4
Brotherhood of the Bobolink
In Search of the Ultimate Indicator Species
Avoid looking across the road to the west, where lies an apocalyptic vision of what is and what could have been. Rather, look to the east, where there’s ecological potential and a reminder of why it’s worth forging links between birds, bovines, and biologically healthy soil. That’s the version of a mantra Mary Damm recites to herself each time she pulls into the driveway of the farm she owns in the Driftless Area of northeastern Iowa, bleary-eyed from a 475-mile road trip that begins at her home in Indiana.
Damm purchased these 120 acres in 2014. As I describe in the introduction to this book, the previous owner, Dan Specht, had been killed in a haying accident the summer before. Before the accident, Mary had spent much of the previous decade wandering this mix of pasture, trees, and restored prairie, helping Dan tabulate all the birds and plants the farmer had nurtured on this wildly successful operation while raising crops and livestock. So when the property, which Dan dubbed Prairie Quest Farm, came up for sale after his death, she couldn’t bear to see it bought up and plowed down for corn and soybeans. Damm’s fears were warranted: she had lost a bid to purchase an additional twenty acres of Dan’s land immediately west and across the road from the main farmstead. The first time she visited her farm after the auction, the acrid odor of smoldering slash piles hung in the air—the new owner of the twenty acres had bulldozed a quarter-mile line of trees and piled them up for burning; the pasture that had bordered the trees was being prepared for row crops.
“I cried, and I told Dan I was really sorry that I couldn’t buy that land,” Damm recalled on an afternoon in late July as we stood in her driveway, looking at those twenty acres, which were now head-high corn from fenceline to fenceline. Then she turned east to look at the 120 acres she had saved from the dozer and the plow. The grasslands that made up most of Prairie Quest Farm were speckled here and there with small flags and crisscrossed with portable electric fencing—the former marked research plots, the latter rotationally grazed pasture paddocks. The flags and the fencing represented a possible way to not only maintain the legacy of Dan’s farm as a home to healthy ecosystems, but give other farmers and the rest of society a reason for not always seeing a stand of trees or grass as unproductive until it’s dozed, burned, and plowed.
In recent years, I’ve visited Prairie Quest a couple of times to learn more about a research collaboration that has arisen in the wake of Dan’s tragic death. Mary, a prairie ecologist, is partnering with Phil Specht, Dan’s older brother, who owns and operates a dairy farm near her land. As I toured Mary and Phil’s farms, the whole time listening to them compare notes, debate, and downright argue about the way to strike a balance between scientific veracity, environmental sustainability, and agricultural profitability, I realized that on a micro-scale they are grappling with a question that vexes our entire food and farming system: how do we develop an indicator, a kind of label, that immediately relates a clear message about the impact a farming method is having on ecosystem health and at the same time gives the public a helpful clue as to what it can do to support that type of agriculture?
I could think of no better piece of land to contemplate that question on. After all, no ecological agrarian was more aware than Dan Specht of the push and pull required to strike the working lands conservation balance.
Prairie Partners
This collaboration has its roots in a chance meeting Mary had with Dan at the 2004 North American Prairie Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Although the tallgrass prairie biome was once present in fourteen states from Texas to Minnesota—including 85 percent of Iowa—sprawl, agriculture, and other forms of development have combined to all but obliterate this habitat in the midwestern Corn Belt. Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin, for example, now have less than 0.1 percent of their presettlement prairie.1 As a result, prairie ecologists are particularly interested in two types of prairies that exist today: native remnants that somehow escaped the plow and the bulldozer, and restored prairies—plots that have been replanted by land trusts, natural resource agencies, and private individuals using seed gleaned from those remnants and native plant nurseries.
As part of her graduate school research at Indiana University, Damm was interested in comparing the ecosystem health of the native remnants and their restored counterparts. After the meeting in Madison, Dan invited her to study prairies in Iowa. They became romantically involved and soon Mary was regularly making trips from Indiana to gather samples for her research. By 2017, she was closing in on finishing her PhD dissertation, which was showing that although restored prairies are not as diverse as their native counterparts, over time the groupings of the restored habitat’s plant communities in a given location become more consistent from year to year, which makes the overall system more resilient. Resiliency is the hallmark of a working, or functioning, ecosystem like a prairie.
