Where a land ethic blooms

Listen to this essay 29 minute listen Forty iron rectangles, each one blunt as a piano key, rotate into a blurring fury that hides the eight-foot-long shaft at the heart of the flail chopper. I am perched atop several tons of iron, with 80 horsepower at my command. This part of farming is straightforward – even a mechanically challenged tree-hugger like me can manage to depress the clutch, shift into second, and ease the throttle forward. The tractor’s tall, deeply treaded tires churn, revolving into a smooth spin. Everything is spinning: fans, belts, alternator, the driveshaft, axles. I don’t understand the mechanism fully, yet the tractor and chopper and I are propelled forward across the knee-high whiskers of a coarsely bearded cornfield. It is Indian summer in southern Wisconsin. My wife and I and our young son live here on her family’s farm. Both of us are employed off the farm, but on weekends and many evenings I am an apprentice to my father-in-law, David. Today, we are taking advantage of a brief period of warm, dry weather. Winter is approaching, and I could be spending the day beside our woodsplitter – the gasoline-sipping, hydraulically heroic mechanism that makes it possible to put up several cords of firewood quickly each year – but that work can wait until the cool, sunny days of fall are shoved aside by the relentless spin of the earth into darkness, sleet, snow and frozen ground. The wall of tall green corn that stood here this summer has been transformed by fall and harvest. Little is standing after the field was stripped by a seed-combing combine. The mechanical tornado flails so loudly behind me: wailing against the air, grinding off the root-buttressed corn-stalk stumps, sucking up spent leaves and stripped cobs. In my wake, dry corn litter passes through the chopper like water compelled into frothy turbulence, falling again into an even, silent surface that hides so much activity below. No time to waste – the weather is expected to hold for another day, and I need to cover the field before the light fails this afternoon. Tomorrow, David will rake this chewed-up detritus into windrows and then come back for another round to bale them up. While it is good to leave some of this thatch on the field – to keep a roof over the soil and guard against erosion by wind and rain – we can afford to borrow some of this, which also makes good straw. Wherever livestock are gathered in close quarters, their waste can produce concentrations of ammonia and other gases that can be harmful to animals and people alike. Adding straw slows the breakdown of manure and urine, reducing the production of noxious gases and suspending valuable nutrients in a semi-solid mixture. The straw and excrement will come back to this field loaded with nitrogen, phosphorous and other nutrients. The ‘barn-pack’ is also heavy with organic matter that keeps a significant portion of the nutrients locked up for longer periods of time until it is broken down by the creatures who are at work beneath the calm surface of the field: literally tons of worms and beetles and other invertebrates; many miles of fungal hyphae; and countless diversity of bacteria. The denizens of this foodshed work to decompose the thick cell walls of the straw, as well as the partially digested grass stems and leaves that passed through the cattle and into their manure while the livestock fed on hay. The creatures of the soil also feed on the bodies of the gut microbes that helped ruminants digest their hay. The gut-borne microbes are the true herbivores in this system: the power of the sun is harnessed by plants and turned into grain or hay, which is gathered by the farmers and transported to the barn, then delivered to the habitat of the gut by a large mammal whose brain, mouth and muscles spend their days gathering food for its microbial tenants. However, the microbes are short-lived and quickly finish their shift at the top of the system. As they die, they pass through the threshold of hind gut and, finally, the anus. Shit. Is it fair to call any of this waste? The spark of life in the stinking barn pack is not yet exhausted, not yet lost to entropy. Roots burrow deep in search of more phosphorous, nitrogen and water to carry on the busy work of building ion transporters, enzymes, lignin and proteins – from root to stem to leaf to seed. Through spring, summer and fall, the straw, plant fibres and dead microbes that re-enter the field will take shifts in resurrection. Such is the life of the soil. The end of the row breaks my reverie. I turn the tractor in a half-circle and feather the lever again until the tornado touches down just as I straighten out and catch the next row. Ready for another trip across the field, aimed down the rows, now due west. My route takes me just a few degrees north of where the late afternoon sun hangs in the soft yellow light of mid-latitude autumn. I crest and ease on over oak-dappled ridges – glacial moraines – that attest to the furthest advance of the recent Ice Age glaciers and the fire-centric economy of the people who covered this land with effigy mounds and who later began to grow corn and other crops in fields they weeded using the shoulder blades of bison. Further west, a narrow, rusty-girdered bridge threads over the Mississippi River, carrying water that fell as rain and snow on north country forests, coulee pastures in the tri-state Driftless Area, and the broad, flat corn-and-soybean lands of central and western Minnesota. Each fall, the skies above fill with white pelicans, bald eagles and a paradise of waterfowl. Against this pattern of gathering and flow, I’d continue west, west: chopping through the dried stalks of compass plant and tall tassels of big bluestem at Hayden Prairie State Preserve in Iowa and fording the Big Sioux beneath the watch of yucca and side oats grama. End of the row – decision time again. Last September, I accompanied David to check out a field that lies due west of the stubble-chopping field, on the north bank of Prentice Creek. We were there to measure and mark a grass buffer that will separate row crops from the creek – a practice encoded in the conservation easement that is now a part of the deed to the property. Given the flash floods that have repeatedly swept across this low ground over the past few years, leaving this land in grass makes good economic and ecological sense. During the last major flood in 2008, David baled dusty hay from this field, while a substantial portion of his corn crop would have been completely lost. As we moved upstream to place more flags, I repeatedly plunged through the field-edge tangle of burdock, mulberry, eastern blackberry, woodland sunflowers and pointed-leaf tick-trefoil to find the eroded edge of the creek bank. It is not a pilgrim’s creek, but a real one, cut deep into topsoil that has eroded off the long-planted fields and into its dynamic basin. David planned to follow this line of flags a few days later, while spraying the rest of the old hayfield with glyphosate to kill the grass and alfalfa, and prepare for next spring’s planting of herbicide-resistant corn. We spent an hour flagging the buffer, and the heat of the day was lapsing as we reached the property line. To get back to the truck, we followed a strip of weedy foxtail grasses that waved yellow seed heads in a rolling sea of hay. We were moving due west, as the foxtail marked precisely where the soil had been disturbed when David’s brother bulldozed the old fenceline a few years earlier. Halfway back to the truck, I was surprised when David stopped at a short, west-facing slope, where the field dropped about 10 feet over the course of 30-40 feet. ‘Let’s flag this, too,’ he said. Though I couldn’t see much of the soil beneath the late summer growth of alfalfa and grass, David said he knew the soil on this slope was light – a band of sand and gravel. Probably where an outwash stream trickled from the collapsing glacier. David pried up a few stones with his jackknife, and I turned over a few rounded and smooth stones in my hands. He quickly pointed out a pattern in the vegetation: ‘You can sort of see the change in soil in how the brome and alfalfa grows differently here. It’s thinner. This won’t be any good for corn, and it will erode away if the crop doesn’t take hold, so I’m going to leave it in hay. I’ll leave a broad-enough strip so I can come in from the buffer to bale it. The neighbours might laugh at me, but it’s the right thing to do.’ A land ethic cannot spring from the mind but must live, renew and evolve among families and communities In that moment, I was an elated farm ecologist – I sensed that we shared a respect for the soil and a sense of responsibility to hold this ground. His decision could limit if not reverse soil erosion and perhaps build thicker topsoil, higher fertility and greater yields in the long run. In the short run, too, holding this ground with hay will be more profitable than buying seed, fertiliser and herbicide to plant hybrid corn. David uses all of those tools on his farm, yet they don’t drive all his farming decisions. He farms with a forethought that gives a fuller accounting of costs that come both out-of-pocket and at the expense of the health of the land. Out in the field, he expressed his knowledge of the system and loyalty to the land through the language of conversation rather than the rhetoric of seminar or sermon. His knowledge was hard-won. He was now able to translate what he had observed in many a plough furrow to a subtle but discernible pattern in the field, which would otherwise appear as a uniform sea of green to the inattentive mind. He could make predictions, weigh costs and benefits, and chart a sustainable strategy without hardly pausing in his walk across the field. That kind of knowledge is not simply to be stored up, harboured and lost; it can be relayed along in the evolution of a locally adapted culture as he conveys, in situ, the knowledge to following generations. With another year to add to my perspective, I have finally acknowledged what I could barely sense on that afternoon. My father-in-law was not talking to me as farmer to ecologist but as elder to apprentice. We agreed as professionals, but what was far more important than the congruence of our disciplined perspectives was the relationship we were building. When we choose to stay in place, we begin to feel the rub of constraints, responsibilities and uncertainties now placed on us by the past and future, while simultaneously the process provides opportunities for stronger human connections. There is within this a deep joy, satisfaction and hopefulness that is not readily available – perhaps not comprehensible – when we are in the process of pulling up stakes and heading out on the open road. The time I’ve spent learning to work on this farm has reinforced the idea that a land ethic cannot spring from the mind but must live, renew and evolve in the work and conversation that unfolds among families and communities. Our antecedents derived the word ‘conversation’ from the Latin conversari. The root is also related to convertere, ‘to turn around’. On this level, conversation reflects the simple act of taking turns listening and speaking. Yet conversari itself meant ‘to live with or associate with’. Conversation, in this older