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A fresh way to describe a farm
The
Farm As Natural Habitat: Reconnecting Food Systems
with Ecosystems
Dana L.
Jackson and Laura L. Jackson, eds
Island
Press 2002
250 pp.,
$25
Coming
up with new metaphors for the farm is essential to agriculture's future. For
more than 50 years, we have been engaged in a process of redesigning the farm
to make it function more like an industry. Farms, like most industrial
operations, have concentrated on accessing cheap energy flows, externalizing
costs, reducing labor, and producing bulk commodities as cheaply as possible.
All of this led us to ignore some vital parts of any farm—especially the
ecological capital on which it depends.
In their delightful new book, Dana Jackson and Laura
Jackson help us begin thinking about the farm as a natural habitat. They take
issue with the notion—all too prevalent among farmers and environmentalists
alike—that the farm has to be an "ecological sacrifice zone," that only
wilderness preservation can protect biodiversity, and that agriculture and
wilderness are opposing concepts.
In addition to their own viewpoints -- Dana is
associate director of the Land Stewardship Project in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and Laura is associate professor of biology at the University of Northern
Iowa -- the Jacksons have added other perspectives. Contributors include
Nina Leopold Bradley who wrote the introduction and ecologist Brian DeVore.
The Jacksons, also intimately involved in the development of
"natural systems agriculture" with Laura's father and
founder of The Land Institute in Salina,
Kansas, are not backing away from that long-term vision for
agriculture. Rather, they encourage farmers and others to consider ways to
restore the agricultural landscape with crops and practices available now while
researchers continue efforts to develop perennial crops. The Jacksons contend, correctly I think, that if we were to adopt
new farm policies and develop new markets that would encourage farmers to
return to diverse crop rotations, including sod-forming crops, and extend the
cultural knowledge to make that transition, we could change the agricultural
landscape "within a decade."
The Jacksons also draw our attention to the need for social
transformations in food and agriculture. "The
Farm as Natural Habitat is about the connection between the grocery list
and the endangered species list," they tell readers at the start of the book.
We need to become better acquainted with the
connections between our eating habits and farm habitats if we want to achieve
our goal of a more sustainable future.
This collection of essays helps us to understand some of those
connections—and it is therefore a book not only instructive for farmers but for
everyone who eats. -- Fred Kirschenmann
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