But it wasn’t just about prairies that Damm was learning when she made those early research trips to Iowa. While using Dan’s farm as a home base, she had her eyes opened to how agriculture could relate to nature in a positive way.
“I had been to two farms before I met Dan. I actually did not know much about midwestern agriculture,” recalled Damm, who, before attending graduate school, worked for The Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service in Colorado.
Even when she first started visiting Dan’s farm and saw how, for example, he had replaced some of his annual row-cropped acres with perennial pastures so he could produce beef cattle on grass, Mary was more drawn to the acres of oak and other hardwoods that bordered the pastures. “We’d hike in the woods and I would separate the woods from the pastures. I’d be like, ‘Oh my, look at the beautiful forest understory,’” recalled Damm.
Eventually, it was the birds that convinced her working farmland and natural habitat could share the same piece of real estate. There were birds and other kinds of wildlife in those woods, of course, but Mary also noticed that Dan’s rotationally grazed pastures were home to an array of avian species usually associated with prairie habitats: various kinds of sparrows, as well as meadowlarks, dickcissels, and, perhaps the most noticeable of them all, the “skunk bird,” otherwise known as the bobolink. Dan had been into birds since he was a kid, even making up comic strips about them and other wild animals. He always seemed to have a pair of binoculars on hand, and bought Mary her first pair. Chore time on Dan’s farm was often not a straightforward affair.
“We’d be driving along and, ‘Oh, oh, there’s a bird!’ And then we’d drive along some more and, ‘Oh, oh!’ So eventually we’d get back to what we were supposed to be doing, which was check Dan’s cows,” recalled Damm with a laugh. “The birds, we’d always look at the birds.”
When Damm was back in Indiana, Dan would e-mail her about the seasonal arrivals of various species, and share his ideas for helping out the feathered residents of the farm, like adjusting grazing schedules or haying a field in such a way that the fledglings would have an opportunity to seek refuge from the mower. Mary and Dan soon became a kind of team—attending prairie and sustainable agriculture conferences, they would participate in different sessions, comparing notes afterward. Mary would accompany Dan on his cow chore/birding outings in the field and Dan, in turn, would help Mary do soil and plant sampling on her prairie plots; he even developed a height-adjustable plant sampling frame for her using electric fence posts.
Bobolink Battle
Dan bought Phil Specht his first pair of binoculars as well. Like his younger brother, Phil inherited their family’s passion for the out-of-doors. Their dad had long been involved in soil conservation efforts on and off the farm they grew up on, and was an avid fisherman whose idea of a Sunday family outing was to be casting lines for smallmouth bass at a local river. Phil, who is in his late sixties, has a degree in social work with a minor in chemistry from Wartburg College. Dan studied wildlife biology at Iowa State before he decided, as Mary puts it, “I can go be a wildlife biologist at home.” (In the 1990s, he went back to school and got his biology degree at the University of Northern Iowa.)
Both brothers ended up farming, and both decided they were not going to raise food using a conventional chemical- and energy-intensive system. In the 1970s, Phil started producing milk using managed rotational grazing, which at that time few in the Midwest had heard of. “I wanted my whole farm to be a working ecosystem,” he told me.
Today, Specht has 250 acres of rotationally grazed pastures, and although he at one time grew as much as one thousand acres of corn, he hasn’t raised a significant amount of that crop since 1992. Like Mary’s farm, Phil’s is extremely hilly, and years ago he put in place some seven miles of terraces in order to grow row crops on the highly erosive slopes. Today those structures, which snake along the contours of the farm, are covered in grass and trees.
Rotational grazing has proven to be an economically viable way to produce milk for Phil, but his interest in the land goes beyond the financial bottom line. One day when Mary and I met with him, he pulled up in front of Dan’s now-abandoned house in an especially good mood because he had just sold one hundred woodland acres to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. It was prime cerulean warbler habitat; these sky-blue songbirds rely on mature deciduous forests; one estimate is that their populations declined 74 percent between 1966 and 2015.2 Phil was delighted he could help out a wild resident that he was fascinated with. “I got a real good look at one cerulean warbler,” he told us. “It flew down, lit on a branch. I was staring at it, and then it gave me this beautiful look and off it went and I’ve never seen another one since.”
