Agroecology as Faith

Thoughts on Farming With and For Nature

Acknowledgments

This piece derives from work done with many people and inspired by many conversations. I would like to sincerely thank all those—ecologists, farmers, cultural researchers, historians, students—who have physically helped our efforts and who have, intentionally or not, influenced our thinking. This particular manuscript has benefited notably from the editors of From the Ground Up and from my wife and partner in crime, Claudia Knab-Vispo.

Lest the title immediately put you off, let me explain that it is not meant to be demeaning of either agroecology or religion. Rather, my point is that, as with our lives, making sense of something as complex as an agrarian landscape that works ecologically and also socioeconomically requires not just observation but also faith. It is a path as much as a fixed outcome. Science is one guide along that path, but so too is collaboration and a vision of how the world works that must extend beyond peer-reviewed scientific articles, that must be both more parochial and more global in worldview.

The “Hydrology” of Ecology

A few years ago, in our efforts to understand the wildlife occurring in and around some Hudson Valley orchards, we walked grids, pausing regularly to record the buzzes, whines, and clicks of summer insects. By measuring the relative loudness of each species’ call across the orchard, we could make what was analogous to a topographic map of each orchard, where elevation was replaced by the intensity of the respective species’ sounds and depicted as colors (as a result, some call these “heat maps”). With some smoothing of the transitions, the result depicted a landscape blotched with insect life, a large-scale Petri dish of sounds. Make such maps across time, and you can watch those blotches wax and wane. I found these maps deeply satisfying, because they echoed a personal vision of life as a liquid, which, like water, flows across the land and through time—pooling there and then, draining here and now. Each form of life being a fluid with its own particular colors, properties, and flow patterns. In this essay, I want to sketch one way of viewing on-farm biodiversity, derived in part from this “hydrological” view of life.

These maps show the distribution of one “singing insect” (tentatively identified as Allard’s ground cricket) across two different Hawthorne Valley orchards. These maps were made by quantifying the loudness of the cricket’s song across a grid of recording points, and then converting that information to a heat map in which relatively loud singing appears in red and lack of singing in blue. How would you generalize the habitat use of this species based on such maps? Images such as these emphasize that production landscapes are also natural landscapes. Recordings and more of these maps (including those for the below-described Bobolinks) are available *here*. Image courtesy of Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program

Wild Organisms from the Perspective of Nature Conservation and Agronomy

There are two reciprocal ways of thinking about on-farm wild organisms: One can ask how those organisms are influenced by farming and, conversely, how they influence farming. These may be said to represent the viewpoints of the conservation biologist and the farmer, recognizing that there are biologists who farm, and many farmers deeply interested in conservation.

Let’s tackle the conservation biology perspective first: How are the distributions of native species influenced by farming? One can approach this by considering the biographies of the species, because where a species is today is the result of history acting on ecological personality. Envision a northeastern landscape through time. While details will vary, one part of the trajectory will usually be the insertion of European-style farming into a landscape that had very different habitat patterns before that. In many places in the Northeast, by the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century, large tracts of land were cleared and squared off into farm fields and cutover woodlots. What did that mean for the pre-existing organisms? Did they shrink from the intrusions? Did they cautiously seep into the new pastures, haylands, and crop fields? Did some celebrate the new modifications? Each species responded according to its nature. Speaking broadly, some wildlife of disturbed ground and grassy areas benefited as grazing and grass-based agriculture spread throughout much of the Northeast and created what physically (but not botanically) one might call “The Northeast Agricultural Prairie.” Few, if any, forest species benefited, because forest area declined dramatically in extent, size and age, and the species that remained were often trapped and hunted. Even within grassland wildlife, the change benefited only those creatures, like grassland birds, who cared most about the extent and structure of the vegetation (albeit with widely varying preferences in grass height and density), while creatures more closely tied to particular plant species, such as some of our butterflies and moths, faltered because the grasses of the new fields were primarily non-native.

