While agriculture is a major contributor to climate change, it can also play a significant role in mitigating the impacts—and we at Civil Eats make a concerted effort to focus on solutions in our coverage. So far this year, we have shared numerous stories of creative thinkers across the food system pursuing efforts to reduce damage, increase resilience, and adapt to the new and ever-changing realities.

We have covered the incorporation of hedgerows to sequester carbon in soil, an ultracross seed-breeding project to create climate-adapted plant varieties, and the adoption of care-centered politics, among many other efforts. Below are some of our most important climate solutions stories from 2023.

Can This Beef Cooperative Become ‘the West’s Largest Climate-Smart Ranching Program’?
In an industry dominated by a handful of large meatpacking companies, member-owned Country Natural Beef has plans to document its ranchers’ practices and encourage a shift toward more regenerative practices.

Op-ed: Some Regenerative Farms Are Weathering California’s Unprecedented Rainfall
In the face of intensifying weather patterns like the series of storms pounding the West, regenerative organic farms are demonstrating that the key to resilience is working with nature.

Comic: Adapting Corn for Tortillas—and New Markets—in the Pacific Northwest
In this illustrated report, we explore how the Organic Seed Alliance is working with local farmers, scientists, and chefs to adapt crops to new environments—and the changing climate.

An Ancient Grain Made New Again: How Sorghum Could Help U.S. Farms Adapt to Climate Change
Sorghum—popular among young, BIPOC, and under-resourced farmers—has extra long roots that allow it to withstand drought and sequester greenhouse gasses.

The Edges Matter: Hedgerows Are Bringing Life Back to Farms
Researchers have found that planting hedgerows helps farmers sequester carbon in the soil, manage pests, and provide habitat for pollinators and other wildlife.

Perennial Crops Boost Biodiversity Both On and Off Farms. Researchers Explain How.
Above and belowground, perennial crops including wheat, grasses, trees, and more provide habitat and nutrition to creatures that help make ecosystems whole.

Farmers March for Urgent Climate Action in DC
In this week’s Field Report, scenes from the Rally for Resilience, a push for “Product of USA” labeling on meat, new glyphosate research, and more.

Scientists Scramble to Help Bay Scallops Survive Climate Change
Researchers begin selective breeding and other initiatives in hopes of saving the East Coast’s last wild bay scallop fisheries.

These Farmers Recharged Groundwater by Catching Atmospheric Rivers
After years of drought and dozens of recent atmospheric rivers, Central California farmers have revamped an old practice: intentionally flooding fields for deep irrigation and restoration of underground aquifers.

A Radical Seed-Breeding Project Could Help Southern Farmers Adapt to Climate Change
The Utopian Seed Project is growing dozens of types of okra in one North Carolina field, creating genetic collisions that build new, resilient varieties. The group is working to adapt more food crops to the changing climate.

Climate Change Is Walloping US Farms. Can This Farm Bill Create Real Solutions?
Although it seems like everyone in D.C. is buzzing about a “climate farm bill,” some of the most impactful changes, including crop diversification and shifting diets from meat toward plants, are barely on the negotiating table.

Shell or High Water: Rebuilding Oyster Reefs Is a Climate Solution
Oyster reefs clean water, repair ecosystems, and help prevent flooding. But a lack of shells is forcing restoration projects across the country to seek out alternative structures.

Can Farming With Trees Save the Food System?
Unprecedented funding is flowing into a broad range of agroforestry practices, which can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and build farm resilience as the climate changes.

Bringing Oats Back to American Farms
Adding oats to a farm’s rotation can improve soil health and reduce fossil fuels, but the crop has all but disappeared in the U.S. Now, a nascent movement fueled by oat milk’s popularity may help reverse the trend.

Some Farmers Are Skipping Tomatoes and Eggplants. Their Reasons May Surprise You.
From climate risks to better work-life balance, a small but growing contingent of farmers is giving up summer crops to reap winter’s harvest.

How Focusing on Care Can Change Our Relationship to Food
Robert Gottlieb, author of “Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet,” discusses how the care economy has the potential to create critical food systems change and mitigate the climate crisis.

The USDA Plan to Better Measure Agriculture’s Impact on the Climate Crisis
In this week’s Field Report, news on the agency’s latest effort to invest in soil science and correct discrimination, plus reports on global hunger and pesticides’ impacts on birds.