He then handed Mary a couple of cover crop seed catalogs he had picked up. There was a one-acre spot near Dan’s house that she had enrolled in a U.S. Department of Agriculture program that paid landowners to establish pollinator habitat. Damm wanted to seed it down with cover crops to prepare the soil before putting in the expensive prairie seed, and she admitted she was clueless about how to proceed; she could identify every plant present in an established prairie, but preparing the soil for a new planting was another thing altogether. Damm needed advice from the farmer.
They talked over the best strategy for establishing the prairie and the history of the farm, as well as government agriculture programs and some recent watershed-wide efforts to improve water quality and habitat. They also discussed Phil’s approach to farming. “It should mimic nature,” he said. That statement prompted Mary to share her philosophy on how she can best contribute to protecting and supporting the natural environment. “I became an ecologist because I wanted to protect these natural areas and my personality isn’t that of a tree hugger who goes to meetings and expresses myself that way,” she conceded. “So, I felt if I had the science knowledge, that would be my way to contribute.”
At one point during the discussion, the farmer grabbed a camera out of his van and tried to snap photos of an uncooperative butterfly that was flitting around a bull thistle a few yards away. “A female black morphed swallowtail,” Phil announced. He takes a lot of photos of the birds, plants, and insects he sees on his farm and posts them to his Facebook page, along with his strident views about the state of industrial farming and agricultural policy. Specht was hoping his telephoto lens would help him differentiate between two male bobolinks he had been watching.
“Did you name them, Phil?” Mary teased.
“Well, I could’ve,” Phil shot back without missing a beat.
Over the years, Dan and Phil partnered on various agricultural enterprises and traded work. All along, they shared an intense passion for farming in a way that was good for the land. Dan also adopted managed rotational grazing, in this case to produce beef cattle, and for a time raised pork utilizing a method reliant on deep straw bedding in open pens, a stark contrast to the factory-style confinement system that dominates hog production these days. He raised corn and organic soybeans, and when I first met him in the 1990s, he had just won a state yield contest for the latter crop.
No matter what farming technique they were using, the brothers were always on the lookout for indicators that their production methods were in sync with nature. So they were excited when, in the 1980s, Dan started noticing that grassland birds were nesting and feeding in the rotationally grazed pastures. “All of sudden, there are lots of birds,” recalled Phil.
Others have noticed as well. While doing cerulean warbler research along nearby Bloody Run Creek a few years ago, natural resource scientist Paul Skrade would regularly take shortcuts through Phil’s farm. He was, in his words, “blown away” by all the grassland birds he was seeing on the farm. Sighting so many bobolinks on Phil’s land seemed to be particularly delightful for the assistant professor of biology at Upper Iowa University, who describes one of their calls as resembling the musical beeps emitted by the robot R2-D2 in the Star Wars movies. Bobolinks and other birds reliant on upland grassland habitat have experienced the biggest decline of any bird group in North America, and the downward trend shows no sign of dissipating. Replacing all those pastures, hayfields, and grassy field borders with annual row crops has had a particularly detrimental impact on such birds.3
“I was seeing all these bird species that are of concern in Iowa while walking across Phil’s farm,” the biologist recalled. “I said, ‘Phil, what’s the deal? Is this Conservation Reserve Program ground?’”
Phil made it clear that this was not idled conservation land—it was a working pasture system.
Birds such as bobolinks are “obligate species”—meaning they rely almost 100 percent on a certain kind of habitat—grasslands, in this case. Finding such habitat when they return to the Midwest each spring is critical to the skunk bird’s survival. They winter in South America and after making a jaw-dropping, 12,500-mile round-trip migration flight each year, begin building their nests in places like northeastern Iowa by the second or third week of May.
One afternoon while he was visiting Mary’s farm as part of a Practical Farmers of Iowa field day, Skrade explained to me that just having lots of grass isn’t enough—grassland songbirds rely on a heterogeneous habitat; they want variety both in terms of the height of vegetation and the number of plant species present. Skrade likes that Phil does not have a uniform way of grazing his paddocks. Depending on conditions and time of year, sometimes the farmer leaves the cattle on the same spot for a couple days and they are allowed to eat the forage down relatively short. Other times the cattle may be moved after only a day. This latter method leaves a fair bit of standing vegetation behind, allowing the paddock to recover quicker and providing a diverse habitat for birds and other wildlife.