What then happened as European agriculture drained westward and human use waned on many former farm lots? While it’s easy to imagine a churning, splashing flood of life returning into such abandoned land, one must be careful to parse the currents by species and realize that as the land evolved, a new landscape was created—not an old one restored. Again, each species responded based on its evolutionary heritage and its innate flexibility. Did they find familiar, accommodating elements in the new land? Or, to phrase it slightly differently, did the new landscape hold habitat analogs that worked for them? Some, like the returning beaver and fisher, eventually found conditions similar enough to what they had long known, and so they flourished, even though many of the new forests were now-overgrown farm fields—entirely different in structure from the original forests—and many of the waterways had been straightened and re-routed by roads and rails. Others, like grassland birds, suffered from the departure of the extensive grasslands they had come to know and love as analogs for their native prairies farther west. Finally, biological evolution is ever probing an organism’s surroundings, and some native species are now adjusting their physiologies and ecologies to the new landscape.

This visualization emphasizes flow through time, perhaps reducing a tendency to envision the present as somehow isolated from the past and giving us useful insights into how organisms might respond to upcoming habitat changes. Yes, crafting conservation on farms means dealing with the present, but that can’t succeed without recognizing the past, and the anticipated future. Past, present, and future reside together, and rub shoulders. Farms can be soft-edged not only in time but also in space, and that type of softness also has relevance for the question of farming’s role in nature conservation. Rather than a priori judging a farm as good or bad, or giving the farm fences too much ecological strength, one can see a more mixed role that depends on the particular farm (and its practices), the wild organisms being considered, and the “knit” of the larger landscape within which the farm occurs. Boundary lines are blurred as mayflies blow in from adjacent waterways, mice slip through mesh, kingbirds pause to twitch on fence posts, and apple-fostered plum curculios wander out onto wild black cherry. So, from a conservation biology perspective, farming succeeds in supporting native species to the degree that it augments rather than removes the places where biodiversity “pools” in the landscape. It succeeds when it provides sustained habitat footholds for different native species, realizing that success depends not just on simplistic categorizations such as field, edge, and forest, but also on details like the flora of the farm and its surroundings, the state of the soils, and the use of fertilizers and pesticides. It becomes the task of the farmer, the ecologist, and all who shape the land to form and elaborate on these personalized visions of our patches in a dynamic, multi-functional landscape.

“farming succeeds in supporting native species to the degree that it augments rather than removes the places where biodiversity “pools” in the landscape”

Turning to the influence of wild organisms on farming, one asks: How does their presence (or absence) influence farm production? The terms “pests” and “beneficials” soon appear in such discussions. It is easy to think of tomato plants stripped clean by tomato hornworms; of apples blotched by those plum curculios; or of sweet corn cobs with the frassy, browning tunnels of European corn borer. Likewise, one recalls the happy buzz of bees; the busy predation of aphids by larval lady beetles; or the limp, wasp-cocoon-covered carcasses of those hornworms. In other words, the villain and hero stereotypes are easy to ascribe and certainly not without substantial validity. Nonetheless, as with thinking of an agrarian landscape as just luscious wilds and farmyard deserts, these stereotypes need some probing.

Slugs. Most growers would describe them as pests, especially on leafy greens. And yet … for a few years, we set out close-focus time lapse cameras to document visitors to a bait of freeze-killed eggs of fall armyworm, a serious pest affecting grains and corn. Every few minutes the cameras took a picture; a diligent helper then reviewed them all and noted the various creatures consuming our bait. The winner? Slugs, particularly during wet years. Should you decide to spend time pit-trapping in crop fields, you will come to realize the ebbs and flows of invertebrate communities: fields that in a dry year may have produced a slug or two per cup, will, during a wet year, host a slimy slug party. Our work, and similar work by others, suggests that those partygoers may be nibbling more than lettuce.

