Farming with the Wild

Image Gallery Livestock and predators can coexist with a little help from llamas, which effectively guard small livestock, such as sheep, from coyotes, dogs and other predators. DANIEL IMHOFF

At first glance, the phrase “farming with the wild” may seem contradictory. Agriculture has been and remains the relentless process of selec­tion and minimization, one that now blankets billions of the Earth’s acres with a mere handful of crops. Farming and ranching activities are consistently identified as the pri­mary cause of wildlife habitat loss, the archenemy of the biodiversity crisis.

Throughout the millennia, agricultural domestication has largely been a dance of coevolution, with humankind playing a leading role as artificial selector and stew­ard, among a full cast of essential and cooperative participants (including birds, insects, fellow mammals, grasses, food and fiber plants, and natural systems). As farms that combined row crops and livestock gave way to specialized factory-oriented monocultures at war with pests, diseases and weeds, ever larger machinery necessitated ever larger areas to operate. Habitat destruction and fragmentation, pollution of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, soil erosion, the persecution of predators and the over­exploitation of nonrenewable resources are now among the many ecologically devastating consequences of modern industrial agriculture.

Forced to compete in a globally oriented food and fiber system, farmers have often had to forsake goals, such as wildlife preservation and long-term landscape conservation (as well as health-care and other basic needs), in favor of short-term economic survival. But with the proper incentives, assistance and resources, farmers can and should be encouraged to manage their lands more sustainably, and profitably, while protecting wildland values.

A Classic Concept with a New Vision

Farming with the wild is not a novel concept. Nineteenth and 20th-century American literature is replete with prophetic and philosophical writing that attempt to reconcile and redirect a civilization bent on the isolation or elimination of wildness from the broader culture. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, John Muir’s The Mountains of California, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America spring readily to mind among the hundreds of works of extraordinary vision and insight. Within the sustainable agriculture movement itself, the idea that farms must be managed as natural systems gained considerable cur­rency throughout the 20th century.

Today, a number of terms describe the move away from monoculture toward the more diverse crop systems of polyculture, from an emphasis on annuals to geographically appropriate perennial cropping sys­tems: agroecology, regenerative agriculture, natural systems agriculture, grass farming, succession farming, permaculture, eco-agriculture and farming with the wild.

With this evolved thinking, a new vision for a more functionally integrated agriculture is emerging. Such a vision, however, will require new ways of looking at agriculture’s place on the landscape.