by Dan Imhoff, WFA Board President

In late September of this year, the sustainable agriculture movement lost an exemplary leader when Fred Kirschenmann passed away. Fred was a tall man with an easy smile and a big vision, one in which agriculture strives first and foremost to co-exist in balance with wild nature. He was born into a farming family and dedicated his life to meeting the continual challenges of being both a conservationist and a large-scale grain farmer. His north star was following in the footsteps of Aldo Leopold who wrote that one of Homo sapien’s greatest challenges was to find our place in the biotic community rather than being controllers of the land. 

I visited Fred Kirschenmann’s farm in North Dakota almost 25 years ago when I was researching the book Farming with the Wild. It was a large family farm by some standards, with upwards of 4,000 acres divided between two properties. We spent a day touring the farm operation, which included 100 brood cows grazing on 1,000 acres of protected and unplowed prairie. They had developed complex rotations of 10 different grains, oil seeds and cover crops in relatively small fields, often separated by wind breaks, shelter belts and other natural habitat. His rotations were designed to balance fertility and weed control without chemicals, as well as to accommodate the year-round habits and needs of birds. I had a strong sensation that it was gardened rather than farmed.

“Clearly every farmer knows that wildlife can be damaging to your farm,” Fred told me. “But on balance, the wildlife can also eat enormous amounts of insects. So the question is, how do we manage the system to not only provide a place for wildlife, but to create a habitat so that they’re there to do other services for us.”

At the time of my visit Fred was the director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture where he worked for 20 years. He had a mastery of biological farming methods as well as agricultural economics and received a Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in religion and philosophy. He had read A Sand County Almanac as an undergraduate in the 1950s, which inspired him to become a lifelong champion for a change in consciousness around land use. For Fred, organic agriculture was just the beginning of that change. 

In an essay entitled “Tame and Wild” co-authored with David Gould, Fred wrote:

“Organic agriculture must begin to reinvest itself in terms of landscape ecologies. If we are to be successful as organic farmers, long term, we cannot ignore the intricate and complex ecological processes of nature which sustain the whole ecosystems of which our farms are a part.”

In other words, the farm must fit the land. And farms must be integrated at a landscape level in order for them to be truly sustainable.

To me, personally, Fred was a mentor, a collaborator and a low-key high quality human being. He was a long-serving advisory board member of the Wild Farm Alliance and wrote the Foreword to Farming with the Wild and the Preface to two editions of Food Fight: A Citizen’s Guide to the Food and Farm Bill.  I will remember him for his profound insights and generosity, his distinctive laugh and penchant for post-lunch catnaps.