I cut hay on our other farm I must have destroyed five to 10 batches of bobolinks," says Thicke. "The adults were all circling screaming at me."
Changing farming practices
It became clear the hay fields and managed pastures were in danger of becoming "population sinks," or graveyards, rather than "population sources." As a result, several farmers have reduced or delayed pasture clipping to allow for fledglings to achieve some level of mobility before the mower disrupts the nest. Mike Rupprecht did not clip any of his paddocks in 1996. It didn't appear to have any negative effect on the productivity of their pastures or beef cow herd, and the Rupprechts observed a number of male dickcissels using taller plants in their pastures as singing perches. Thicke also eliminated clipping on some of his paddocks this year and by the fourth grazing, he says, "You couldn't tell where you clipped and where you didn't."
One of the management techniques which has the farmers most excited about improving grassland species nesting success is the establishment of "rest areas" within their managed grazing paddock systems. This is the grass farmer's version of keeping a piece of land fallow for part of a season, allowing the vegetation to grow undisturbed by grazing. In 1995, each farm held one paddock out of grazing from the beginning of the season until at least the end of July (most farmers on the Monitoring Team have 20 to 30 fenced paddocks).
The results of the first two years of experimenting with rest areas shows great promise. The densely vegetated rest areas provide a place for birds to nest undisturbed by cattle or machines. They also allow birds disturbed in adjoining paddocks to retreat to the lush cover and re-nest. Farmers noticed greater concentrations of bobolinks and dickcissels in the rest areas the first year of the experiment. A search of a rest paddock on the Rupprecht farm in 1996 confirmed a successful bobolink re-nesting. By the end of the nesting season in late July of that year, Art Thicke and his wife Jean saw more than 60 bobolinks, some of which were fledglings, flocking together on their farm. That's exciting news for lovers of the "skunk blackbird," which has seen a 90 percent plunge in its Midwestern populations in recent years, according to the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey.
In addition, the rested paddocks give grass and legume seeds an opportunity to mature so they can re-seed either directly or through the livestock. Allowing the grasses and legumes to grow for a longer period also increases the root structure of the plants, thus improving soil structure.
Since these rest areas are showing a benefit not only for wildlife but for pasture productivity, these may be management practices that benefit the farm financially, as well as improve the environment. And that's good news for farmers who see the land's ecological and economic health inextricably connected.
"If we lose the birds and toads, we're next" says Ralph Lentz, a Lake City, Minn., beef grazier who is taking part in the Monitoring Project.
In addition, the pleasure the farm families involved in the project have gotten from watching the bird activity has contributed to their belief that there is more to quality of life than a simple correlation to "standard of living." Some have even made personal sacrifices for the sake of the birds.
Thicke, who has identified more than 100 migrant and resident bird species on his farm during the past four years, (he counted 45 bluebird babies in his nesting boxes this spring alone), no longer uses his four-wheeler to take cattle to and from the pastures during the spring and summer; the vehicle's noise inhibits his ability to observe the birds. That's a dramatic shift in habit for the former stock car racer.
"With the four-wheeler we used to just race out and open and close the gates and then race back in," says Thicke as he watches a pair of bobolinks flutter about a meadow on land Brian and Carol Schultz farm. "Now I'm enjoying the whole experience. When I see something like a scarlet tanager, it makes my day." p
Jodi Dansingburg works with the Monitoring Project in LSP's southeast Minnesota office.
| Want to know more? For more information on the Monitoring Project, contact: Richard Ness, Land Stewardship Project, 180 E. Main St., PO Box 130, Lewiston, MN, 55952; (507) 523-3366; e-mail: mlspse@rconnect.com. |
By Dana Jackson
Periodically, the Land Stewardship Project holds special listening sessions in which rural Minnesotans describe visions of what they hope their communities will be like for their children in 30 years. Almost all participants depict a place that is aesthetically pleasing and environmentally safe. They want to see good stewardship of the land by rural residents who are able to earn their living through farming. But equally important is the quality of social interaction they desire. In the towns they want to see numerous, bustling local businesses, good schools, active churches, parks, libraries and gathering places for festivals and celebrations. They want more for their children than just a place to live and a salary to earn; they want a healthy communities.
They would choose Dinuba over Arvin any day.
The towns of Arvin and Dinuba in the Central Valley of California were the subjects of a controversial case study done in 1944 by anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt. With the Central Valley (irrigation) Project about to be built by the Bureau of Reclamation, various state and federal agencies set out to study the potential technical, economic and social consequences of this giant undertaking.
The original law founding the Bureau of Reclamation in 1902 stated that water developed by the Bureau should only be available to holdings of 160 acres or less, but much of the land for which this water was destined was held in large tracts. If the law were upheld, the large farms would need to be broken into 160 acre farms to legitimately use irrigation water.
As an employee of what was then called the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Goldschmidt was assigned to address the question: "What difference does it make to the character of rural life if the farm units are large corporate holdings as opposed to family-sized units, such as the acreage limitation provision was intended to create?"
