208 Agroecology and Sustainability
with canvas for the winter. Hogs bed in deep straw or corn stalks, which composts
with their manure, warming the hogs in the process and producing nearly com-
posted, dry fertilizer for the fields when the barns are cleaned. Manure is not a
toxic waste in management intensive rotational grazing or hoop house production
systems, and the cost to the farmer of handling it and the public for regulating it
is little or nothing. In fact, overall production costs are so much lower that farmers
can make a profit as long as they have fair access to markets (Dansingburg and
Gunnink, 1995) or sell cooperatively with other farmers or directly to consumers.
If market prices are too low, farmers can use these hoop houses for other purposes,
such as storing hay or machinery, which gives them a flexibility that producers try-
ing to pay off the debt for a high-tech, single-use confinement facility do not have.
Using management intensive rotational grazing and deep-bedded straw systems in
hoop houses, farmers can take advantage of ecosystem services in providing animal
feed and managing manure. These systems are efficient alternatives to the indus-
trial production models for livestock and can compatibly exist alongside or as part
of natural ecosystems.
The Benefits of Diversity
Diversified farms producing feed for their own livestock may rotate crops of alfalfa
or other legumes, corn, soybeans and small grains such as barley or oats, in contrast
to conventional cash grain farms that rotate only corn and soybeans or grow corn
with no rotation. For example, Jaime DeRosier employs a complex rotation of hay,
wheat, barley, vetch, flax, buckwheat, corn and soybeans on his large organic farm
in north-western Minnesota (DeRosier, 1998). The Fred Kirschenmann farm in
North Dakota rotates up to ten different grain or hay crops in three different rota-
tions (Anonymous, 2000). In all parts of the country, farmers are also planting
several different kinds of grasses and legumes in their pasture mixes, planting fields
in strips of several crops, intercropping one species with another (such as field peas
with small grains) and using cover crops between plantings of major crops. In
California, orchards, vineyards and specialty crop farms have added cover crops
and farmscape plantings to attract pollinators and other beneficial insects (CAFF,
2000).
The benefits of biodiversity in agriculture were effectively laid out in a report
with that title by a task force of the Council for Agriculture Science and Technol-
ogy, co-chaired by ecologist G. David Tilman and geneticist Donald N. Duvick
(CAST, 1999). The report stresses the dependency of modern agriculture upon
biological diversity and advocates greater attention to preserving diversity both in
domesticated crops and livestock, and in the natural landscape.
The Benefits of Biodiversity also discusses the dependence of modern agricul-
ture upon ecosystem services, such as pollination, generation of soils and renewal
of their fertility, pest control and decomposition of wastes. It acknowledges the