“Agriculture and biodiversity can go together—we’re seeing that here. As you get this diverse habitat out there, you can get this diversity of species,” said Skrade excitedly as a couple of dickcissels somewhere out in a nearby pasture cranked out their dick, dick, dick . . . cissel call incessantly. “We have a working landscape here.”
I realized while talking to Skrade that he was referring not only to the fact that Specht’s pastures were generating economic activity, but that they were also part of a system that “worked” from an ecological point of view. Such an insight recasts how one thinks about a “working landscape”—it’s not just about pounds of milk per acre; ecological services are a valuable output as well.
When Dan got Phil those binoculars, it launched a kind of avian contest between the two that continued even after Dan’s death. Both men were fascinated by the charismatic bobolink, so at the core of the competition was a basic question: whose farm could produce the most of that species in a given year? During one of my visits to his farm, Phil estimated that of the 250 acres of pasture on his place, about one hundred acres were prime bobolink habitat; there were some thirty nesting pairs of bobolinks on his farm alone.
This wasn’t an assessment based on off-the-cuff observations made from a tractor seat. For the past few years, Specht has been in the midst of a fairly in-depth research project of his own. Phil is not your typical farmer—besides having academic training in chemistry, he’s a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science. One of his “hobbies” is reading scientific abstracts and he complains about having to pay money every time he wants to download journal research that was conducted by land grant scientists.
“He’s a weirdo,” said Mary with a deep-throated laugh.
Specht is a big believer in recording data and adapting his management style as a result. He makes sure the information gathered is randomized, “because your eyes will always go to the exception,” he said. Such an observe-and-adjust way of doing things is relatively common among farmers I’ve met who are undertaking innovative practices that replace a heavy reliance on chemical inputs and machinery with intensive management. Over the years, I’ve been on dozens of operations that utilize managed rotational grazing, and a trait graziers share is the ability to monitor how their livestock and grasslands are interacting, and to act accordingly. Managed rotational grazing, like diverse crop rotations or cover cropping, is not a cookie-cutter way of managing the land that lends itself to computerized calibrations. Phil likes to quote a grandfather of his who used to say, “The grass will wave and beckon the cattle.” In other words, when it’s tall enough that the breeze can cause movement of the stems, it’s tall enough to be grazed. “My number one rule for graziers: observe and adapt, observe and adapt.”
Phil has set up rectangular study plots on his and Mary’s pastures. For two months each spring, the farmer notes when female bobolinks are flushed off nests in a plot. He also records grass height at various times during the study period using a measuring tape attached to a five-gallon bucket. “My thinking is you’re not going to get farmers to think about fine details, but you could get them to set a bucket out to measure grass height,” said Specht. “That’s why I went with the bucket—everybody’s got a bucket.”
Bobolinks forage for insects and spiders found around forbs, grasses, and sedges. What Specht has observed is that the birds prefer to nest in paddocks that have been grazed in early May, and that they stay away from the parts of the pasture that border the woodlands. The farmer’s ultimate goal is to figure out at what point livestock productivity and bobolink productivity begin to intersect, or collide, depending on how you look at it. How much forage production can he get off his pastures before the bird nesting suffers? What is the tipping point?
“What I think I’m proving is you can have a healthy grass ecosystem while producing milk,” said Phil. “But I’m also measuring why are the birds in one spot, and not another? What do they prefer?”
Damm’s research on her and Phil’s farm is going deeper, so to speak. Along one-hundred-foot transects in the grazed pastures and the ten acres of prairie Dan restored on a back part of the farm in the late 2000s, she records how many plant species are present and each species’ abundance, thus developing a picture of how much diversity there is. She also takes regular soil samples, sending them off to a laboratory to be tested using a sophisticated method called the Haney Soil Health Test.4 Such testing goes beyond the traditional measurement of basic nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—known as N-P-K—which is popular among crop farmers trying to determine their fertilizer budget for the coming year. Comprehensive soil health tests attempt to show how much biological activity is actually going on. Such a measurement provides insights into more than a soil’s fertility; it also measures its ability to, among other things, build soil organic matter, which in turn can bolster everything from water-holding capacity to the amount of greenhouse gases that are sequestered. Damm is excited about making connections between the health of the soil and the state of the plant community that is sending its roots through it. After all, one truism that’s come out of the soil health movement is that diversity below ground equals diversity above ground.5
The study Damm is undertaking on her farm is similar to the dissertation research she’s been doing on restored and native prairies in other parts of the state. In other words, will that prairie Dan planted become more resilient, more prairie-like, with time? But the question has an added twist: what impact will the grazing of the pastures and parts of the prairie have on species diversity and soil health?
