Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature:
Essays in Conservation-Based Agriculture

A Grassland Manifesto
By Becky Weed

Small lessons around the homeplace are one way to wander into wild farming. But if one wonders about the fate of the homeplace, the journey can’t end there. Either way, close or far, it’s all about grass.

On a small scale, sheep ranching at home in Montana, we’ve watched coyotes watch us as we both mark territory. Mostly unwatched, mountain lions have harvested whitetail deer in the back fields and occasionally lambs in drought years. In the last few years, a herd of elk have made a regular circuit of pastures and brush in our neighborhood. In a tiny patch of woods on the neighbor’s place, a bow-hunter watched a black bear wander right under her tree stand while she waited for those elk to pass through. All of this in spite of encroaching suburbia. None of these residents have put us out of the sheep business. They’ve tested and taxed us, but they’ve livened the journey for us and for our customers.

But our place is small, and the view necessarily expands, at first to the scale of a mountain range. The Bridger Mountains right behind us, it turns out, are one of the critical, vulnerable linkages in habitat for wolverine and other threatened species between the Rocky Mountains to the south, and the Belt Mountains and Canadian Rockies to the north. That realization led to queries outside of our farm. Indeed, we’ve learned of quiet families in the Rocky Mountain Front north of us managing ranches with grizzly bears; about ranchers in Alberta coexisting with wolves for decades; and mega-conservation buyers in Idaho revising grazing management in high desert and forest allotments to work toward ecological restoration goals on the scale of hundreds of thousands of acres.

There are even promoters of a bison ecology. Some are capitalist ranchers who love the merger of good business, beautiful prairie, and big steak. Others belong to interdisciplinary coalitions that envision a “wildlife economy” across millions of acres in the Northern Great Plains in the United States and Canada. Current residents, according to some scenarios, would be able to remain on their land in such an economy. Grassland restoration, with its full suite of participating residents, from bison to burrowing owls, would be the dominant regime.

All of these examples are of course anomalies in American agriculture and direct contradictions to “modern” industrialized agriculture. The notion of a restored bison ecology throughout vast portions of the Great Plains seems especially far-fetched, like something an enviroon- hallucinogens or an eastern academic would dream about. (Indeed, they have.) Even if by some miracle wild farm ventures were to suddenly become the successful wave of the future, and all the major public and private western range operators were to suddenly withdraw from critical habitat and/or espouse wildlife-friendly practices, we still couldn’t say that “Farming with the Wild” had “arrived” just because some sectors had arrived at wild farming. To understand why, a rancher must reluctantly explore brutal paths beyond the homeplace.

Within North America, western ranchers produce only a small fraction of the U.S. meat supply. Cowboys both real and imagined have comforted themselves with the western illusion of disproportionate political power, while their economic autonomy and clout have withered. Meanwhile, a dense cobweb straps them, along with their grain-farming neighbors and the abundant ranchers and farmers of Canada and the American Southeast, to the “other” landscape of North America—the Midwest. All are beholden, to varying degrees, to one dominant force emanating from the Midwest: artificially low feedgrain prices. Every strand of the cobweb (feeder steers trailering to auction and feedlot; feedlot effluent migrating to groundwater; ranch kids graduating to land grant universities or cities; boxed beef coalescing in fast food grinders) has been smothering the art of grassfarming, and obscuring the wisdom of wild grasslands for roughly half a century.

The meat production infrastructure engendered by such subsidized grains, that is, the corn-soybean-feedlot machine, has fostered a perverse price discovery process in which incentives for healthy meat are turned on their head, yielding antibiotic-laden, e. coli–contaminated, and hormone- infested beef. Perhaps most importantly, the “cheap” corn diet has fundamentally altered the fatty acid profile of America’s dominant meat supply, degrading the health not only of domestic livestock, but also of the people who eat it.

The centralized meat processing infrastructure manufactured by the corn-soybean-feedlot machine has in turn disabled direct consumer ties to grass and growers on a massive scale. So now, even as the penetrating consequences of our national grain-fed dependence have begun to dawn on many growers and consumers, we wonder, is it possible to reverse the 20th century grass-fed to grain-fed transformation?