“Pest” and “beneficial” are subjective terms based on our assessment of how a given creature affects our attempts to grow food. These terms are not innate characteristics of the organism, like its size or color, but rather judgments reflecting not only the behavior of the creature (e.g., what it eats and when), but also the crops we’re interested in, the larger ecology that shapes the creature’s ability to act, and our own determination of what we call damage or benefit. There are many more examples of equivocal creatures: omnivorous ground beetles who feed on weed seeds under certain circumstances (a “benefit”) but on strawberry seeds (a “detriment”) under others; bats who have been recorded eating pestiferous corn moths as well as helpful parasitoid wasps; and who didn’t get the memo on how to be an unabashed beneficial and so ensnare not only grasshoppers and cabbage whites, but also bees, praying mantises and other pollinators and “natural enemies”—friends of husbandry. Even bees themselves have some nuance—honeybees, a non-native species, can sometimes deter native bees and may be, for certain crops, poorer pollinators than those natives. The point is that, as with the question of farming’s influence on wild species, just who is a beneficial or a pest is also confused or enriched (pick your adjective) by life’s creativity.

Facing Complexity

The ecology of a crop field is the intricate result of these landscape flows, the habits of the creatures riding those currents, and our production goals and methods, all seasoned by the effects of weather and the complex, shifting webs of ecological interaction. This is a baffling reality, and our main modern response has been to try to remove that complexity. Try to make a living by growing crops in such a stew, and one can easily understand the allure of simplifying the system through pesticides, herbicides, and monocrops. Take this simplification too far, and the rest of this essay becomes moot, because there is little complexity left to work with. However, not so long ago, the mainstream perspective was different.

One need go no farther back than 100–150 years to realize we once lived with a different mentality. Much valuable data was collected in the fields of descriptive, “economic” ornithology and entomology in the mid- to late nineteenth century. State and federal governments paid scientists to study the feeding patterns of birds so as to understand how those species might be encouraged to be pest-control collaborators; others were funded to explore the details of insect natural history to better understand the touchpoints where farmers might intervene to discourage pests or encourage beneficials. It wasn’t easy, and chemical pesticides understandably rose to the fore as a simpler tool for managing crop depredation. As a result, while there are still excellent and dedicated ornithologists and insect ecologists out there trying to understand relevant natural history, the vast majority of funding for research and development over the past 75 years has gone into pesticides, rather than exploring the relevant natural history and helping farmers with the practical application of that knowledge. We have tried to suppress nature’s complexity by turning our fields into a clean slate whose ingredients we control, largely at the expense of developing the ability to work with that complexity.

*“Economic ornithology” explores the role of birds in influencing farm production, for better or worse. This illustration, from the 1903 book* Birds in their Relations to Man; a Manual of Economic Ornithology for the United States and Canada by Clarence Weed and Ned Dearborn, sketches out a farm from the perspective of which insects occur where and which birds help control them. This was not mere speculation—late-nineteenth-century ornithologists spent ample time studying bird diets.

I have laid out some intertwining issues—the value of thinking of farms as integral parts of a larger free-flowing ecological landscape through time; the realization that we are to some extent the makers of our own angels and demons in the context of agronomic pests and beneficials; and the dilemma that we have followed a crude and, in some cases, self-defeating approach to deal with these agronomic challenges, creating new problems along the way (think of water contamination, for example, or the use of pesticides creating the need for their continued and expanded use). Can we form a more integrated vision of nature conservation and food production by seeking ways of tailoring production to the potential and ecology of the land? Can we internalize the need for fully functional agrarian landscapes, rather than just productive farms?

“we are to some extent the makers of our own angels and demons in the context of agronomic pests and beneficials”

This is a call not just to ecologists and farmers. Lest any non-farmer think they can stand back uninvolved, we need to remember that an important shaper of farming is consumer choice: accept “cosmetically-challenged” apples (as cider makers already do) and orchardists have new options; tune your diet to local foods, and your stomach has a say in local ecology. This is no easy task, given that agro-industries have effectively promulgated their vision of efficient, large-scale farming, and consumers have come to expect, or even depend on, the resulting low retail cost of food. Furthermore, as alluded to above, no farm is an island. So we should ask not only whether farms fit in our vision of a natural landscape, but also whether our vision of the natural landscape (as expressed, for example, in landscaping trends and public commitment to conservation lands) fits with ecological farming.

