10
The Farm as Natural Habitat
Dana L. Jackson
‘We should be having our summer board meeting on a farm. It’s really beautiful at
my place now.’ When Dan French brought this up at the annual meeting of the
Land Stewardship Project’s board of directors, everyone nodded in agreement. Why
didn’t we think about scheduling the meeting there? I had spent a few days at the
French farm several summers ago, sitting under a tent listening to instructors in the
holistic management course held there and looking at Muriel’s flower garden and the
black-and-white dairy cows in the pasture beyond. A light breeze brought us the
fragrance of green alfalfa from the barn where Dan’s son was unloading bales. The
class walked down to the creek, where we talked about the water cycle and how to
judge water quality by observing the kinds of insects and fish in the water. The gravel
on the creek bottom sparkled in the clear water. There was a flurry of birds and
birdsong in the taller grass of a pasture section that hadn’t been grazed for awhile.
When you drive up to the French farm, it looks like an interesting place, with
its barns and outbuildings, vegetable and flower gardens, and shady picnic area. It
doesn’t look like those farmsteads one often sees in the Corn Belt, where the house
and a machinery shed or two seem to just stick up out of a corn field, as if the own-
ers had planted every inch they could on the place. Actually, if you drive on Inter-
state 35 between Saint Paul and Des Moines, you do not even see many houses.
The landscape in July seems to be covered just with corn, a seemingly endless
monotony of green stalks broken occasionally by shorter bushy soybeans.
It is hard to imagine what it must have looked like when Europeans first settled
the Midwest, when it was a wilderness covered with prairie, forests, clear streams,
and herds of buffalo. Too quickly it became dominated by agricultural uses inter-
rupted by a few patches of prairie or woods around lakes or rivers that harboured
remnants of natural habitat. Some prairie plants survived in pastures and meadows
until they were replaced by fields of corn and soybeans in the last part of the 20th
century. Then animals were moved into barns and feedlots, fences came down, and
habitat edges disappeared. It only took about 150 years to reduce biological diver-
sity on this landscape to a numbing sameness.
Reprinted from The Farm as Natural Habitat by Dana L Jackson and Laura L Jackson. Copyright ©
2002 Island Press. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington DC.