The title was picked without consciously referring to the Buffalo Springfield song of the late 60’s, but as the connection occurred to me, it seemed strangely appropriate. There is much angst about how divided our country is now, but it was even more divided back then, with many demonstrations escalating into riots and violence. Still, the paranoia and the closing off of alternatives because “we” could never trust “them” enough to collaborate and cooperate is all too familiar. There is an aspect of this adversarial tribal identification between many in the ag economy and the environmental community. I have worked as a consulting agronomist for forty years, but with one foot in the other world. I have no tribe. So here are a few thoughts on this topic, using recent examples from my life, which I can then tie back to my restoration.

A few months ago my wife, Linda, was talking to a U S Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) employee in Minnesota who had recently moved there from another state, and he related his surprise and dismay at the rancor shown to him by many farmers. They were openly angry with FWS (and with the Minnesota DNR) because of a perceived hostility to farmers and actions those agencies took which they felt were in opposition to their making a living on the farm. To borrow a line from another song from the 60’s, “I’ve looked at life from both sides now,” and I think I can put myself in both sets of shoes.

From the farmers’ point of view, it starts with the casual denigration of the way we farm today, our farms referred to as industrial or factory farms, in opposition to the small, diversified farms of 50 years ago. I grew up on one of those farms, and while it was a good life there were many aspects which no one would ask us to go back to. The work was brutal, even for children, vacations were unknown, and serious accidents were normal. I have a memory of being in church as a teenager and suddenly being struck by the number of physically damaged men, with fingers or even arms gone, hunched over with chronic back injuries. My father, who was without one finger from an accident and had a bad back his entire life from an attempt to stop a runaway team of horses was a good example. Public policy supports farmers financially on one hand, but limits them in other ways. A couple years ago Minnesota mandated perennial filter strips along waterways on all farms in the state. Without going into details, this mandate could easily cost an average size farm $5-10,000 per year in expenses and foregone income from those filter strips. Add in the competition for land from FWS and DNR purchased for wildlife areas, the problems landowners have with hunters trespassing on their land and fights over drainage issues, and some farmers feel besieged. We all are stuck seeing the world through our own eyes, and we like to see ourselves on the side of the angels, in this case feeding the world while caring for the land, and it is difficult to reconcile that with feeling you are viewed as a villain. The lament is, “Why am I viewed as a bad guy?”

On the other side, the FWS employee wonders what the hell he did to get yelled at. Visiting with someone about a voluntary easement for a fair price doesn’t feel like an aggressive or a hostile act. Buying land from willing sellers, which supports the land values of farmers, supports their balance sheets. The filter strips which limit silt and chemicals from impacting water users downstream furthers an important societal goal a farmer should understand and support. As an employee of FWS he is trying to build a richer and more abundant world to live in for farmers as well as everyone else. Most farmers hunt and fish, and all profess to love the land and the environment. But once again the lament is, “Why am I viewed as a bad guy?”

Still, we are all parochial and selfish; we are all weak vessels. We tend to group those with whom we disagree into a faceless group we can rail against or ignore, and a couple negative experiences indict an entire group. Witness how the 9/11 terrorists and ISIS became the face of Islam in many people’s minds, which is a bit like seeing violent neo-nazis or members of the KKK as emblematic of all Christian Americans. Thus has it always been, but I will forego other examples of these divisions to look at examples showing another path.

Recently I talked to a Farm Credit Services (FCS) loan officer about financing another potential project. He is my age, and very much a peer, having also grown up on a remote hill farm. He has made a good career for himself as a knowledgeable and very hard nosed banker. He also farms the land he grew up on and he was very interested in my prairie restoration and my conservation projects. He shared some of his ideas for his farm as he nears retirement, which includes putting several parcels into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) both for the soil and water conservation aspect and as wildlife habitat. He smiled and said, “As we get older we think more about the legacy we are leaving, and hope we leave things better than we found them.” The CRP program will pay him rent, but it would be easier, and probably more profitable, to continue farming the land. Yet my conservative banker friend was very pleased with the idea of a small sacrifice to improve the environment, and pleased that an FCS loan might facilitate my conservation project.