Possible Approaches

Let us return momentarily to the hydrological image of life flowing across a landscape. One can envision farms as mill sites. That is, they are points in the landscape where humans try to take advantage of natural flows to help “power” their agriculture. As such, they are sites where a knowledge of fundamental ecology is important, just as for a mill it is important to know when water freezes and how the “head” of water influences the power it can generate. Beyond that, at each farm site, it is crucial to understand the local circumstances and to observe how they influence biotic flows, just as one needs to locate and scale a mill to the task and topography at hand. In other words, understanding place, while sometimes denigrated as being parochial, is critical. The key question is not how do we derive all-encompassing generalities, but how do we efficiently describe the ecology of a farm in a way that has practical relevance? In this context, I would encourage three next steps:

That field ecologists devote more time to studying and exploring farms as habitat for native species, ready to document not only the shortcomings of those habitats, but also their riches. Hearkening back to our earlier discussion of landscape history, we have come to realize that, given the current human-made reduction of natural disturbance in our landscape (i.e., fire and flooding control), diverse agricultural patterns may serve as makeshift ecological analogs that are adopted by certain species. For example, strips of wildflowers through a crop field (or sometimes even the flowers of the crop itself) might help a wetland butterfly find the nectar that extensive beaver meadows might have once provided; or a dry, brushy pasture might invite some of the shrubland birds who once settled in after natural disturbances. One need neither accept such rosy analogies nor roundly reject them. Instead, on-the-ground evaluation and the resulting ecological understanding can help map out ways of accentuating the nature conservation value of particular farms. Sharing such work not only with the farmer but also more broadly may help more onlookers see farmers as potential collaborators in nature conservation, rather than as opponents.
That ecologists dive into the natural history of on-farm “pests” and “beneficials” with all the new instruments in the scientific kit—eDNA, acoustic monitoring, radio tracking, isotope studies of trophic relationships, et cetera. Essentially, this is a call for a twenty-first-century, localized version of nineteenth-century applied natural history. Approaching the unsprayed crop field or organic orchard as a complex ecological system, can we better understand what makes a pest a pest and what augments the benefits of the beneficials? I know from experience that documenting this ecology and its production relevance is wickedly difficult, especially when trying to assess the role of generalist predators. The food web of a farm may not immediately tell you who is actually influencing yield in an economically meaningful way, but it will at least refine your understanding of the organisms that crop production is working with and against. Doing this at every farm may be impractical, but information for each region and distinct set of farming methods would certainly help.
That we think of such work as accompaniment—joint exploration by scientists and agronomists—rather than the scientific discovery of blanket solutions. Reductionism—the dissection of scientific problems into solvable sub-questions—has been a valuable part of the scientific process, and, done incrementally and with sustained focus, can produce important understandings. Yet, at the same time, it has made it seem as if science is not successful unless it reveals common, overarching truths. As I hope the preceding narrative has suggested, on-farm ecology is insanely complex, and hoping that universal truths will emerge from the study of tiny corners might only lead to frustration. I spent several years trying to grow butternut squash and sweet corn next to various plantings of wildflowers and native grasses in an effort to document the benefits of such plantings for production. Each year produced a different result with no one type of planting rising to the top in terms of good neighborliness. Part of this might have been due to my dismal talents as a squash and corn grower, but much of it might also have come from the “muddying” complexities I have alluded to. A much larger study exploring the role of semi-natural habitats on farms across Europe concluded … it’s complicated, and landscape effects seem to be huge. It is easy to be discouraged by a lack of simple answers, but only if we expect our inquiries to provide them. If, on the other hand, we redefine the goal as an exploration of farm individuality and a patient documentation of patterns and specifics, then the lack of simple answers is less an indication of failure and more a contribution to understanding the reality we are fated to live with. To help farmers deal with the ecological individuality of their farms, accompaniment—joint exploration of a farm’s particular ecology and the tailoring of specific responses—seems to be one possible approach.

