Union School Slough © John Anderson

Farming with the Wild — Excerpts

Farming in Leopold’s Footsteps by Fred Kirschenmann

As a farmer, my relationship with wild things has been fraught with ambiguity. I grew up believing that wildness was the enemy of agriculture. I didn’t like blackbirds eating our sunflowers, coyotes attacking our calves, or weeds robbing our crops of nutrients and moisture. So I had an almost instinctive inclination to tear all the wildness out of our farm. I was ready to use all the tools or scientific management tactics available to eradicate wild things from the farm.

A part of me even felt morally justified in harboring that attitude because it is deeply entrenched in our culture. The early Puritans who settled on New England’s shores considered it part of their manifest destiny to “tame the wilderness” and “build the Kingdom of God” in this “new land.” Cotton Mather (1663-1728) considered the wilderness to be the “devil’s playground.” It was, therefore, part of his God-given responsibility to urge his fellow Puritans to replace the wilderness with nice, neat rows of corn. For good or ill, that Puritan ethic shaped much of the culture in North America once Native Americans were driven from the land. I am a product of that culture.

Like the generations of farmers and ranchers before me, I have lived, in part, by this wilderness eradication ethic and caused devastating harm to natural ecosystems. Meanwhile, conservationists have adopted a countervailing ethic in order to protect the wilderness. In response to centuries of abuse, conservationists decided to preserve wilderness in its natural state by designating certain regions as Wilderness Areas that are to be protected from human activity. Only with great difficulty have wilderness advocates managed to keep a small proportion of our country (approximately 5 percent) free from industrial intrusions (though not free of livestock). But by quarantining humans from certain parts of the landscape to preserve it, we have also inadvertently consented to humans using the rest of the landscape without any regard for its wildness.

We now know that this dual approach to land use is dysfunctional on both counts. Wildness cannot be “maintained” in the form of isolated pieces of the landscape, and farms cannot be productively managed without wildness. Just as wild organisms need the connectivity of natural ecosystems to thrive, so agriculture needs the wildness of soil organisms to maintain soil quality and pollinators to grow crops — both necessary elements for productive farming. So in the interests of both productive farming and robust wilderness, we need to revisit our dualistic mentality.

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The Wild Farm Alliance

The Wild Farm Alliance platform was written and edited by a broad coalition of farmers, livestock producers, conservationists, restorationists, and sustainable food system activists over a one-year period. It is intended to set both a context as well as base-line standards for the emerging “conservation-based agriculture” movement. Since its introduction in 2003, over 100 groups and individuals have signed on to the platform, and it has exerted a profound influence on discussions about the future of sustainable agriculture and the scope of conservation efforts. The platform has also been extremely instrumental in the establishment of regional “farming with the wild” efforts around the country.

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