Seed Savers
2003
Summer Edition

REVIEW:
The Farm as Natural Habitat
Reconnecting Food Systems with Ecosystems
Edited by Dana Jackson and Laura Jackson

Book Review by Jean English

The most significant book I've read in a long time is The Farm as Natural Habitat-Reconnecting Food Systems with Ecosystems, edited by Dana L. Jackson and Laura L. Jackson and with a foreword by Nina Leopold Bradley. The organic movement, then community supported agriculture, season extension and rotational intensive grazing, encouraged farmers to take leaps toward more sustainable operations. The Jacksons' tenet that we should amplify the importance of farm ecosystems will prompt the next big stride toward sustainability-a stride that will encourage farmers to take better care of their land, and naturalists and consumers to visit those farms to buy food and see diverse, healthy ecosystems.

Imagine weekly shopping and bird watching as one and the same trip! Dana Jackson cites research showing that "many more birds and more different species use rotational pastures than use continuous pastures," and she tells of a farmer who "is ecstatic when he talks about birds he sees while moving cattle-birds that weren't there when those pastures were planted to corn and soybeans."

Consider the headlines in Maine newspapers last summer about excessive numbers of visitors to Acadia National Park and Baxter State Park, and the effects of those excesses on air and soil quality. Multiply those headlines by all of the state and national parks in the country. Why drive hundreds or thousands of miles to visit an over-visited landscape when you can travel down the road to a local farm to pick strawberries or pick up a bag of fresh produce-and perhaps see a moose or bobolink while you're there?

Dana Jackson writes about Dave Palmquist, interpretative naturalist at Whitewater State Park, the most popular park in Minnesota. Palmquist sometimes takes campers 10 miles away from the park to show them a local, sustainable farm. "There's an increasing understanding," Palmquist relates, "you can't save the world within state parks." The campers are impressed that they can see a beautiful farm and bluebirds at the same time.

"When farms are factories," writes Dana, "they produce commodities and profit for agribusiness and charge external costs to the land and rural communities. When farms are natural habitats for humans, domesticated crops, and livestock, and also for wild plants and animals, they produce food and multiple other benefits for society… We need all people to look at farming with new eyes, to see the potential of the farm as natural habitat, and to refuse to accept the inevitability of farms becoming rural factories to serve the global economy. We must teach that 'the land is one organism.' "

The Farm as Natural Habitat tells how to do that. It describes problems in agriculture-how manure from confined pigs in the Midwest contributes to the hypoxia (low oxygen) zone in the Gulf of Mexico; how simplified row cropping systems increase pest pressure and, consequently, the use of pesticides. Laura Jackson tells why conservation biologists, in general, have not stepped forward to help conserve agricultural lands, and she implores biologists to change their attitudes.

Wellington Huffaker's chapter, "Reading the Land Together," shows the benefits of such change. He talks of seeing his first sandhill crane of the year at a farm, then hearing the farmers (brothers) tell him "the exact date the first cranes arrived, which crops cranes liked best, how much damage they do on an annual basis, and the location of many of their favorite nesting spots. I realized that the brothers studied the cranes' behavior as ecologists would and were actually more observant than many ecologists I know."

Brian DeVore writes in a chapter about farmer David Podoll, who lets Canada thistles grow on the margins of his farm, where thistle rust and the painted lady butterfly can thrive and then help control thistles that grow in crop fields. Another farmer tells DeVore, "You must have the pest to have the predator. I get nervous of I don't see any pests." Yet another says, "I think of all the monitoring tools, birding is the most fun. It's addictive."

DeVore tells of farmers at gatherings talking not of corn yields or milk production, but of bluebird and bobolink sightings; of growers who have learned to delay cutting pasture until fledglings move out; of the increase in birds when just one paddock in a rotational intensive grazing situation is not clipped or grazed for a season. DeVore relates a fascinating story of a farmer who planted trees alongside a stream, as is commonly recommended to control erosion, but who left parts of the stream bank covered with herbaceous plants when he ran out of tree planting time. After many years, the trees grew so well that they shaded out the grasses, creating bare soil-which was prone to erosion. The grassy/herbaceous banks, however, grazed periodically but briefly, were lush and not subject to erosion-not only because they weren't shaded, but also because grazing reduced the slope of the stream bank.

The idea of the farm as a natural habitat struck me pleasantly this summer when my family and I raked our own blueberries at Sewall's Orchard in Lincolnville. The day before raking, we had been to a retail outlet near the Bangor Mall looking for software, only to find that my three-year-old computer was too old to do what my son wanted the software to do. This was one of those unbearably hot and muggy days-conditions due in part, no doubt, to all of the driving that people (including us) do in Maine in the summer. We were not a happy family by the end of the shopping trip. The next day, blueberry day, was gorgeous, however, and seeing the clear skies from the top of Sewall's hill, seeing the glorious Camden Hills and all of the watershed between Sewall's and those hills, renewed our spirits-and filled our freezer with 107 pounds of organic blueberries! We were a happy family that day.

The idea of the farm as a natural habitat can be extended to another exciting idea: that of the farm as part of a larger habitat-a watershed. The Jacksons' ideas link beautifully with one put forth by Fred Kirschenmann at last summer's IFOAM Conference: that before long, we will be certifying as organic not just farms but watersheds.

I've described just a few of the ideas that Dana and Laura Jackson introduce in The Farm as Natural Habitat. It's an uplifting book that would be great for a study group of farmers and/or ecologists; for a college class; or for those sitting-by-the-woodstove-in-winter days that are coming.

Originally published in the December 2003-February 2003 issue of Main Organic Farmer and Gardener, the quarterly newspaper of the Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association, PO Box 170, Unity, ME 04988, e-mail mofga@mofga.org.

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