Compelling storytellers are building upon meticulous research outside the industrialized agricultural mainstream to publicize the interdisciplinary consequences of the feedlot machine: the effect of confined animal feeding on livestock and human health (Jo Robinson); the corn connection to obesity, diabetes, and other public heath quagmires (Michael Pollan); the sociological outcomes cultivated by centralized meat-packing and the fast-food industry, that is, occupational hazards, rural crime, low wage levels that perpetuate the demand for “cheap” food (Eric Schlosser); continental-scale ecological consequences of monocropping and excess nitrogen fertilizer applications (Richard Manning); and so on. These and other writers are inspiring consumer activism built on the power of the food dollar. Their call for conversion to grass-fed is exciting, empowering, and essential, but is it enough?

As a sheep rancher buried deep in the details of direct marketing, and sticky at the margins of the commodity cobweb, where can I turn to assuage my doubts?

• Academia? University ag research these days is largely beholden to corporate-driven, high-input husbandry/factory-suited genetics that are not geared to a grass-fed economy. Exceptions to this rule are not sufficiently powerful to induce industry-wide change on their own. But they could be important nonetheless.

• Food Industries? Our nation’s cheap food dogma engenders cheap labor practices and narrow definitions of “efficiency,” which in turn require cheap food policies. To oversimplify: if you live on box store wages, you probably have little alternative but to eat fast food. That vicious circle ensures that industry will not instigate reform of our current industrialized model without external pressure to do so. Mainstream livestock producers typically consider themselves to be part of the industrialized food system, so they’re caught in the same vicious circle; they’re not leading fundamental change.

• Innovative Livestock Producers? The most successful producers and direct marketers of grass-fed meat owe much of their commercial success to the essence of niche markets—scarcity and special stories. The incentives for preserving or at least passively accepting that scarcity act as powerful disincentives for food system transformation (or ecosystem-scale environmental protection) by even the progressive industry faithful.

• Environmentalists? The conservation community is intermittently effective at articulating the livestock “problem” but cannot be expected to, on its own, take on the bloody, profit-needy, inglorious task of working with domesticated animals and their handlers to achieve an alternative system.

No simple saviors here. The skeptic can find sobering evidence that, so far, an understanding of grass-fed meat production and its repercussions remains marginal in four key places: American medicine, land grant universities, USDA policies, and the bulk of Midwestern farmland. While a wellness newsletter from Berkeley may tout the benefits of grass-fed meat, the vast horsepower of pharmaceutical companies is churning on the income of cholesterol-lowering drugs, a manufactured antidote to our diet of grain-fed meat. A small handful of researchers explore the benefits of re-perennializing the upper Mississippi drainage, but the lion’s share of agricultural resources is perpetuating sod-busting crop systems. We pour carbon sequestration research dollars into tweaking tillage practices in grain fields, instead of restoring grass. We even export our perverse dependence on corn and soybeans by quashing more diversified agriculture overseas, indirectly through domestic commodity subsidies, and directly, by forcing markets for genetically engineered seed. Consumer activism is mighty, but can buying habits change all this? No one can do it alone. And no alliance can do it without a vision for agriculture.

Even at the heart of progressive agriculture, within the booming organic movement, there is evidence of a faltering, or at least incompletely articulated, vision. The current angst and divisiveness between the small-scale/local/organic vs. industrialized/globalized organic sector says less about conflicts in peoples’ motives than it does about uncertainty in their vision. The concerns are diverse—pesticides in produce, hormones in groundwater, the ethical welfare of chickens, the threats to open space, the genetic integrity of native plants, the livelihoods of indigenous peoples across the globe…what a mouthful. Such concerns are driving wonderfully positive, but ad hoc, changes in agriculture. When does the availability of marvelous consumer choice become a distraction from, or an ineffectual proxy for, a coherent landscape imperative? What if it really is all about grass?

