The Need for Farmland Sanctuaries
by Russ Mullen
I grew up on a diversified farm in southwest Iowa during the 1950s and 1960s when chickens, hogs, cattle, hay crops, and pasture dotted the landscapes. Farmers used small tractors by today’s standards, bulldozers were rare, and genetically modified grain crops for use with specific herbicides were not invented. Almost every farm had timber, brushy waterways and weedy fencerows. Even farms in central Iowa with flatter land had more timber, brush, and grassy fencerows than today. Our family trapped, hunted, fished, and farmed, so it was easy for me to observe places in nature that provided sanctuaries for wildlife:
-The young doe that jumped up out of the weeds while I walked along a brushy waterway looking for a missing cultivator shovel – her two spotted fawns stumbling to keep up with her as she led them to the entryway of a thick forest of oak and hickories.
-Fingerling perch furiously swimming to a tree-shaded pool of still water bordering a trickling stream.
-Even Dad had a natural sanctuary. A week before his land payment deadline, I saw him grab his old, crooked cane fishing pole, the cream-colored sisal string wrapped in spirals around the pole with a red and white bobber hanging on for dear life. His right hand holding a metal, Butternut coffee can, half full of feedlot-fed worms, he disappeared over the hill toward his favorite fishing hole - a naturally air-conditioned spot under the overhang of a 75-year-old cottonwood tree near quiet moving water that no longer had fish.
All species need sanctuaries to flourish - physical spaces in nature that provide safety, acceptance, and freedom. And in a farming state like Iowa, we have lost them at an alarming rate in the past. Ninety-five percent of Iowa’s wetlands disappeared, more than half of the forests, and many wildlife species are in decline due to agriculture intensification. But it’s not an impossible situation. We can embrace, value, and implement farmland sanctuaries.
One of my early boyhood memories of a previously, unexplored sanctuary occurred only a short distance from our farmstead on a dirt road in SW Iowa. I walked out of the driveway just before dawn, traps slung over my shoulder, and headed south to the wetland. It was a crisp, fall morning, every sound distinct. Bird songs echoed off the road toward me when I topped the last hill. Conversational notes of mergansers, wood ducks, mallards, and geese talking and laughing ricocheted into my ears.
I crossed the rusted fence bordering the wetland and entered a foreign land. Mounds of soil, claimed by patches of reeds and cordgrass, stood above pools of water like unbridled acne on nature’s pockmarked skin. Hopscotching on mounds of soil, my foot slipped, throwing me forward. My gloved hands dove into the muck below and sank deeper and deeper until my face entered the murky water. The water tasted stale with the aroma of sweat-stained socks that should have been washed 3 days earlier. My hands, covered in a dark, creamy sludge, smelled revolting at first, until I remembered Dad’s description of nature’s perfume. I regained my footing and stood, transformed into a swampland rat – a soddened, furless animal standing in a strange world.
Slowly and quietly, I moved through the marsh looking for good places to set traps. Waterfowl, although wary, didn’t fly and accepted me. A muskrat, perched on a mound 25 yards away, stared at me and leisurely entered the pool of water, disappearing beneath the surface. A white wing flashed ahead, another to my left. Two wings lifted and vanished. Water rippled, vibrations glistened in silver - something swimming below, in the shadows of reeds.
Iridescent shards of green flashed from mallards swimming in and out of the yellow shafts of sunrise piercing the marsh. Ducks, adorned with red, purple, and orange feathers silently glided and circled in do-si-do fashion among the vegetation. Cattails, reeds, and sedges nodded and swayed in the morning breeze – hiding shy tenants inside. Small, playful birds sang different notes and played tag among the taller reeds. Geese and ducks conversed in deeper tones about serious topics while watching and scolding their offspring. I smelled the faint pungent odor of muskrats and mink, spotting their runs and dens.
I never caught much out of that swampland that fall. Setting traps in that quagmire was pure hell for a two-legged animal like me. But trapping made me enter the bowels of a marshland – to feel its insides, to smell its stink, and taste its dank and sour water. What was inhospitable to me, was heaven to other animals and plants. It was my source of pain and sorrow when the land was bought and tiled out 40 years ago.
But the great thing about farmland sanctuaries is that they are physical – they can be built, rebuilt, or preserved. No sanctuary is too small. Nature will supply the products and the labor to create them. We only need to value them economically, not just ethically. Economic incentives, artificially supported markets, and policy regulations have favored and rewarded the tremendous loss of physical sanctuaries in our farm landscapes in the past. But we can use those tools to establish value and reward landowners for providing sanctuaries on their land. Modest, innovative changes in our county, state, and national tax laws, could free up money to support sanctuaries. For example, we could use small percentages of already existing taxpayer-supported subsidies, like ethanol-blended gas that supports corn production, to promote sanctuaries.
Fostering mini sanctuaries on private farmlands can add up to large-scale, state-wide positive impacts on our natural plant and animal diversity in the nation’s agricultural heartland. The next 50 years will see landscape manipulations and loss of biodiversity at a much greater scale than witnessed in my lifetime or my father’s. How satisfying it would be to own, invest, or support a farmland sanctuary program, to preserve or create special places where a myriad of species feel safe, accepted, and valued!
Russ Mullen, Emeritus Professor of Agronomy, Iowa State University, is a lover of agriculture, the outdoors, nature’s art, and biodiversity.
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Russ is right. We need to place value in land that is kept wild. Iowans must understand that lack of biodiversity makes for a boring landscape.
Great piece. Thank you.
"No sanctuary is too small. Nature will supply the products and the labor to create them. We only need to value them economically, not just ethically. Economic incentives, artificially supported markets, and policy regulations have favored and rewarded the tremendous loss of physical sanctuaries in our farm landscapes in the past. But we can use those tools to establish value and reward landowners for providing sanctuaries on their land. Modest, innovative changes in our county, state, and national tax laws, could free up money to support sanctuaries. For example, we could use small percentages of already existing taxpayer-supported subsidies, like ethanol-blended gas that supports corn production, to promote sanctuaries."