Comic: To Fight Climate Change, This Research Farm Is Pioneering Regenerative Practices
In this illustrated report, we explore how the Maine-based Wolfe’s Neck Center is breaking new ground in soil health, soil monitoring, and other climate-smart technologies.

The post As the Climate Crisis Escalates, Here Are 18 Food and Ag Solutions appeared first on Civil Eats.

“This was the great Eastern Woodlands,” says Sauder. “It wants to be a forest here.”

Centuries ago, Sauder’s Anabaptist ancestors arrived and, instead of learning from and alongside the Native peoples who had already developed techniques to farm within the forest, took the land and cleared the trees to grow crops and graze livestock. Now, Sauder sees its next chapter as both practical action and penance.

“I do it for the sake of my children’s future and for the sins of my ancestors,” he says, of the 3,500 young hybrid willow, honey locust, mulberry, chestnut, and persimmon trees that are now maturing slowly in neat rows across 30 acres of pastures.

Sauder’s system—where his cows will soon graze among trees instead of in fully open pastures—is called silvopasture. And it’s one of several practices that fall under a broader agricultural approach called agroforestry, or farming with trees.

Farmers can plant trees and bushes in strips to prevent soil erosion and provide habitat for wildlife (windbreaks and hedgerows), along streams to stop nutrient pollution (riparian buffers), or between rows of corn (alley cropping). These practices are taking root all across the country.

In California, Rebekka and Nathanael Siemens graze sheep in their 2,000-tree almond orchard. On 18 acres in Wisconsin, the Midwest’s leading agroforestry nonprofit, the Savanna Institute, is growing chestnut, elderberry, black currant, and black walnut trees between rows of organic soybeans.

Whatever the approach, more abundant plant life that stays put year after year—i.e., perennials—lead to healthier ecosystems that support biodiversity and store carbon. Indigenous cultures around the world, including Native American tribes, have long practiced various forms of agroforestry. And, as researchers, policymakers, and governments look for effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build climate resilience on farms to secure the food supply, agroforestry is approaching a renaissance.

Funding Agroforestry as a Climate Solution

“Farmers are stewards of photosynthesis, one of our oldest and best technologies for getting carbon out of the atmosphere,” Keefe Keeley told policymakers, government officials, and CEOs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) biggest annual gathering this year.

Keeley, the executive director of the Savanna Institute, was invited to speak to highlight the USDA’s Climate-Smart Commodities program. The agency awarded $3.1 billion in two rounds of grants last fall, including $153 million to projects focused specifically on agroforestry. (Additional broader projects also include elements of agroforestry.)

The Savanna Institute is one of many organizations involved in a $60 million effort coordinated by The Nature Conservancy across 29 states. In the Southeast, Tuskegee University is leading two projects intended to help underserved farmers transition to agroforestry practices and to grow markets for their products. The Adirondack North Country Association will help women-owned farms measure the benefits of riparian buffers and cropland reforestation in New York, while Caribbean Regenerative Community Development will work with small coffee farms in Puerto Rico.

In recent months, the USDA started distributing funds from the Inflation Reduction Act designated for climate-smart agriculture—including agroforestry practices. Then, in late March, Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) reintroduced the Agriculture Resilience Act. If included in the next farm bill, it would direct the USDA to establish three new regional agroforestry centers. As lawmakers prepare to write the 2023 Farm Bill, many are looking to continue to expand funding for climate-smart practices.

“When we did a pre-survey of farmers across the region, agroforestry was the No. 1 thing they were interested in doing. And the No. 1 practice they were interested in is silvopasture,” says Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, an organization that supports Mid-Atlantic farmers.

Pasa received a $50 million Climate-Smart Commodities grant to implement and expand agroforestry and other soil health practices on 2,000 small- and mid-size farms along the Eastern Seaboard, from Maine to South Carolina. Through a network of partner organizations, it will subsidize the cost of tree planting and offer technical support.

The Nature Conservancy’s project will tackle the same two challenges in additional regions. And covering the upfront cost is key, said Joe Fargione, the group’s North America science director. Fargione compared getting started in agroforestry to organic transition. Initially, farmers have to invest money and time into going organic, they often see lower yields as they work out the kinks, and it takes three years before they can charge more for their crops. With agroforestry, trees are expensive, other costs often arise in setting up the system, and farmers won’t see benefits to their bottom line until the trees mature, which takes a minimum of three years—and usually more like six to eight. “But one of the things that’s exciting about agroforestry is that . . . it’s profitable,” Fargione said.