Damm foresees the possibility of a joint scientific paper with Phil that compares ecosystem health between a grazed pasture and a restored prairie, and that takes into account the impact rotational grazing has on plant diversity, soil health, and bobolink populations. Such a collaboration makes sense in a lot of ways. Because Phil’s farm is practically next door to Mary’s (another landowner’s fields separate the two), their individual patches of grasslands and woods form an almost contiguous block of natural habitat.
Pasture vs. Prairie
One summer day we three headed up to Mary’s pastures to get a firsthand look. There were sixteen rotational paddocks on one hundred acres, and we stood in a spot that had just been grazed a month previous by a local grass-based beef farmer to whom Mary was renting the pasture. From my non-expert perspective, it appeared to be a well-managed grassland: good regrowth, no exposed soil. Flags marked where Mary had been sampling vegetation and soil, as well as where Phil had been doing bobolink monitoring. We spied a few female bobolinks, which were buff-colored, a sharp contrast to the breeding males, which, with their feather color mix of black below and white above, suggest “a dress suit on backward,” writes Roger Tory Peterson in the first birding field guide I ever owned.6 We spied one bobolink Phil believed was a late nesting female, judging how much she held her ground and energetically let the neighborhood know we were in the vicinity with her chuk, chuk call.
I asked Phil and Mary to assess the pasture from their various standpoints. Phil said the pasture had some good forage in it from a livestock producer’s perspective: timothy grass, orchard grass, bromegrass, red clover, and white clover. There were also stands of giant ragweed and goldenrod, which are not such good sources of livestock feed.
Mary conceded she didn’t have the eye for pasture that she does for prairie.
“Look! Goldenrod! Look! Milkweed!” Phil shouted, doing an impersonation of what he thought a prairie ecologist’s response to the habitat would be, a reminder that even though a plant like goldenrod is a valuable part of the natural habitat—it’s a great source of food for pollinators during the fall, for example—it’s not well-loved by cattle.
“Actually yes, I do see the diversity of plants. Just on the other side of the fence where I sampled one bird plot, there were thirteen species of plants,” Mary said, pointing at a spot a few hundred feet away. “There is a diversity—it’s not as diverse as a native prairie or maybe even a restored prairie, but in terms of what plants are out here and how many there are, and the cover too, it’s good. So, one other thing I notice here—I know this is a cool-season grassland that this time of year has dead seedheads. And then over here straight up ahead of us is the prairie.”
As she said this we glanced at the ten-acre restored prairie a few hundred yards east of where we were standing. The difference was striking: its warm-season natives were green and vibrant, and various flowering plants were just coming into their own in the July heat. Here in late summer were two habitats going in opposite directions.
Looking for Signs
“People like Dan and Phil don’t get caught up in the minutiae, or they see the minutiae and go beyond it and integrate all the minutiaes,” Damm said later that day after Phil had headed back to do the evening milking. “I think unfortunately scientists get so caught up in a little piece of the picture that they are not very good at anything big.”
As she said this, we were walking down to the ten acres of restored prairie. It was hemmed in on three sides by trees. As we made our way down the path, more bobolinks flashed about, giving out their soft chuk call when perched, and emitting the R2-D2 song in flight.
We waded waist deep into the prairie, and it was clear Mary was more in her element. All of the talk about cover crop mixes, government programs, pounds-of-bovines-per-acre, and fencing systems was part of a steep learning curve for her. She relied heavily on Phil and other farmers in the area for advice on what to do with the agricultural part of the land. But here, among the native grasses and forbs, she was in charge. Along the way, Damm pointed out where she was sampling plants and soil and how she had unofficially divided the natural habitat into “bad prairie” and “good prairie.” The former, which was on the side of a small pond closest to the pasture, was full of brome, a good forage for cattle but which is considered an invasive by prairie enthusiasts.