Goldschmidt found that the town of Dinuba, surrounded by a large number of family farms, supported more businesses, schools, churches, parks and playgrounds than Arvin, which was surrounded by large-scale, industrialized farms. Dinuba also provided a higher median family income. These communities stood in stark contrast to each other even though they were about equal in size and the total dollar value of farm products produced was about the same. The differences in the quality of life between the two towns were fairly obvious, even to visitors.
The Bureau of Economics' research plan called for this detailed examination of two representative communities to be followed by a quantitative comparison based on data easily available on things such as number of local business enterprises, social and civic clubs, newspapers, prevalence of paved roads, sewers and other public facilities, number of teachers residing in the community, etc. However, Goldschmidt's work was prematurely cut short. Large farm owners and agribusiness interests had launched a propaganda campaign against the study from the day it was begun. These interests were finally successful in pressuring the Bureau to cancel the second phase of the study altogether. This prevented the anthropologist from demonstrating in incontrovertible terms the difference between Arvin and Dinuba.
Political pressure from large land holders also caused the Bureau of Economics to suppress the publication of the first phase of the study for two years. Senator Jim Murray of Montana, chair of the Senate Small Business Committee, learned about the work and wanted it to be made public. At first, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Secretary of Agriculture Dewey Anderson stonewalled, but Murray persevered and finally succeeded in getting them to release the document in exchange for not mentioning that it had been done under the auspices of the USDA.
Even though the California press bashed the study when it finally was published in December 1946, academic professionals used it extensively in advanced classes and included it in several textbooks. But it didn't become widely known until its reissue in 1978 under the title, As You Sow: Three Studies of the Social Consequences of Agribusiness, with a forward by Senator Gaylord Nelson. This book included a section called "Agribusiness and Political Power," which was Goldschmidt's description of the controversy over his study. This version was widely read and described to a larger audience by leading spokespersons for alternative agriculture. It became a reference point for those in the 1980s who were critiquing conventional agriculture and proposing alternatives. The names Arvin and Dinuba became symbols, their implications recognized by many people whether or not they had actually read the study by Walter Goldschmidt.
Here in the Midwest, these symbols have become particularly relevant in the past few years as livestock production has become industrialized, with mega dairies and hog factories displacing independent producers. Today, when members of a farm family look across the road and sees a dozen long white buildings under construction and backhoes at work digging a hole the size of a city block, they know that thousands of hogs will be confined in those buildings and millions of gallons of putrid liquid hog manure will soon fill the lagoon. But the family and their neighbors are supposed to be happy because Cargill, Tyson, Seaboard, Premium Standard Farms or a group of investors from within the state is bringing "economic development" to their community.
In the United States, 65 percent of independent hog producers have gone out of business since 1980, and more give up every day, often because they are just intimidated by propaganda that livestock production through concentration, like all large-scale specialized agricultural production, is more efficient and thus inevitably the best system. However, diversified grain/livestock farms using intensive management and low-cost, innovative systems can still support families and communities in the Midwest. Provided they have fair access to markets, independent farmers can and do have competitive livestock enterprises. But bankers often prefer to loan money to large companies that employ low-wage, landless workers in livestock factories, and this is seen as economic development. Agricultural lenders and extension educators who recommend one large dairy over 10 small ones and one corporate hog farm over 20 diversified farms that raise hogs are choosing the Arvin model for rural communities.
More recent studies indicate that the Arvin model is not the wise choice for investing in rural communities here in the Midwest, either. In 1992, University of Minnesota economists Dick Levins and John Chism analyzed the spending patterns of 30 farmers selected from the membership of the Southwest Minnesota Farm Business Management Association. The researchers found that for livestock intensive operations, the percentage spent locally (defined as within a 20-mile radius of the farm) declined dramatically with an increase in the size of the operation. A 1995 case study of Minnesota's Sibley County found that large farms that raise only crops purchase fewer goods and services on Main Street than do smaller dairy operations. The study, which was conducted by the University of Minnesota's Patricia Weir Love, concluded that the quality of life in the community of Green Isle had declined dramatically.
Reported Love: "Retail sales dropped by 81 percent between 1979 and 1989, the public dance hall closed, and the grade school adjourned permanently. Today, a collection of main street stores, feed mills, and a manufacturing plant remain idle."
We know that rural people still prefer communities with independent small farms and retail businesses supporting each other, communities with a rich social life and a high level of civic participation. USDA policy and Wall Street hype has enabled agribusiness to create Arvins; advocates of sustainable agriculture, such as LSP, are helping rural people build and retain Dinubas.
After his Arvin and Dinuba work, Walter Goldschmidt authored many books and went on to a long and distinguished academic career in anthropology. This fall, the American Anthropological Society honored Goldschmidt at a special session during its annual conference.
