Happy New Year! Wild Farm Alliance is excited for 2016, and we are so grateful to begin this new year with you. 

Your support is the backbone of our work. Because of you, we are starting off 2016 stronger than ever. Last year, you helped strengthen the capacity of farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change through regenerative agriculture. You also helped to educate consumers about the impact on biodiversity that their food choices have. And finally, your support in 2015 helped finalize the new food safety rule that encourages wildlife habitat on the farm. 

With our encouragement, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) written by Congress sought to make sure that conservation mandates would be addressed in these regulations, and that no conflicts or duplication would occur with the National Organic Program. While we don't like everything in this Produce Rule (there was no attempt to rein in misguided buyer requirements), we feel FDA heard our concerns about conservation.  

This is the time of year where bats often get a bad rap and are mistaken for vicious blood sucking creatures. An old Halloween lore, unless of course you are the larvae of a corn earworm moth.

Corn earworm moths and their larvae can devastate corn, tomatoes, and cotton crops. But a recent study was just released showing the enormous benefits bats provide in pest control, especially for corn. This study looked at the bat predation of the corn earworm larvae in Illinois. 

A recent study was published showing the devastating loss of crop diversity over the last three decades. This alarming loss of crop diversity is not just about fewer varieties of food crops, it has much bigger implications. For example, fields of monocultures diminish soil fertility, eliminate wildlife habitat, and encourage pesticide applications.

Fifteen years ago I helped found the Wild Farm Alliance with other sustainable agriculture and wildlands advocates alarmed that agriculture was recklessly disrupting natural ecosystems and destroying native species of plants and animals. 

We knew that the sacrifice of complex, sustainable natural systems for sterile fields of high producing crops was not the best way to produce food for humans. We devised a positive mission for the new Wild Farm Alliance: to promote a healthy, viable agriculture that helps to protect and restore wild nature.

No farmer wants to lose land to flooding, or have excessive codling moth in their walnut orchard, but those were the issues facing Paul Hain of Hain Ranch Organics.

A past flooding event took several acres of the walnut orchard, and the ever present codling moth threatened yields. Paul wanted to try a natural solution.

While summer’s bounty and our farmers are churning out an abundance of food for us humans and non-humans (think insect pollinators and beneficial birds), we are keeping our eye on research and policies that benefit conservation-minded farmers and the wider landscape.

On August 2015, the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, released the findings from a study that revealed that the elimination of natural vegetation surrounding farm fields failed to reduce the presence of foodborne illness-causing pathogens in fresh produce grown in those fields. The study, titled "Comanaging fresh produce for nature conservation and food safety," found not only that the absence of natural vegetation did not contribute to pathogen reduction, but also that cleared land resulted in increased pathogen prevalence over time.