At one point, I asked to take a photo of her in the prairie, and Mary agreed, as long as bromegrass wasn’t in the shot. “Phil loves brome,” she conceded. But the farmer wasn’t here and the prairie ecologist was. We struggled through reed canary grass as a bullfrog near the pond launched into its evening amphibian public address system. Finally, we made it to the “good prairie.” There wasn’t nearly as much bromegrass, and there was a healthy mix of wild species such as big bluestem, Indiangrass, Canada and rigid goldenrod, gray-headed coneflower, cup plant, rattlesnake master, white wild indigo, round-headed bush clover, showy tick-trefoil, partridge pea, and common mountain mint. Damm stopped to examine a legume that was doing particularly well: the vines of Apios americana, commonly known as potato bean or American groundnut, were wrapping themselves around the stems of reed canary grass. A small native legume was quietly taking down a highly productive, invasive grass.
A Tough Neighborhood
Mary is well aware that no matter what she does on this farm, or what Phil does on his, they are just two of many in the region—islands in the stream, or, more accurately, islands in a roaring river that frequently leaves its banks. All she has to do is look west across the road at that twenty acres of former timber and pasture to be reminded of that. The bottom line is the land management practices that dominate the rest of the agricultural landscape know no boundaries.
For example, as part of her research Damm studied two-hundred-acre Steele Prairie in northwestern Iowa’s Cherokee County, which was at one time home to the state’s largest population of western prairie fringed orchid. Unfortunately, it is surrounded by some of the most expensive farmland in the nation. A few years ago, Damm and a botanist conducted an inventory of the prairie’s flora and found no western prairie fringed orchids. Over the years, eroded soil from surrounding row-cropped fields had crept into the prairie, bringing with it the fertilizer present in those crop fields. Such an influx of sediment and nutrients favors invasives like reed canary grass, which crowd out native species like the orchid. It was a great loss. Damm compared the orchid to the bobolink—a charismatic species whose presence or absence tells us a lot about the health of an entire ecosystem.
But there are signs of hope. Several members of Practical Farmers of Iowa, a sustainable agriculture organization, farm in Damm and Specht’s neighborhood, and frequently hold field days highlighting innovative, ecologically positive production practices. One such event on Mary’s farm drew dozens of participants, despite torrential rains in the area that day. Phil knows of farmers in the area who are increasingly interested in grass-based livestock production, and conventional corn and soybean producers are more frequently showing up at sustainable agriculture workshops, seeking information on cover cropping and other techniques to build soil health.
Damm also feels the environmental community is starting to appreciate the role working lands conservation can play in habitat restoration. Prior to one of my visits to the farm, she had an e-mail exchange with a leader in the ecological restoration community. Mary had suggested that the next meeting of the Midwest-Great Lakes Chapter of the Society for Ecological Restoration include a session on how to establish native prairie species in pastures. The ecologist had responded positively, writing: “I agree with you. I think it’s time restoration and agriculture come more together.”
Bringing those two worlds together is another reason the research she and Phil Specht are collaborating on may be so important. During one of my visits, they got into an energetic, but good-natured, argument over the best way to gauge whether a land management method like rotational grazing is facilitating a working ecosystem. Mary, the scientist, was excited about what something like a Haney Soil Health Test could show her. Certain Haney Test results could tell a lot about whether the farming system on the soil’s surface was helping to build a diverse biome below.
Phil, the working farmer and observer, argued that just the presence of bobolinks can provide the telltale sign that things are working ecologically. It’s an indicator farmers can note while doing chores, building fence, or riding the tractor; it doesn’t require grubbing up a soil sample and sending it off to a lab.
“Do you have to do the Haney Test, or can you just see a bobolink? Dan’s statement was, ‘If you see bobolinks, three little words: It’s. All. Working. Three words. You have a working ecosystem.’ Anyway, the bobolink is just something you can take field glasses and see. It’s a real handy indicator and a flashy one. Henslow’s sparrows are more threatened than bobolinks, but frankly aren’t as charismatic.”
Damm agreed that the bobolink could be a recognizable symbol of how the land was faring, but as an indicator it needed to be backed up with other research that monitored more than successful fledges of just one bird species. That’s why it was important to augment the nesting observations with the plant species sampling and soil biology tests. “We need to find out if there is some sort of correlation—there may or may not be,” she said.