sense, was more than just an exchange of words – it was an expression of shared life, of dwelling alongside one another in relationships of mutual dependence. This ancient truth remains valid, even as the scale of our mutual turnings stretches far beyond family and village and watershed to encompass national and global communities through economic and cultural exchanges and the shared cycles of carbon and nitrogen, dust and pollution. No matter the distance that separates us, the lives of urban and rural people still turn around one another. An ethic grounded in this truth must be expressed in mutual interest in and concern for one another. The goal of public policy for agriculture continues to be guided by the desire for cheap food In the summer of 1947, the conservationist Aldo Leopold worked to integrate his thoughts on land use, weaving lands, wildness and ethics into a single essay, ‘The Land Ethic’, which became the capstone to his collection A Sand County Almanac (1949): A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity. The land ethic remains relevant in part because Leopold recognised his effort as a synthesis, as an articulation of the best of current understanding of people, land and the connections between them, rather than as the final word. We still have far to go in the attempt to encode a land ethic sufficiently strong to temper our appetite for Earth’s resources and focus our work towards restoring land health. A land ethic, good land use, and an equitable and civil society arise from countless actions and conversations, constantly unfolding, as the nation’s citizens go about their daily lives. Agriculture is an ecologically embedded enterprise, and we should not tolerate actions that degrade our natural capital, the diversity and function of our ecosystems, or the health of the atmosphere, soils and waters that surround and support us. At the same time, we must recognise that agriculture is embedded in society – a farm practice that runs counter to society’s goals is hard to maintain. I agree that a farm can and should be valued by its owners as a place to live, and as a source of pleasure in good farming, good eating and engagement with both domestic and wild neighbours. Society continues to measure farms, and judge farmers, on their production of grain, meat, biomass and other commodities. Farmers are caught up in a highly competitive market system that typically allows only a slim margin between money coming in and money going out. Meanwhile, the goal of public policy for agriculture continues to be guided by the desire for cheap food. While the predicament of modern agriculture may appear so dire that we will inevitably adapt and organise a more sustainable system, ecologists at Murdoch University in Australia came to a different conclusion after analysing the problems facing farmers in the semi-arid southwestern part of that continent. Farmers and policy-makers continue to invest in production systems that don’t fit the land because they are now tightly bound up in patterns of modern agribusiness and food production. Financial capital goes to conventional farmers more easily than to alternative farmers, and social capital – in the forms of agronomic research, technical assistance (for addressing issues with animal health, soil fertility, soil erosion and water pollution), and especially processing, distribution and retail – supports the energy- and natural-capital intensive system. The authors describe this as a ‘lock-in trap’, ‘an industry that has so much “sunk-costs” that it may continue to degrade the resource it relies upon until the capital is totally removed.’ Shifting the system to a more desirable state – one that is ecologically as well as socially resilient – requires us to forge new social connections in the quest to establish more sustainable patterns of land use. Can a community of well-connected but individually small actors hope to break agriculture out of its lock-in trap? There is little room for optimism, but our prospects are not hopeless. As David Orr reminds us: ‘Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.’ When Orr encouraged us to be hopeful in times like these, perhaps he was continuing a literary conversation with Wendell Berry, a Kentucky hill country farmer and writer. Berry stated that he had no reason to be optimistic about the prospects of people becoming reconnected with the ‘wealth, health, knowledge, and pleasure of their country’, but still he concluded that ‘hope is one of our duties … The health of nature is the primary ground of hope – if we can find the humility and wisdom to accept nature as our teacher.’ We may have much to learn from how nature’s economy operates in the prairie. In the Flint Hills of Kansas, the prairies are truly dominated by tall grasses – big and small bluestem, switchgrass and Indiangrass account for around 80 per cent of the prairie’s windswept greenery. These grasses are so dominant because they are remarkably efficient. Unlike many other grasses, these species build channels in their leaves to make the process of photosynthesis more efficient than it is for their competitors. The grasses need comparatively fewer enzymes to carry out photosynthesis and thus require less nitrogen – a building block of enzymes. This is a major advantage, as the amount of nitrogen in the soil is often the limiting factor for plant growth – hence the artificial nitrogen we’re counselled to add to our gardens and crops as fertiliser. The tall grasses also lose less water thanks to their innovation, which helps put them ahead in dry climates with high evaporation rates. In the language of microeconomics, the tall grasses