The Need for Local Agroforestry Expertise

Still, on his own, Sauder didn’t have the cash to plant the trees until Austin Unruh made it possible.

Unruh is the founder of Trees for Graziers, and he and his team have now completed about 20 silvopasture installations in Lancaster County, with more in the works. Key to his success has been access to public and private funds directed at reducing nutrient runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. (Pennsylvania is behind on its goals to reduce Chesapeake Bay pollution and is counting on 90 percent of future reductions to come from farms.) Unruh finds the funding for farms like Fiddle Creek and then brings his deep expertise to help farmers develop their systems.

“There’s a lot of experimentation, a lot of farmers comparing notes, but very few agroforestry technical support people out there advising farmers,” said Pasa’s Smith-Brubaker.

Unruh is the exception, and his knowledge of the local climate and landscape is crucial. He knows exactly how much shade is good for cool-weather grasses that thrive in the Mid-Atlantic, but that calculation would be very different if he were helping a farmer plant trees between rows of corn in Illinois. “I would love to see every county have someone that can offer these kinds of technical services and consulting,” he said. “It’s something that needs to be done locally.”

And while the Climate-Smart Commodities projects will train more experts and get a lot of farms planting trees, Unruh said agroforestry will only reach its potential if support for the approach is sustained over time. In his state, for example, silvopasture isn’t eligible for funding through existing conservation programs. But demonstrating and measuring the impacts over the next five years should help, he said.

Smith-Brubaker agrees. “Alley cropping wasn’t approved before, but we were able to do these demonstration sites and then have NRCS [PA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service] agents come out, and now NRCS does fund alley cropping. We’re hoping the same will happen with silvopasture,” she said.

On its own, the acreage that will be affected by this new funding won’t be enough to make a huge dent in agricultural emissions, but Fargione says it will provide important data and tools that could spur future investment and growth, allowing it to scale up. The Nature Conservancy project, for example, will be measuring carbon stored in trees and soil on the farms while also working to develop an affordable measurement method. He said giving farms the tools to implement agroforestry practices and document the impacts will then allow food companies with net-zero commitments to buy from them.

Either way, says Unruh, “it’s a drop in the bucket compared to how big agroforestry should be and what the opportunities are.” Beyond dairies like Fiddle Creek, there are also pastured poultry and hog farms that Unruh sees as having even more potential. Those have barely been considered.

For now, spring is in full effect. Robins are flitting between grasses and still-thin branches speckled with buds. In about three weeks, Sauder says, the pastures will be ready for the cows. For the first time since planting, a canopy will start to provide shade for the animals. While it will be far from a forest, the farm will inch closer to its roots—and toward a resilient future.

Illustrations by Nhatt Nichols.

The post Can Farming With Trees Save the Food System? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Steeped in tea, processed into granules, or cooked down into a paste, the stevia plant’s sweetening potency is derived not from a lab, like sucralose or aspartame, but from a leaf. The plant’s feathery leaves contain 200 times the sweetness of sugar without the calories. As recently as a decade ago, when food and beverage giants such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Cargill, and other companies began using stevia in dozens of products in what is now a $500-million-a-year market, they had no legal obligation to ensure that members of the Guarani tribe, on whose territory that leaf was first found, would benefit.

The Guarani, Latin America’s largest Indigenous tribe, with territory ranging from eastern Brazil to the sub-tropical mountain ranges of Paraguay, have long held stevia to be a sacred plant. They smear it on boys’ bodies during their ceremonial passage into manhood, and brew it into yerba mate and other traditional drinks to soften their bitterness.

In 2017, supported by the Swiss NGO Public Eye, the Guarani organized protests against the commercialization of their sacred drink, denouncing “the multinationals that make profits based on their knowledge and their biodiversity,” and asked that Coca-Cola and other companies agree to their demands to share in the financial benefits. Their demands were ignored.

Now, five years later, neither the Guarani’s demands, nor the demands of other Indigenous peoples whose plant traditions have been extracted, have been met.

Starting this year, however, the era of untrammeled access to the world’s remaining genetic resources—that’s the term the UN uses for the Earth’s plants, animals, and micro-organisms—may be coming to an end. In one of the most significant developments at December’s global Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Montreal, 196 countries agreed to create a new Access and Benefit Sharing Fund to ensure that moving forward, those who develop commercial products derived from genetic resources will be compelled to ensure a fair and equitable sharing of “monetary and non-monetary benefits from the utilization of genetic resources.”