Ecosystem Seal of Approval
All this talk about developing an indicator of a healthy ecosystem brings up the larger issue of how to provide consistent economic incentives for wildly successful farming. Mary had been thinking more about that question as she considered the future of the land she had taken ownership of. There’s a reason that the majority of farms in her community and beyond raise corn and soybeans: government programs and the markets pay them to do that. Although Damm was using U.S. Department of Agriculture conservation programs to provide financial support for improving the rotational grazing system, establishing pollinator habitat, conducting soil health sampling, and even establishing edible nut trees on her farm, such incentives are no substitute for long-term financial support. In addition, the survival of such programs is vulnerable to the whims of agricultural policymakers, and I’ve witnessed firsthand how the competency with which they are implemented through government agencies can vary considerably, depending on the staffing situations in rural offices.
As an absentee landowner with an environmental ethic, it’s difficult for Mary to manage the 120 acres from afar, even with Phil being in the neighborhood. At one point, she had researched various templates for lease agreements that would require certain conservation practices be maintained by the farmer renting her land. In the end, Damm ended up enrolling the farm in a USDA Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) contract. Such contracts, which usually run for five years, provide payments for maintaining various conservation practices on working farmland. Mary’s CSP contract stipulates that the pastures be under a managed rotational grazing system and that it undergo monitoring of soil health, which dovetails nicely with the research she and Phil are doing. She has rented the pastures out to a farmer from the neighborhood who has an extensive background in environmentally friendly grazing, but that might not always be an option. Damm figures that for now, anyway, the CSP contract’s stipulations will help keep in place environmentally sound land management practices no matter who the renter is.
Consistent market support for wildly successful farming practices is difficult to maintain as well. Certified organic farmers receive a premium price for maintaining certain chemical-free, sustainable practices—Dan was certified organic for a time—but establishing a prairie or building a healthy soil biota in general does not generate regular financial dividends in our current food and farm system. Over the years, Dan worked hard to try and get rewarded for his ecological farming methods through sustainable and organic meat labels, but had mixed results. Dan and Phil talked frequently about developing a sustainable grassland “stamp” featuring a singing songbird that could be placed on livestock products originating from farms that are doing the right thing when it comes to natural habitat. Maybe the bobolink could be the poster child for such a stamp, at least in the Midwest where so much of its habitat has suffered as a result of industrial farming? Phil wondered out loud about a third-party group certifying such a label.
This fixation on bobolinks as the ultimate symbol of a working ecosystem had me, like Mary, feeling a little uneasy at first. After all, any time we choose to focus on promoting one resource, there’s the danger of excluding other pieces of the puzzle that are key to the workings of the whole. Aldo Leopold grappled with this when he realized that killing off predators like wolves may have been good for game species such as deer in the short term, but it resulted in significant damage to the overall forest ecosystem in the long view.7
However, as I spent more time with Damm and Specht, it became clear that the bobolink is so dependent on a healthy grassland ecosystem—it relies on consistent, perennial cover that’s characterized by heterogeneity and is home to plenty of insect-based food—that using it as a kind of biological barometer isn’t a bad idea. With its black-and-white flashiness, coupled with a name that tends to trip off the tongue, the bobolink truly is charismatic and easy for even non-bird nerds to remember. It may not be a keystone species, but its presence or absence tells us a lot about what else finds that particular habitat attractive: other grassland songbirds and pollinators, as well as the kind of deep-rooted perennials that can keep our water clean and sequester greenhouse gases. The bobolink is also one of those animals that can have a domino effect when it comes to triggering one’s interest in other members of the plant and animal community. Partially because of his fixation on the bird, Phil has become more interested in what insects are on the farm and ways he can help them thrive. Mary, for her part, is now fascinated by the relationship between biologically healthy soil, plant diversity, and bobolink nesting success.
Yes, we could do worse than to focus on what keeps this delightful little bird happy. And Phil said something once that sticks with me, providing hope that whether or not a special “Bobolink Beef” label is created or enough credible science emerges from his and Mary’s plots and transects to gain the attention of government agencies and policymakers, one fact remains: the farmer and the ecologist are going to do their utmost to maintain an ecosystem that Dan Specht would have recognized as healthy. Phil’s reassuring statement came when I asked, half-jokingly, who was winning the brotherly battle of the bobolink. “Me, this year,” he said without hesitation. “Last year, it was Dan.”
The farmer then went on to describe ways he could tweak his grazing system, tilting the odds even more in his favor.