have the lowest costs for construction and operations. As a result, these ships in the prairie sea can cast vast nets of roots below the surface to capture water and nitrogen, and set huge sails of green leaves to catch the sun to propel photosynthesis. These photons and molecules are finite resources that plants cannot share and for which they must compete. The highly efficient tallgrass fleets should rule the prairies. Paradoxically, the tallgrass prairies are blessed with an abundance of smaller, less efficient wildflowers and legumes, prospering from sub-boreal Manitoba in Canada to the subtropical coastal plains of Louisiana and Texas. As with the mystery of decay and renewal that abounds in the soil, microbes dwell at the heart of this paradox. In the cycles of evolution, the efficiency and dominance of the tall grasses built a palace of greenery All of us mammals have microbes in our guts, facilitating and regulating digestion. Large-bodied herbivores take this to an extreme – huge body cavities accommodate an intricate digestive system that shelters, feeds and harvests a community of microbes. Mouth, teeth, tongue, digestive tract and brain are all organised to harvest and process grass, leveraging the ability of microbes to consume the fibrous grasses and excrete easily digestible sugars. In the tallgrass prairie, American bison select where to graze based, to some extent, on where they can maximise their intake of the plant resource to which they are best adapted. The ecological niche of an organism is perhaps most aptly translated as its palace, as the poet, translator and ecological activist Gary Snyder has re-discovered, and interpreted for us, in the work of the philosopher Dōgen. In the cycles of evolution, the efficiency and dominance of the tall grasses built a palace of greenery. The bison evolved to dwell in this palace. Among the tall grasses, they are fully at home. As the ecologist Alan Knapp and his colleagues at Kansas State University digested from their research in the Flint Hills, the microbially facilitated bison play a key role in making their home a palace for others too. As they fulfil their needs by feasting on leaves, the bison demolish the tall grasses’ leafy superstructures. The rest of the prairie blushes and blooms in gratitude. The leaves of big bluestem might otherwise have overshadowed a short-statured wild petunia seedling. Because the microbe/bison superorganism is adapted to make use of the abundant grass, the young wildflower now spends much of the summer bathed in light, taking in carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen, and building leaves and roots through photosynthesis. Furthermore, nitrogen in the big bluestem leaves would have been locked up through the rest of the growing season, unless a passing band of grasshoppers landed for a meal and carried it off, driven by the instinct to mate and lay eggs before the days become any shorter. As the bison eat and excrete, the nitrogen and other nutrients once held in the leaves overhead are returned in forms accessible to other community members. After pausing to scratch her belly on a compass plant, a bison cow returns a cascade of nitrogen-rich urine that the wildflower may absorb just as it begins to send its flowering stalk skyward. The compass plant, in turn, could produce one more flower than it might have, had the nitrogen remained locked up in big bluestem. Its saucer-sized flowers attract and nourish many native pollinators, while its nutritious seeds are a staple for seed-eating birds. Both flowers and seeds are costly to produce because they concentrate large amounts of nitrogen. The compass plant and wild petunia are only two of hundreds of wildflower and grass species that can be outcompeted by the dominant tall grasses. When the bison home in on a patch of tall grasses, the dominance of the highly efficient big and small bluestem, Indiangrass and switchgrass may be depressed such that the prairie’s balance sheet might take a hit on the single measure of tons of biomass per acre – but, as Robinson Jeffers puts it in his poem ‘Bixby’s Landing’ (1928): … what a good multitude Is here in return … In the process of reorganisation, exchange in other ecological currencies multiplies, for countless organisms dwell in the palace of wildflowers. Most herbivores and omnivores are smaller than a bison and lack the microbial symbiosis that provides access to grass. Instead, they depend upon the more digestible leaves, pollen, nectar, sugary fruit, starchy tubers and seeds, and protein-rich leaf buds that wildflowers and flowering shrubs produce. Badgers, rabbits, mice and voles, prairie chickens, grouse, turtles and waterfowl can all benefit. The less efficient plants host many species of insect larvae, which in turn feed predatory insects, songbird hatchlings and others on the food web. And so the web of connections rolls out and across the prairies in this fashion. If we are to transform agriculture for better outcomes, we need a similar roll-out of networked and diverse people and organisations who collectively act as a keystone species. But we cannot simply wait for the bison of federal policy reform to come trampling through the industrial agriculture complex. We must act lest the bison of more sustainable agriculture stumble, allowing the most ruthless forces in industrial agriculture to continue unchecked – to the degradation of soil, extinction of wild plants and animals, and hollowing-out of communities. To restore agriculture to a more diverse and resilient community, each of us must express our individual land ethic through the food markets and by giving voice to our values in