{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01788375558867362, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0012774111134766872, 'mean_word_length': 4.99234693877551, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches

Those on the lookout for some evidence that the growing of food is not wholly controlled by Monsanto/Pioneer’s genetic engineers may find comfort with Daniel Imhoff’s Farming with the Wild. Here is a book that reports on the author’s search for what farmers and communities are doing throughout America to create viable agriculture while protecting wild lands, natural systems, and the environment as a whole: it’s all about biological diversity and agricultural sustainability. Imhoff’s book is the result of back-roads trips to some of the very best farms and ranches to be found, all of which are intent on protecting the ecosystems within which they exist. It is only recently that science-based management of ecosystems has been understood as critical to sustaining the health of our planet. The wanton draining of wetlands, suppressing of wildlife, and destroying of indigenous grasslands were part of the American pioneer tradition, a necessary route to conquering wilderness. European farmers settling in the new world believed that economic capital could be found by replacing wilderness with nice neat rows of corn. Today, it is understood that these “improvements” diminished water supplies, contaminated soils, and caused erosion and continued loss of species. The farmers and ecologists Imhoff visits believe that their land and soil are ecological capital that must be carefully managed for long-term sustainability. An important course correction is occurring in American agriculture, and this book seeks to provide a record of that change. Imhoff focuses on a group of general trends and observations that help define the difference between this new ecologically based agriculture and the economy-based agriculture that dominates the global market. These trends are as diverse as the farms he visits—from Ted Turner’s fivehundred-thousand-acre ranch landholdings in southwest New Mexico to Frank Morton’s fifty-five-acre lettuce farm in the eastern foothills of Oregon—with the result that it is extremely hard to define or standardize what is ecologically responsible agriculture. However, Farming with the Wild does show how important biodiversity is to the future of farming. Imhoff visits the Sky Islands, a region that encompasses over 10.2 million acres spanning the New Mexico–Arizona–Mexico border and terminating in the foothills of the Sierra Madre. This vast bioregion hosts over four thousand plant species and a huge diversity of reptiles and mammals; it is also the flyway for more than half of all the breeding bird species in North America. Thus, it is an area of great ecological significance. Today, this region is subject to a plan prepared by the Sky Island Wildlife Network predicated on the protection of large reserves of untrammeled wilderness areas to secure foraging for predators such as bears, wolves, jaguars, and mountain lions and to protect grasslands for the prairie dog and black-footed ferret. Imhoff introduces us to Jho Austin, a Sky Island rancher in southeast Arizona whose lands receive only fifteen or twenty inches of rain each year. Over the past twenty years the Austins have installed over twenty thousand dry-stacked stone gabions to create small check dams to retain pooled water in what were once dry creeks. This certainly is not a new idea in the arid West, but here it is being done not only to provide higher profitability but to protect the rare Sonoran mud turtle that now lives in the successive vegetation growing along these water courses. It’s a wonderful example of how a rancher not only respects biodiversity but is proud of the endangered species that live upon his land, even as he enhances economic profitability. Imhoff steps away from North American projects to visit Doug Tompkins and his eighteen-thousand-acre reserve on the Ayacara Peninsula in the southern Palena region of Chile. Tompkins, as many will remember, was founder of the Esprit clothing company. He has recently protected well over seven hundred thousand acres throughout Chile and Argentina and is one of the organizers of the Foundation for Deep Ecology. On my visit to Ayacara, I was surprised at how little agriculture was permitted. In fact, most of the activity within these huge holdings appeared to be directed toward reclaiming lands that had been, for many generations, exploited by poor farmers trying to make a living on a soggy peninsula whose harsh climate provides two hundred inches of rain per year. My visit made clear that although it is important to protect large blocks of forestlands, it is also critical to encourage the inhabitants of these third-world 118