Such accompaniment also requires a subtle shift in farmer-ecologist social roles. I think agroecology should be thought of not just as a service to farmers, but more as a branch of production wherein the crop is not (at least directly) food for humans, but is Nature itself. Of course, agroecology cannot be divorced from the economic realities of food production. However, I do believe that agroecologists and farmers can meet as equals, and that open conversations around the harmonizing of primary goals—nature conservation on the one hand, food production on the other—can happen without the baggage of either party feeling a need to apologize or blindly work in service of the other. Too often, ecologists can come across as agronomically naïve, academic stuffed shirts trying to tell farmers how to do their job; farmers can be seen as abusers of Nature, myopically following the demands of production. Accompaniment will work only if we accept that we are all on level footing.

For this reason, and out of sheer human decency, we cannot divorce this work from the welfare of farmers. One cannot argue for greater attention to agroecology without also highlighting the need to create a sane economic system for farming. I know many farmers who have devoted what seems to be an inordinate amount of time to thinking about such a system, but who among us could idly accept the inherent contradiction of working so hard to produce a key human necessity (food) while having to scramble for even basic financial survival? We cannot paint a vision of true accompaniment among equals and a functional agrarian landscape without addressing the agricultural economic system. I won’t pretend to know how to tackle that, but it must be tackled.

Some Personal Examples

I will close by describing a trio of related initiatives I have been involved in, to hint at what such an approach might look like. The first is our recent Cultural and Ecological Field Guide to the Habitats of Columbia County, New York (our home county). It is meant as a tool to help people become familiar with the patterns of species occurrences in the landscape around them. We have included on-farm habitats in the guide, the “subversive” point being that a farm field, like an oak forest, is a habitat and is home to a particular group of creatures. Through the field guide, we hope to encourage people to encompass farms in their vision of the ecological landscape and so build a public vision of nature conservation that includes a role for farms, and a vision of farming that includes a role for the greater landscape.

“a farm field, like an oak forest, is a habitat and is home to a particular group of creatures”

The second is the Applied Farmscape Ecology Research Collaborative, a multi-institutional group of researchers sponsored by, and largely focused on, the Hudson Valley Farm Hub. The goal of this group is to approach the study of on-farm habitats from a variety of perspectives, asking what role they play in wild species conservation, and what role wild species play in influencing farm production. Wood turtles who periodically venture from the nearby riparian corridor into adjacent farm fields and bobolinks who have quickly adopted former cornfields are both the subject of studies trying to understand the role of farming activity in shaping the habitat quality for these species. A pair of researchers are also looking at the soil as habitat, and asking what influence soil management has on the microbes and macroinvertebrate communities. As part of this Collaborative ourselves, we seek to understand the role that semi-wild habitats or installed “beneficial” habitats might be playing in supporting beneficials in adjacent crops. The value of these projects is partially in the doing: By explicitly defining these as themes for study and by involving many students and interns, we help legitimize and motivate research into the multifaceted role of on-farm habitats.

This beautiful bobolink painting by artist Linda Mirabile highlights one of the most raucous members of the hayfield grassland bird community in the Northeast. The demographic heartland for bobolinks was probably the tallgrass and mixed-grass prairies of the Midwest. As grass-based agriculture expanded in the Northeast, so too did bobolinks as they found that hayfields served as suitable ecological analogies for their natural habitats. Today, reduced hayfield area in the Northeast, intensified hay harvest whose timing overlaps the nesting season, and the conversion of Midwest prairie to industrial agriculture all pose threats to this declining species. Credit: *Bobolink*, Acrylic on Fabriano, © Linda Mirabile.