the public sphere. There are deep congruencies between sustainable agriculture and conservation, and we cannot afford to lose the incremental but crucial gains that pioneers have made over the past few decades. Investing in local food and energy production creates demand for more types of agriculture, renewing ecological and social diversity across landscapes long simplified in the name of industrial efficiency. Such landscapes might include small, intensively cultivated vegetable fields and orchards supplying fresh produce and local processors; trellised hops adapted to local conditions and supporting regional breweries; perennial grasslands producing healthy animal products from cattle, sheep, swine and poultry; small fields of corn, wheat and other grains integrated with livestock or supplying locally owned mills; and oak woodlots thinned to provide firewood and lumber. Wetlands now choked with reed canarygrass and shrubs could once again support wildlife while providing hay, bedding and renewable biomass capable of heating homes, businesses and schools during winter’s deep freeze. By turning more of our dollars away from large agribusiness and toward these small-scale, locally integrated systems, we will be rewarded with healthier soil, cleaner and more abundant groundwater, fewer and less severe floods following intense rains, stronger communities with the skills to manage biologically complex farming systems, and a richer, more secure tapestry of semi-natural-to-wild habitats. Many semi-domestic parts of the rural landscape are important for the wild creatures that enrich our lives and testify to the care we take of the land. The touchstones of these partly wild/partly human landscapes are small pastures and sweeping grasslands, scattered woodlots and deep forests, shady valleys and sandstone-capped bluffs, clean headwater springs, and wetlands alive with waterfowl. A diverse rural landscape, shaped by goals of complexity and resilience, rather than maximum production and minimal accounting, will be invaluable to our communities in the coming years. The landscape of diverse farming systems that rely much less on fossil fuels for energy and fertility is much more likely to remain productive despite shocks such as intense rains, flooding, drought, rising fuel and fertiliser costs, declining soil structure and fertility, and limited access to credit and financial capital. Such shocks are predicted to become more frequent and more severe because of climate change, continued population growth, increasing demand for resources, and economic and social inequality. What could a large agribusiness, food-processing or cut-throat retail corporation fear more than for us to begin acting like we don’t believe there is much congruence between their sales and quarterly earnings, and our security and happiness? Berry has described such a social shift as nothing less than secession. Love is at the heart of conservation, good farming and strong communities Among the trade-offs that come with taking personal responsibility for investment in infrastructure and community is that much of the pay-off will come in the long term rather than in the next quarter or next few years. Building a long-term outlook and sustaining collective commitment will require cultivating the skills needed to navigate disagreements between individuals and factions, to face the uncertainty of alternative models of community development, to weather economic hard times, and to engage in both practical and joyful scepticism of the intense propaganda that flows from the anonymous economy to its victims. This demands vision, sincerity and the arts of neighbourliness and community engagement. Nowhere in the frameworks of sustainability have I come across love for our neighbours and the land as a guiding principle, yet love is at the heart of conservation, good farming and strong communities. We do not know what the future will bring, but resilience to coming shocks cannot be secured through better technology, greater efficiency or improved communications infrastructure alone. We need all of these advances, but conservation asks even more of us. Leopold’s words resonated with this call when he summarised his goals for an ecological education: If the individual has a warm personal understanding of land, he will perceive of his own accord that it is something more than a breadbasket. He will see land as a community of which he is only a member, albeit now the dominant one. He will see the beauty, as well as the utility, of the whole, and know the two cannot be separated. We love (and make intelligent use of) what we have learned to understand. Each of us is an individual, but ecology and ecological economics remind us that we exist only in relation to the land and our neighbours. By enacting our love for the land and our neighbours, we assume great risk. We will likely face changes in consumption patterns and the nature of work and exchange that will feel like severe sacrifices. However, many rich harvests are indeed possible when we choose to act as members of our community, to transcend efficiency and strive toward harmony among people and between people and land. Much that might otherwise go to waste is brought back into cycles of renewal. As we nurture the life of community, we tend a field in which many of our hopes and pleasures can bloom. End of row. Decision time again. Craig Maier died in 2024. This essay has been lightly edited from his original manuscript for publication, with the guidance of Craig’s graduate advisor, Randy Jackson. With thanks to Randy for his valuable input in the editing process, and for helping to honour Craig’s memory.