The Farm as Natural Habitat 211agricultural landscape from ruin, even if those that exist possess a strong land ethic.
We would be foolish to depend upon giant producers and processors such as Tyson,
IBP and Smithfield corporations to exercise a land ethic. Whose responsibility is it
then? It is a public responsibility. Good farming produces public goods, and the
public must support good farming. Instead of accepting industrial agriculture as a
necessary evil and counting on regulations to soften its negative environmental
and social consequences, the public (particularly conservationists and environ-
mentalists) should use their dollars and their votes and their influence to bring
about agroecological restoration.
If asked whether it is all right to consider agricultural land as an ecological
sacrifice area, most conservationists would loudly say no. But without thinking
about it, many have acquiesced to the inevitability of farms becoming corporate
factories when they have been involved in state or national processes to establish
regulations for feedlots. Activist organizations have worked for strong regulations
of nonpoint source water pollution and confined animal feeding operations, and
their chief opponents have often been farmers, or farm organizations, which has
caused them to develop antagonism for farmers. Many have not had the opportu-
nity to know farmers whose diversified livestock systems operate without need of
regulations. If conservationists could get to know farmers who are stewards of the
soil, water and the wild and learn about their management philosophy and the
farming practices they use, perhaps they would see possibilities for making basic
changes in US agriculture that would restore rural landscapes to greater biological
diversity and environmental health.
Dave Palmquist, the interpretative naturalist at south-east Minnesota’s White-
water State Park, the most popular park in Minnesota with about one-third of a
million visitors a year, knows a stewardship farm family. He has taken groups of
campers 10 miles away from the park to visit the 275-acre farm owned and oper-
ated by Mike and Jennifer Rupprecht, one of the six farms in LSP’s monitoring
project. His reason: ‘There’s an increasing understanding you can’t save the world
within state parks. The sixty-five little pieces of Minnesota (state parks) aren’t going
to do it. If you have to go outside your park to tell an important story that relates
to the park area, do that.’ Palmquist believes that visitors are impressed. ‘It’s clear
to the visitors that these farmers embrace diversity and see themselves as being part
of the bigger environment. The more diversity, the more bobolinks, bluebirds,
etcetera, they have on their land, the better they feel. If they can make a living
there, maintain a family farm, and be gentler on the environment, that’s very excit-
ing for them’ (DeVore, 1996).
This kind of agroecological restoration is occurring on many farms today,
illustrating that farms can be managed to give rural landscapes a mixture of agri-
cultural and natural ecosystems that preserve much of local biodiversity and pro-
vide ecosystem services essential to agriculture. We need the heirs to Aldo Leopold’s
thought and inspiration and those who respect the work of modern ecologists such
as David Tilman and naturalists like Dave Palmquist to help society see this vision
of the farm as natural habitat and work to turn it into reality.