In other words, the governments of the world agreed to create a system whereby local farming and Indigenous communities would receive “benefits” from the genetic resources that they have stewarded and conserved for millennia, as well as the traditional knowledge that has often helped point westerners to their multiple characteristics.

The U.S. is not a signatory to the treaty behind December’s convention—it was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, but never ratified by the Senate—but the U.S. did send an observer delegation to the Montreal conference, led by veteran State Department diplomat Monica Medina, who told a small gathering of journalists that she “wished” the U.S. was a member.

When it comes to food, these resources are becoming increasingly important as plants like stevia offer new flavors and textures, and, more broadly, scientists and farmers seek out more resilient seed varieties capable of withstanding extreme weather in the changing climate.

Global Impact of Equatorial Biodiversity

The search for climate–resilient seeds and plants leads to these centers of origin, where the wild relatives of our domesticated food crops have evolved over thousands of years to adapt to varying conditions. All food crops have wild relatives, botanic cousins that contain important survival skills lost through the process of domestication.

For example, the wild relatives of much of the wheat planted across the American Midwest is indigenous to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and other areas of the Mideast, where they’ve evolved over thousands of years to adapt to high temperatures. Agronomists have increasingly been turning to these varieties, which are essentially wild grass cousins of wheat, for their ability to withstand the hessian fruit fly, a pest that has been following the heat into the Midwest and attacking wheat fields.

Meanwhile, the small, fist-sized, wild relatives of apples from Central Asia contain genes that are more resistant to the wild swings in weather—most notably the increasingly mild winters and periodic droughts in apple-growing regions across the U.S. The origin center of corn in southern Mexico has long been key to the characteristics of resistance to fungi and pests in the U.S. corn belt, and is now understood to possess uniquely deep root structures enabling it to survive both flooding and drought.

The potato, a staple food for hundreds of millions of people, originates in the distant high altitudes of the Andes mountains, home to the Quechua Indians in Peru. Dozens of different colors and shapes are common throughout the Andes, each containing genes conveying what a recent study in the scientific journal Food and Energy Security summarized as “tolerance to salinity, drought, and temperature extremes.”

And there are other crops—including cabbage, turnips, and bok choy—that have plant scientists reaching as far as Pakistan and Tajikistan to find the wild relatives that can help the commercial varieties withstand extreme weather.

These are the plants at the very beginning of a crop’s long journey from the field to our tables. “The history of agricultural domestication is a history of evolutionary winners and losers,” says Colin Khoury, senior director of science and conservation at the San Diego Botanic Garden. Khoury has been tracking the loss of such varieties and is part of an effort to preserve them under the umbrella of Botanic Gardens Conservation International. “Some of those ‘losers’ may not be tasty or even edible, but some of them are the key to resilience,” he added.

One of the U.N.’s motives is to slow the rate of extinction of these wild relative species and thousands of other species in what the U.N. and others have called a biodiversity crisis on par with the climate crisis.

Colonialism, Biopiracy, and Biodiversity

When UN negotiators met in 2010 in Nagoya, Japan, at the ninth conference of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, they faced demands from developing countries to end what they termed rampant “biopiracy.” The Nagoya Protocol was the first official acknowledgment of the one-way trade in genetic resources; in response developed countries promised to find a way to provide financial compensation and/or other benefits to Indigenous people and local farming communities for the commercial exploitation of genetic resources, and even set up an Access and Benefits Sharing Fund to collect the money.

But it was not mandatory. Few companies paid in, and 12 years later it had collected and dispersed just $8 million, a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars the U.N. says is key to ensuring conservation and proper recognition of the origin.

Coming into Montreal, a coalition of high-biodiversity countries—led by Indonesia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Brazil—demanded that the UN add muscle, and money, to ensure that they would benefit from the treasure of abundant plant life growing within their national or tribal lands.

The rising interest by food and pharmaceutical companies in such resources has coincided with a marked increase in organizing by Indigenous communities globally, said Preston Hardison, chief negotiator at the convention for the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity—a global coalition of Indigenous NGOs, community leaders, and scholars. Hardison, a conservation biologist who worked for 20 years as a policy analyst for the Tulalip Tribes in northern Washington before his current position, has been to many CBD negotiating sessions over the past several decades.

“There have been major changes in the role of Indigenous communities at these and other UN negotiations,” he said. “In the ‘90s, on climate talks they’d be given a minute or two of intervention. But that has changed.”