The other example I will relate happened several years ago. A pair of burrowing owls, the first that I have seen within 200 miles of here, set up housekeeping in an old badger hole in the road ditch two miles south of my place. The adjoining landowner is a gruff older farmer, recently retired, who rents his farm ground to the most aggressive young farmer in our neighborhood. There is little land in our township that is not farmed, quarter after quarter of corn, soybeans and alfalfa blanket the countryside. What these owls were thinking when they settled there I cannot imagine, much like a young family moving to a nice house in the middle of a barren landscape of warehouses. My wife and I worried that someone would take a potshot at them, whether out of fear they might be an endangered species which would limit their land management (a worry far out of proportion to the actual implications of harboring an endangered species) or simply out of the old country ethos that animals are there to shoot.

Yet every day we would drive by and meet the otherworldly stare of a burrowing owl. Usually one of the pair would lift six or eight feet in the air as we drove by, lightly dropping back to the earth after we passed. Soon we found that not only had the rest of the neighborhood noticed them, they had adopted them as the mascots of the township. The landowner had given strict instructions to his renter that the owls were not to be disturbed. Though this gentleman obsessively mows his ditches as if they were an extension of his front lawn, no mower was allowed near the owl nest. Other neighbors would sneak their vehicles past on the side of the road opposite the nest, trying to get a look at our new residents without disturbing them. The burrowing owls were a happening.

Unfortunately we then got a four inch downpour, and the runoff came down the ditch and flooded the nest. We never saw the owls again, and we are bereft of our interesting friends. The entire township mourned the loss of the owl nest. If that can occur in this very conservative, practical, Republican area, it can and does happen everywhere. Given a chance, people will accommodate the natural environment. People are always the problem and the solution; the joy and the sadness; the giver and the taker. Yin and yang. The eternal question is how to stack the deck so we get a little more yin and a little less yang.

This brings me back to the project of the year (not the one I was talking to the banker about), a small supplement to the 100 acre restoration that could have big consequences. I will probably devote an entire post to the project in the future, but here is a summary, along with a short discussion on how it fits into this post’s thesis.

In the northwest quarter of our farm, we own the northwest 40 acres and a neighbor owns the other 120. On our 40 is a 17 acre crop field and to the north of the crop field is 23 acres of native prairie and wetland that had a prescribed burn in 2018. The prairie has not been hayed or grazed for almost 50 years, and badly needs a return to more active management. The neighbor and I recently agreed to trade the 17 acre field of mine for a similarly sized parcel to its northeast, east of my prairie as shown above. The parcel I am trading for is very rough ground with a draw through the middle where water has run steadily for the past two years, a very awkward area to farm. In the trade he would receive better farmground, but I receive an area that I would do another prairie restoration upon, fence it with the existing native prairie, and graze in two or three years, when the planting was well established. This small action hardly seems significant, but as the CRP contracts mature, it allows it to be part of a growing group of pastures which could eventually reach 400 acres in 6-8 paddocks, surrounding about 300 acres of crop ground.

On the one hand (yin) this allows great flexibility in management for the benefit of the prairies, native and restored. Almost the only reasonable tool to fight bromegrass takeover in mesic sites is grazing, specifically grazing early and late in the season. All the tools of grazing intensity and timing to benefit native plants and discomfit invader species can be used. The scale is such that habitat connectivity, not just within my farm, but with surrounding grasslands, is significant. It will also provide a large reservoir of native plant materials to gather seed from, whether for further projects of mine or for sale. When added to the other ecosystem services the prairies can provide it becomes an encouraging conservation project.

On the other hand (yang) this becomes a sizeable and hopefully profitable grazing unit for the neighbor’s son, a young man who would like to increase the size of their cowherd, allowing him to farm full time. Between the 400 acres of grass and the potential for grazing cornstalks and cover crops, this could support a cowherd of about 100 head for a 6 month grazing season. Right now their herd of 100 cows gets divided into 6-7 small groups, including on two small pastures of mine, creating inefficiencies and complicating management. Their cowherd could be increased by 60-80 cows with little extra work involved in the grazing.

In other words, one plus one could equal three, the definition of synergy. Yin and yang in harmony; a loud affirmation that we are all in this together. I am now planning, gathering information and gathering partners pursuant to a fall seeding, and am excited to see what can be accomplished. And though I am tempted to wrap this up with another old song lyric I will show restraint and not weary you with another 60’s reference. For what it’s worth.