When it comes to agricultural science, there isn't a piece of research property much more prestigious than the federal government's farm facility in Beltsville, Md. But consider this: The University of Minnesota owns an agricultural research center that is slightly larger than the Beltsville facility. And the Minnesota facility, called the Rosemount Agricultural Experiment Station, is 30 minutes from both downtowns in the Twin Cities.
Those are exciting facts to the Land Stewardship Project, which is part of an effort to make Rosemount the premier publicly funded sustainable agriculture research facility in the nation. Working with the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and a coalition consisting of nonprofit organizations, researchers, farmers and other private citizens who are neighbors to the facility, LSP has helped create a proposal for revamping the 12-square mile experiment station site and making it more accountable to the needs of taxpayers, local residents and the original land grant mission of the University.
Under the proposal, the facility would no longer go by the somewhat restrictive title of "experiment station," says LSP executive director George Boody, who helped draft the proposal. "The Rosemount Center for Landscape and Community Development" would be a way for the University to address complex and interconnected problems of the environment, human community, suburban development near rural areas and sustainability of the land.
A little more than a year ago, it looked like any agricultural research - conventional or otherwise - was going to be a thing of the past on the experiment station. LSP learned that the University had put the property on an "accelerated" development schedule which called for, among other things, establishing a 30,000-home suburban community. LSP and others interested in the future of agricultural research pointed out that Minnesota taxpayers and the research facility's rural neighbors had not been consulted about the future of this public property. Dakota County officials and residents have spent years trying to protect their farmland from sprawling development. As one of the largest pieces of contiguous real estate in the Twin Cities region, the station land serves as a crucial buffer between the city and rural areas to the south and west. In addition, developing experiment station land now will severely hamper the University's ability to respond to increased agricultural research needs in the future.
After the University's secretive development plan was publicized by LSP, embarrassed officials put a decision on the station's future on the back burner. In November, Minnesota legislators representing both the House and Senate agriculture committees toured Rosemount and made public assurances that the facility would be kept intact.
Now the hard part: Offering up an alternative, sustainable future for the land. It had become clear during the short, fiery debate over the University's plan to develop Rosemount that it has not been serving the needs of a more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable agriculture. The proposed Center for Landscape and Community Development is based on a "landscape management" approach. This is a comprehensive, integrated method of management that provides a way to view a piece of property in its entirety, rather than as various research parcels with no connections to each other - or to the people residing in the area. Sustainable farmers are increasingly viewing their operations as "whole systems" that take into account the health of the land and the family, and how they relate to the rest of the community. Much of the research done on experiment stations is done in isolation of other research projects or of the station's overall mission. In addition, farmers and other local residents are seldom made a part of such a research facility's decision making process.
The Center for Landscape and Community Development proposal committee believes by taking a whole system approach, the experiment station can do cutting edge research on, for example, marketing of farm products straight to urban consumers, agroforesty, developing ecological indicators for sustainable farming systems, landscape restoration and reclamation and sustainable land use.
Will the Center for Landscape and Community Development proposal fly? It would need to get the support of not only the University but probably the Minnesota Legislature and the Governor as well. The proposal has been presented to University officials and as of late December no action had been taken.
CSA Directory deadline Jan. 31
Will you be operating a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operation in Minnesota or western Wisconsin during the 1998 growing season? Please contact Gina Scanlon at the LSP's Twin Cities office about being listed in our 1998 CSA Directory. The deadline is Jan. 31. p
Nopar leaves LSP after 13 years
Doug Nopar, an organizer with the Land Stewardship Project almost from the organization's birth, has left to pursue other interests.
Soon after joining LSP in 1984, Nopar, along with his wife JoAnn Thomas, organized meetings in South Dakota counties experiencing high erosion rates. Nopar eventually became director of LSP's southeast Minnesota office in Lewiston and helped pioneer the use of small group discussions at LSP meetings. Nopar also helped organize the Stewardship Farming Program, a breakthrough four-year project that brought together 25 farm families to discuss ways of promoting and practicing a stewardship ethic on the land. He worked with LSP's on-farm research projects and helped develop the Farming for the Future videos.
Nopar, who lives with JoAnn and their two daughters, Ellie, 9, and Sylvia, 5, near Winona, is planning on devoting his time to issues surrounding race and culture in rural society. Nopar says he has enjoyed working with people who realize the health of their community is tied to the health of the land.
"Bringing people together who didn't know each other before but who ended up having the same values, concerns and interests was very rewarding. They learned through discussion that they were not alone in their concern for a good land ethic," he says. "I've also enjoyed getting to know an incredible number of farmers and LSP staffers who have got just so much wisdom."
His favorite piece of wisdom?
"I have a quote stuck on my wall from Leo Rowekamp, a longtime LSP member. It says: 'I always tell the truth - that way I never have to try very hard to remember what I've said.'"
New office assistant
Lesley Shelley has joined LSP's Twin Cities office as its new office assistant. Shelley, of Stillwater, Minn., is a student at Century College in White Bear Lake. She also coaches high school volleyball and softball.
LSP internships available
The Land Stewardship Project