Finally, for 20 years, my wife, Claudia, and I have worked as on-farm ecologists at Hawthorne Valley Farm, where we help to run the Farmscape Ecology Program. While much of our work occurs off-site, part of our role has been working with the farmers at Hawthorne Valley to understand their goals—which include ecological health of the land and commercially viable production—and how to facilitate them. That is, our role has been the accompaniment of which I speak. Claudia, a botanist, has helped plan and install beneficial habitats such as pollinator patches, hedgerows, and riparian corridor plantings; we have surveyed for bobolinks and helped the farmers pinpoint fields for delayed hay cutting; we have tried to help them balance pasture quality with wildlife habitat in shrubby pastures. Much of this is summarized in our Hawthorne Valley Farm Biodiversity Report. This work with our farmer colleagues has not necessarily discovered generalizable truths, but perhaps it has helped to integrate the farm more into the surrounding landscape and to accentuate its positive role for biodiversity conservation, while also reducing its negative impacts. Accompaniment is not imposition or rule making, but rather joint exploration, including difficult discussions about balancing production and conservation. Some of our suggestions have “stuck,” others haven’t.

Conclusions: Turtle Time

A small, compact spotted turtle perches on some dry wetland reeds and basks in the May sun. A few meters from its alert eyes, a parade of cows tromps by with bovine diligence, while beyond the cattle lane and behind the deer fence, tractors are beginning to plow the cold spring soil. The turtle may be 50 years old or more. It has its routes to find feeding areas, to encounter upland spots for summer aestivation, to locate suitable winter hibernation sites, and, if female, places to lay eggs. This population has evidently been able to find these necessities for generations in spite of, or perhaps sometimes because of the surrounding farm work. And yet new farm markets, new farming techniques, even new fashions, mean that over that time the turtle has seen many changes, from novel fences to re-enforced cattle lanes, to culverts and drainage projects. So far, it seems, our spectator has escaped unscathed, but with farming’s never-ending evolution, that escape is not guaranteed. No single thing we or anybody else learns is going to protect this population indefinitely, but by radio-tracking some of these creatures and by sharing their paths of exploration with the farmers, we give them an identity and gather farm-specific information that might help reduce the negative impacts of any proposed changes in farm activity on their populations. It is a small example of accompaniment, but perhaps the most we can aspire to on our “watch.” At the same time, part of the financial support that currently allows us to conduct this project comes from the welcome donations of people whose relative wealth has helped, unintentionally, to put housing, services, and land out of reach of many locals, including farmers.

Spotted turtles are attractive, rare little turtles who sometimes occur in small on-farm wetlands, where they can pass largely unnoticed. Realizing they’re present, understanding how they use the farmland, and mapping areas and times of interaction with farm work can be crucial for the survival of these and other turtles. Radio tracking has been a useful tool in such studies.

I cannot paint a fully satisfying picture of how these ecological and socioeconomic conundrums will be resolved. I can only say that those turtles, those singing insects, and those wet meadow orchids will continue doing their darndest to survive on this landscape and our food systems will continue to intersect with their needs. If we don’t have a better understanding of those intersections, not just on our home farm, but on farms around the region, the long-term fate of those creatures, and perhaps of farming itself, is uncertain. Just as each crop is a question seeded in the ground whose “harvest-answer,” as farmers know, will depend on the complex course of the growing season, so too our work as agroecologists is found in the diligent posing and exploring of our locally-centered, applied questions, rather than in a rush to results. Life will give us answers soon enough. And why do I believe that a life spent chasing these local answers will be valuable? Faith.

Conrad trained as a wildlife ecologist and, after studying ground squirrels in Indiana, Ruffed Grouse in Wisconsin and migratory fish south of the Orinoco, helped found the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program in 2003 and the Hudson Valley Farm Hub’s Applied Farmscape Ecology Research Collaborative in 2019. He has authored The Nature of the Place: A History of Living with the Land in Columbia County New York and is a co-author, with Anna Duhon, Claudia Knab-Vispo and Gretchen Stevens, of the recent From the Hudson to the Taconics: An Ecological and Cultural Field Guide to the Habitats of Columbia County, New York.