The most notable change, he said, is the recognition, embedded in the new agreement, that Indigenous communities are often far more effective at preserving biodiversity, using traditional stewardship on lands they’ve lived in for centuries, than more top-down laws and policing have been.

The negotiations were, at times, fraught: The question of how to value genetic resources brings in a range of actors: governments, scientists, NGOs, and businesses. Scientists wanted to ensure that they could gain access to genetic resources even if they were not planning on developing them for commercial application. Business interests lobbied to keep payments as low as possible, but in general supported the initiative.

“Business would like clear rules,” said Daphne Yong D’Herve, director for knowledge solutions at the International Chamber of Commerce. “They don’t want to be accused of biopiracy.”

The African Union (A.U.) suggested that a surcharge of 1 percent of the retail value of any product made from genetic resources be charged at the point of sale. Pierre du Plessis, Namibia’s representative to the talks and a longtime negotiator for the A.U. on genetic resources, was adamant that this not be considered a “tax.” Instead, he said, “It would be a recompense for the centuries of colonial exploitation of African resources.”

Over two weeks of negotiations, no one got exactly what they wanted. But a key step was taken: For the first time, the UN agreed that access and benefit sharing was a fundamental goal essential to the “conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity”—the third goal among four that are the key ingredients of what’s now known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Working groups were created to determine how exactly the fund will work and, critically, what mechanisms will need to be put in place to make it enforceable. And it will all be presented and voted on at the next CBD convention in Turkey in 2024.

Now the hard part begins: Communities that may view so-called “genetic resources” as vital and familiar parts of living systems must engage with international food companies that reduce living organisms to a set of commercially viable traits—sweet, salty, heat-resistant, or drought tolerant.

The two worlds are vastly different. “The Guarani don’t make the separations that we do: ‘This is land, this is animal, this is plant.’ They’re all related to them,” says Miguel Lovera, a scientific adviser to the tribe, who advocates for Indigenous rights in Paraguay from his post at the Catholic University in the nation’s capital of Asuncion. Indeed, even the very notion of them being “wild” relatives is a very Western concept, since the Guarani and many other tribes have long relied on plants that grow uncultivated in their territory.

Also at issue is the question of how this sea change will impact scientists, who are interested in accessing as wide an array of genes as possible in order to digitally sequence the genetic characteristics of food and tastes, like stevia.

The new Access and Benefit Sharing Fund could potentially channel hundreds of millions of dollars toward much-needed conservation in developing countries, where land is often cleared to produce ingredients for the same large food companies. Yet it’s not clear how much the companies will be expected to pay, how the money will be distributed, how the fund will manage plants that can be found in more than one place, or even what defines “commercial exploitation.”

At a closing press briefing on December 20, Inger Andersen, the Executive Secretary of the UN Environment Program, declared a mixture of hope and caution to a small group of journalists. “Let us pause but one second to embrace the history we have made in Montreal,” he said. “And now let us get down to the business of delivering . . . for people and the planet.”

This is the first article in a two-part series; the second article will be published later this month.

The post After Centuries of Exploitation, Will Indigenous Communities in Biodiversity Hotspots Finally Get Their Due? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Executive director Jo Ann Baumgartner has been with WFA since 2001, and she’s a passionate advocate for what she and WFA call “bringing nature back to the farm.” Baumgartner spoke with us about the one of the group’s core efforts in recent years: building awareness about the value of birds on farms.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why focus on birds?

Jo Ann Baumgartner

We have a goal of [adding] a million nest boxes and perches on 10 percent of farmland in the U.S. Our audience is mainly growers, and so we want to show them where they can see the benefits, but we also want to educate them about the need for nature to be supported. There are so many species in decline and so many ways that farmers can help, because agriculture comprises almost 60 percent of the landscape [in the U.S.] when you count all the grazing lands, and it’s a huge footprint. With farmers’ help, we can do a lot to reduce the biodiversity crisis, and they can benefit from it.

Some readers may be more familiar with how birds can eat farmers’ crops than the ways they can interact with farmlands positively. How are you working to shift the narrative?

Well, a few years ago, we published this booklet called Supporting Beneficial Birds and Managing Best Birds [that detailed ways farmers can reduce their pest-control costs by hosting more songbirds during their nesting season]. And before that, most of the growers I talked to—even growers that were finding lots of creative ways to support biodiversity—the first thing they wanted to tell me was about how birds had wrecked something on their farm. But I don’t hear that so much anymore. There are a lot more people we need to reach, but growers are starting to learn that there are so many beneficial things that birds do related to pest control, and different kinds of birds offer different kinds of pest control.

