Where a land ethic blooms

Caring for this planet entails decisions that are intimate, about our farms, our homes, our human and our wild neighbours

Managed grazing of beef cattle at the Gasser Farm in Witwen, in the southern Wisconsin Driftless Area, US. Photo by Randy Jackson

(1981-2024) was project coordinator for the Tallgrass Prairie and Oak Savanna Fire Science Consortium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Forty iron rectangles, each one blunt as a piano key, rotate into a blurring fury that hides the eight-foot-long shaft at the heart of the flail chopper. I am perched atop several tons of iron, with 80 horsepower at my command. This part of farming is straightforward – even a mechanically challenged tree-hugger like me can manage to depress the clutch, shift into second, and ease the throttle forward. The tractor’s tall, deeply treaded tires churn, revolving into a smooth spin. Everything is spinning: fans, belts, alternator, the driveshaft, axles. I don’t understand the mechanism fully, yet the tractor and chopper and I are propelled forward across the knee-high whiskers of a coarsely bearded cornfield.

It is Indian summer in southern Wisconsin. My wife and I and our young son live here on her family’s farm. Both of us are employed off the farm, but on weekends and many evenings I am an apprentice to my father-in-law, David. Today, we are taking advantage of a brief period of warm, dry weather. Winter is approaching, and I could be spending the day beside our woodsplitter – the gasoline-sipping, hydraulically heroic mechanism that makes it possible to put up several cords of firewood quickly each year – but that work can wait until the cool, sunny days of fall are shoved aside by the relentless spin of the earth into darkness, sleet, snow and frozen ground.

Managed grazing beef farm in the southern Wisconsin Driftless Area, Munsch Farm, Coon Creek, Wisconsin. Photo by Randy Jackson

The wall of tall green corn that stood here this summer has been transformed by fall and harvest. Little is standing after the field was stripped by a seed-combing combine. The mechanical tornado flails so loudly behind me: wailing against the air, grinding off the root-buttressed corn-stalk stumps, sucking up spent leaves and stripped cobs. In my wake, dry corn litter passes through the chopper like water compelled into frothy turbulence, falling again into an even, silent surface that hides so much activity below.

No time to waste – the weather is expected to hold for another day, and I need to cover the field before the light fails this afternoon. Tomorrow, David will rake this chewed-up detritus into windrows and then come back for another round to bale them up. While it is good to leave some of this thatch on the field – to keep a roof over the soil and guard against erosion by wind and rain – we can afford to borrow some of this, which also makes good straw. Wherever livestock are gathered in close quarters, their waste can produce concentrations of ammonia and other gases that can be harmful to animals and people alike. Adding straw slows the breakdown of manure and urine, reducing the production of noxious gases and suspending valuable nutrients in a semi-solid mixture. The straw and excrement will come back to this field loaded with nitrogen, phosphorous and other nutrients.

The ‘barn-pack’ is also heavy with organic matter that keeps a significant portion of the nutrients locked up for longer periods of time until it is broken down by the creatures who are at work beneath the calm surface of the field: literally tons of worms and beetles and other invertebrates; many miles of fungal hyphae; and countless diversity of bacteria. The denizens of this foodshed work to decompose the thick cell walls of the straw, as well as the partially digested grass stems and leaves that passed through the cattle and into their manure while the livestock fed on hay.

The creatures of the soil also feed on the bodies of the gut microbes that helped ruminants digest their hay. The gut-borne microbes are the true herbivores in this system: the power of the sun is harnessed by plants and turned into grain or hay, which is gathered by the farmers and transported to the barn, then delivered to the habitat of the gut by a large mammal whose brain, mouth and muscles spend their days gathering food for its microbial tenants. However, the microbes are short-lived and quickly finish their shift at the top of the system. As they die, they pass through the threshold of hind gut and, finally, the anus. Shit.

Inspecting managed grazing of tallgrass prairie mosaic at Gwenyn Hill Farm, southeast Wisconsin. Photo by Randy Jackson

Is it fair to call any of this waste? The spark of life in the stinking barn pack is not yet exhausted, not yet lost to entropy. Roots burrow deep in search of more phosphorous, nitrogen and water to carry on the busy work of building ion transporters, enzymes, lignin and proteins – from root to stem to leaf to seed. Through spring, summer and fall, the straw, plant fibres and dead microbes that re-enter the field will take shifts in resurrection. Such is the life of the soil.

The end of the row breaks my reverie. I turn the tractor in a half-circle and feather the lever again until the tornado touches down just as I straighten out and catch the next row. Ready for another trip across the field, aimed down the rows, now due west. My route takes me just a few degrees north of where the late afternoon sun hangs in the soft yellow light of mid-latitude autumn.

I crest and ease on over oak-dappled ridges – glacial moraines – that attest to the furthest advance of the recent Ice Age glaciers and the fire-centric economy of the people who covered this land with effigy mounds and who later began to grow corn and other crops in fields they weeded using the shoulder blades of bison. Further west, a narrow, rusty-girdered bridge threads over the Mississippi River, carrying water that fell as rain and snow on north country forests, coulee pastures in the tri-state Driftless Area, and the broad, flat corn-and-soybean lands of central and western Minnesota. Each fall, the skies above fill with white pelicans, bald eagles and a paradise of waterfowl. Against this pattern of gathering and flow, I’d continue west, west: chopping through the dried stalks of compass plant and tall tassels of big bluestem at Hayden Prairie State Preserve in Iowa and fording the Big Sioux beneath the watch of yucca and side oats grama.

End of the row – decision time again.

Last September, I accompanied David to check out a field that lies due west of the stubble-chopping field, on the north bank of Prentice Creek. We were there to measure and mark a grass buffer that will separate row crops from the creek – a practice encoded in the conservation easement that is now a part of the deed to the property. Given the flash floods that have repeatedly swept across this low ground over the past few years, leaving this land in grass makes good economic and ecological sense. During the last major flood in 2008, David baled dusty hay from this field, while a substantial portion of his corn crop would have been completely lost. As we moved upstream to place more flags, I repeatedly plunged through the field-edge tangle of burdock, mulberry, eastern blackberry, woodland sunflowers and pointed-leaf tick-trefoil to find the eroded edge of the creek bank. It is not a pilgrim’s creek, but a real one, cut deep into topsoil that has eroded off the long-planted fields and into its dynamic basin. David planned to follow this line of flags a few days later, while spraying the rest of the old hayfield with glyphosate to kill the grass and alfalfa, and prepare for next spring’s planting of herbicide-resistant corn.

We spent an hour........

© Aeon