A wide range of people and ideas has influenced our choice of farming methods. The most sage advice we have found is from Pliny the Elder, A.D 23-79, who wrote in his Natural History, “Take not too much of a land, wear not out all the fatness, but leave in it some heart.” We believe that modern agriculture continues to degrade the quality and quantity of soil, water and other resources in a way that is making it difficult for future generations to sustain themselves.

 

In 1985, a collection of essays called “Meeting the Expectations of the Land” had profound influence on our choice of farming methods. To quote from a review by Richard Nilsen in The Whole Earth Review:

 

“When the topsoil is gone, or the soil is salted out from irrigation, where do you go? You go to a kind of agriculture that can sustain; not only the land, but also the life on it and in it, as well as the people who work it and those who depend on them for food. This book is full of clues to that, of men and women standing on the edges, pointing. Many of the contributors have appeared in this magazine -- Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Amory Lovins, John Todd, Gary Snyder, and Gary Nabhan. And some of the material has as well. Much of what is here, however hypothetical or conjectural, will become the conventional wisdom of the next generation.”

 

 

We started our search for sustainability with the question, “What was here before?” The answer is that our farm is in an area of Western Wisconsin that was native prairie grass, grazed by herds of bison and elk and other large herbivores.

 

Of all the agricultural plants grown by humans, forage crops are the most sustainable. Mixtures of grass and legumes have the lowest requirements for fertilizers, are durable and productive in both droughts and floods and protects and builds soil, providing additional ‘capital’ for future generations to grow food with. This is difficult to do with cultivated crops. 

 

There is one problem: Humans can’t eat grass. So to harvest the solar energy captured by the plants in a pasture or prairie, we decided to raise ruminant animals (cows, goats, bison) whose natural diet is grass, and who in turn can be ‘harvested’ to provide meat, milk, leather and wool.