Grasslands once dominated North America, serving as matrix and sustenance for every natural process that governs the continent’s function —precipitation, pollination, infiltration, predation, migration, consumption, respiration, decomposition, mineralization, you name it. Last is runoff, the continent’s export. Agriculture has altered that regime, such that now more than 80 percent (Manning reports 82) of arable land is dedicated to corn, soybeans, and a handful of other commodity crops. The continent’s natural functions, and humans’ dependent economies, are altered accordingly. As farmers and eaters, residing in the wonderful diversity of farmstead geography and the human marketplace, it’s hard to wrap our minds around that central reality. Perhaps we need to try. I’m haunted by this continental shift in land use, for I was a geologist before I became a farmer. Nearly thirty years ago I watched as my first geology professor scrawled out calculations on the blackboard, deriving the chemistry of streams, then rivers, then oceans, and finally the atmosphere from the composition of rocks and dirt that feed them. These “back of the envelope” calculations became the draft of his graduate textbook, Chemistry of the Atmosphere and Oceans. I soon understood, as a geologist, how such derivations could constitute a primer for subsequent climate modelers and earth historians who revel in the lore of the geologic record. But as a geologist-turned-rancher, I have to recognize that such a primer serves also as a cautionary tale for farmers or whoever else collectively alters the continental exports through unabated soil mining.

To articulate a coherent vision of agriculture, we must start by grappling with the role of grass. Could this continent evolve into a mosaic of grassland ecosystems with a 21st century overprint on its pre-European origins? Could there be some assemblage of bison ecology on the semi-arid prairies; more intensive management in suitable microclimates; more vibrant, integrated crop/livestock systems, freed from the competitive burden of mono-crop subsidies? Such fantasies raise specific questions that are not currently undergoing research on a quantitative, national, or global scale. While the focus is on grass, it is no dismissal of non-grassland ecosystems, and non-grass-based food. To the contrary, restoration of a grassland economy is just the primary tool for displacing the subsidized corn/soybean/feedlot elephant in the living room. And only with it can we begin to restore the potential of all agricultural and wild systems. To turn those tables, a number of questions must begin to be addressed in regions throughout the continent.

• Can we shift the balance from a primarily grain-fed livestock toward a grass-based diet for meat animals without inflicting ecological harm?

• Conversely, what ecosystem services could a return to grass restore, if managed well and widely? (e.g. restoration of soil fertility, rare species, pollinators, natural carbon sequestration, etc.)

• Can grazing be managed in such a way that it can cope with both the seasonality of grazing and the relentless nature of consumer demand?

• What is the nature of the human cultural shift that would be required to implement a shift to a grass-based regime?

• Is such a cultural shift possible?

• What infrastructure and policy changes would have to evolve to enable such a system, and are we willing to make them?

• How can the issue of grass surface in all citizens’ priorities: from eaters, to legislators, to voters, to landowners?

Such a grass farmers’ research agenda seems an implausible ambition. Despite the eloquent praises and premium prices lavished upon many model and aspiring grass farmers in recent years, the systemic challenges driven by the corn-soybean-feedlot machine have not diminished, nor has the massive power of the corporations that have fostered it. At the same time, many entrepreneurs and researchers around the world rightly see that this mighty elephant in the living room is also arthritic, covered with warts, wobbly, obese, and unbalanced. Such fallibility inspires those who seek to restore grassland economies in preparation for the demise of corn/soybean infrastructure, and in recognition of a landscape imperative. Food systems have evolved before, and they will do so again.

In recent years, just as this prospect of grassland restoration has begun to gain traction, the elephant in the living room is shouldering an even bigger burden than our grocery bags: ethanol. We are now beginning to ask corn to serve not only as food, fructose, and feedlot, but fuel as well. It is daunting to raise the complex ethanol prospects, because the variable potential raw materials, distribution schemes, and byproduct economics preclude any simple verdicts on ethanol as a whole. However, regardless of the engineering details, the ethanol “burden,” especially in its current subsidized form, could well abort any mission to soberly assess and restore a grassland economy. We know that all the cropland on earth cannot satiate our transportation appetite. Alternatively, perhaps the absurdity of asking the shaky elephant to let us starve ourselves in order to fill our gas tanks could be the wake-up call we need.

If we’re fully awake, we’ll see the whole landscape, with all the processes connecting east and west, urban and rural, wet and dry, affluent and poor, continental and marine, predators and prey. With, and perhaps only with, the coherence of such a landscape view, can we hook the power of our grocery habits into the same harness as our public health worries, our social instincts, our political maneuvers, and our affinity for wildlife. What a team that could be. It all starts with grass.

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