It’s just like some people think all insects are bad. But really there are beneficial insects, and there are insects that can be harmful, but most of them are good. And with birds, there a few that are bad for farms some of the time.

It seems like both need to be kept in balance, and when they get out of balance is when it’s a real problem for farms?

Yes! We’ve collected around 120 avian pest-control studies and broken it down into different crops in different temperate climates; 90 percent of the studies showed that birds were important. And, not all researchers did the exact same study. Some of them were asking, “Is habitat nearby important?” Yes, it is: The more habitat you have, the more pest control benefits you get. And some asked, “Is it important to have nesting boxes?” And yes—you get more pest control benefits with nesting boxes.

Five percent of the studies showed that while birds were helpful, they also were harmful. So, for instance, in the spring, blackbirds eat all kinds of [harmful] insects when they’re feeding. But later in the year, they may potentially harm, say, a sunflower crop because they’re flocking birds. It’s really the big flocks of birds that can be a problem and there are very few species that do that.

There’s some research that looked at monoculture strawberries and then strawberries that were growing in more diverse farmscapes, and the researchers found that a diversity [of crops] supported a diverse community of birds, and that’s when you have more pest control coming from that community and less damage or less food-safety issues.

And the food safety issues really are coming from birds that are associated with concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where we’ve created a mess and they get into it. Birds go looking for spilt grain and get into the manure and then it’s not good for them to come onto your farm.

When we talk about this to growers, they inevitably tell me stories about how they’ve seen birds help. For example, we just had an event in Livingston, California, in the heart of the Central Valley ag region, where we had helped an almond grower put in a hedgerow and he told me he has seen crows clean off the mummy nuts [almonds that stay on the trees after they’re shaken, and often can carry insects and diseases that impact the following year’s crop].

Growers are paying attention, and I’ve heard lots of stories like that. Farmers, especially the ones who are already managing for diversity, are really curious about birds, and some of them are putting in lots of nest boxes. There’s a grower at Spring Mountain Vineyards in Napa who has 800 nest boxes in their vineyards. Most growers don’t do that, but a lot of vineyards are putting in nest boxes, because there are some really great studies about how they increase bluebird presence in vineyards tenfold.

When the researcher put out experimental prey, bluebirds ate almost three times as many insects near nest boxes versus far away from the boxes. And it’s not just bluebirds that use these boxes, there are other really good insectivorous birds that use them—like tree swallows, which are aerial foragers, meaning they’re cruising around in the air and catching moths, flies, and flying insects. There’s chickadees, titmice, and ash-throated flycatchers, violet-green swallows, and a couple of different kinds of wrens and nuthatches.

I’ve read that the drought has greatly impacted migration, as many of the wetlands and bodies of water where migrating birds used to stop and refuel have been drying up in recent years. Are some birds looking to farms to fill that gap?

I’ve heard that, too, and those birds aren’t really helping with pest control on farms. Some farmers are working with conservationists to flood some of their lands when they can, but that tends to attract waterfowl and shorebirds and the raptors that eat them.

But water is important and lots of birds are stopping at farms. Maybe they’re just coming through and need some food and cover or maybe they are going to stop and nest. We created a chart and an assessment tool to help farmers (and others) find the best native plants to attract beneficial birds and identify other opportunities, like where you might put in hedgerows, change other management practices, or add flowers or pastures as habitat for birds.

You’ve talked about making the case for more birds on farms to growers. Are there other folks who you’re trying to convince, particularly at the policy level?

It’s super important for policy makers to understand that birds are in decline, and we need to do everything we can to support them. And while we’ve been talking about all of their benefits, they also have intrinsic value.

A barn owl sits on a fencepost overlooking a farm. (Photo credit: Sue Cro)

Rachel Carson talked about how if we’re not careful we might wake up to a silent spring. And years ago, when the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was implemented in 1918, there was a whole bunch of pushback from industry. But it turned out that the Supreme Court said, “Look, birds are really beneficial and we can’t ignore that fact. We have to support them.” And back in the 1880s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy.

So we have known how important birds are for pest control for all these years. And now there’s a resurgence. I see it in my own backyard, because over the years, I’ve put in lots of native habitat, and more and more birds show up and it’s just lovely to see them and know that you’re supporting them. Everybody can do this, not just farmers.

The post Once Scorned, Birds Are Returning to Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.