Steve and I have been named as finalists for the 2013 Leopold Conservation Award. (We were finalists in 2012 as well–see Leopold Conservation Award). The $10,000 award is given to one California farmer each year by the Sand County Foundation, California Farm Bureau Federation and a group called Sustainable Conservation, to recognize “extraordinary achievement in voluntary conservation by private landowners.” The Sand County Foundation gets its name from Sand County Almanac by mid-20th century conservationist Aldo Leopold. Leopold was an advocate for the value of wild things, and he called for an ethical relationship between people and the land they own and manage.
We have been chosen as finalists for our efforts at water quality enhancement, cover cropping, conservation tillage, planting native hedgerows, planting a vegetative filter strip to prevent run-off from the farm from reaching the slough, and our native grassland restoration project. I don’t know if anything we’ve done here constitutes an extraordinary achievement. But perhaps it is the accumulation of ordinary achievements over time that creates the sort of “land ethic” that Leopold espoused.
One particular point that Leopold mentions strikes a chord for us here. He notes that the diverse wildernesses of America have mostly already gone, but says “we shall do well to find a forty here and there on which the prairie plants can be kept alive as species.” If all landowners do their best to preserve some of the wild on their land, then the native plants and animals can have places to simply exist.
About half of our home 40-acre farm is protected in a conservation easement. This means that no matter who owns the property after us, this portion of the land cannot be developed or even farmed. But that’s not all that is needed to truly conserve this ground. The land is not in its natural state—it has been farmed in the past, and has been overrun by invasive weeds that have all but obliterated the native grasses and flowers that we are trying to restore. There also was a landslide that took out a whole section of the hillside.
Our efforts in restoring this area (much thanks and praise to our restorationist Laura Kummerer) have included collecting and planting native plant seeds from local surroundings, and bringing in goats to eat the weeds and cows to fill the niche left by elk as grazers for the native grasses. Many times as we have struggled to manage this property we’ve seen the weeds come back and the native plants have a hard time reestablishing. The animals don’t always eat what we want them to eat, sometimes damaging what we’re trying to save. The struggle to recreate a native grassland on this special piece of ground brings home just how difficult it is to mimic nature. It took nature eons to create the diverse natural habitat that was here before this ground was used by people. We can only do our best to set up the conditions for nature to come back in and take over again.
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