202 Agroecology and Sustainability
It is no surprise that people passionate about wildlife and the preservation of
natural habitats have concentrated on protecting other places, those dramatic
expanses of land where more of the original landscape remains, such as the Bound-
ary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota, the rugged mountains of Colorado
and Montana, and roadless areas in Alaska. Such conservationists have accepted
the agricultural Midwest, especially the Corn Belt, as a sacrifice area, like an open
pit iron mine, or an oil field, where we mine the rich soil and create toxic wastes to
extract basic raw materials. But the environmental impacts of this kind of mining
are not confined to farming country. No nature preserves within its watersheds or
wildlife area downstream on the Mississippi River can be adequately protected
from farming practices that simplify ecosystems to a few manageable species and
replace ecosystem services with industrial processes.
People who live in rural areas or urban residents who drive through them may
not know that they are seeing a biologically impoverished landscape, because they
have no knowledge of its diversity before modern agriculture. Others may know or
imagine what the land looked like with different kinds of crops, meadows and
livestock in pastures, but they accept its simplification because they are convinced
that the main trends in agriculture cannot be overcome. Agribusiness has success-
fully persuaded farmers, politicians, civic leaders and even conservationists to
believe that agricultural modernization leads to specialization and industrializa-
tion, and that financially viable alternatives are unavailable even though such mod-
ernization reduces the rural quality of life and harms the environment.
In this chapter, I will introduce an alternative vision for agriculture that defies
the trends considered inevitable. It is a vision inspired by Aldo Leopold’s writing
that farming and natural areas should be interspersed, not separated, and by the
farmer-members of the Land Stewardship Project, whose ways of managing farms
have created a natural habitat for them, for their crops and livestock, and for the
native plants and animals of the area. I will also describe two sustainable farming
practices that currently are improving biological diversity on rural landscapes and
showing the real possibility of this vision. Let us look at the practices of main-
stream industrial farming that render the countryside an ecological sacrifice zone.
Rural Lands as Industrial Zones
The loss of biological diversity was not the only environmental consequence of
creating the Corn Belt. Soil erosion, depletion of water resources, contamination
of groundwater and surface water from fertilizers and pesticides (Soule and Piper,
1991), and a steady silt load in rivers are some of the consequences of so much
tilled land. The sediment load in the Minnesota River at Mankato is equal to a
ten-ton dump truck load moving by approximately every five and a half minutes
(Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, 1994).
The most serious environmental consequences are yet to come because of the
growing consolidation in the livestock industry fuelled by the abundance of cheap