Biological Diversity on the Farm Leads to Resilience and Abundance
“If a perennial grass or a flower or an oak’s acorn is viable in the soil for thousands of years, why isn’t it growing on your landscape?”
From a conversation with Daniel Griffith of Timshel Wildlands, a farm in Central Virginia. For the entire conversation, please click on the link to the YouTube video.
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DANIEL GRIFFITH: At Timshel Wildlands, we talk a lot about biodiversity. Just last week I was with (wildlife biologist and nutritionist) Fred Provenza. He and I are working on a project and understanding how to integrate some of his findings in the wildlife space into the more farm related cultural landscape.
The Wildland is the perfect canvas for developing his thoughts. The Wildland has feet in both sides. Some of it is a conservation minded approach, and some of the landscape is producing beef for our neighbors.
We’re finding that the convergence of conservation and regenerative agriculture, which we call Timshel Wildland, is the most biologically abundant place we’ve ever found that is also still harvestable.
Fred and our team are working on this idea of biodiversity. It’s like this. When you start to release control, when you allow an environment to find its own resilience--that’s what I mean by releasing control--
As regenerative farmers, we like to build biodiversity. We like to plant. It’s very easy to plant. But often, when you plant, it’s not entirely resilient. It demands to be replanted, or nurtured in a particular way.
At the Wildlands, “Resilience is diversity in motion.” In order for motion to be resilient, it also has to be continuous.
How do you get plant diversity without sowing seeds? If we are not producing abundance, how can we have it? How can we nurture abundance?
The answer is that there is more abundance when you let go of control.
Is there more diversity when you let go of control?
I was consulting on a farm in North Carolina. There were like 2 or 3 species on the whole operation. And they wanted us to come in with a no-till drill and plant some cover crops and diversify. But at Robinia, we urge our farmers and students not to stop farming, but just to halt and ask questions.
The question that this farmer needed to answer is: If a perennial grass or a flower or an oak’s acorn is viable in the soil for thousands of years, why isn’t it growing on your landscape?
So the question is: What do we need to do to reawaken the wild? Not push it, not produce it, not control it. The wild just needs reawakened. It’s all there.
But there’s a reason why sericea lespedeza is growing and not bird’s foot trefoil. And this is the hard part. Maybe that system needs sericea lespedeza and not bird’s foot trefoil. Maybe the conditions that we have created have made it very hard for bird’s foot trefoil to grow and sericea lespedeza, not so much.
We don’t know for sure, because there is complexity to this. But maybe so. It could be that the system needs time. It could be that we have screwed the system up.
The interesting convergence between our work and Fred Provenza’s work is that an animal--given rich amounts of biodiversity to forage from perennial grasses to runner grasses, annuals, herbaceous perennials, woody perennials, sedges, rushes, briars--if you throw a smorgasbord at any animal, domestic or wild, it should be able to find … life, a good life, a life enriched with nutrients.
Biodiversity produces nutrient dense food.
Nutrient density is not linear, and it cannot be reduced.
In the regenerative movement, we tend to reduce this idea of health down into stable soil organic matter, or the amount of soil carbon or the number of perennial grasses you have. Those are really important things. Stable soil organic matter is unparalleled in its ability to create and nurture and sustain the rest of the system. It’s a foundational building block.
But Dr. Suzanne Simard wrote a book called “Finding the Mother Tree,” where she did these university studies. They planted an alder tree next to a cedar tree. They covered the cedar tree with a 100% shade cloth so it couldn’t get any light.
So the cedar tree could not photosynthesize. It can’t get any energy from the sun. But it’s still growing. They measured the cedar’s growth over the next couple of years and it didn’t die.
So there’s complexity here. We must stop and ask what’s going on. The alder was feeding the cedar tree carbon nutrients underneath the soil via the mycorrhizae fungi communication network.
So plants, in community, are able to co-create and self-organize and co-evolve nutrients out of nowhere. We call this emergence.
So we’re so focused on getting the soil in check. Yes, we have to balance the soil from a macro-nutrient and micro-nutrient perspective. We have to get carbon cycling through the system.
The carbon cycle is of vital importance. Yes, all of this is painfully and bloody true. But plants in community are just as needed. And it might be even more needed, according to what Fred Provenza is finding in his research, and what we’re finding here at Timshel.
For example, pigweed--spiny amaranth--fixes phosphorus. So if you have a soil that is deficient in phosphorus, you need spiny amaranth. And a plant that needs phosphorus but does not fix phosphorus, and is not growing in phosphorus balanced soils is going to be healthier if it grows near spiny amaranth.
So the dynamics of the systems community is of vital importance to the health of the community, the resilience of the community, but also the nutrient richness coming out of that community.
If you take a more longstanding native plant, like yellow Indian grass, it’s ridiculous to think that in every viable meadow in Virginia today that yellow Indian grass isn’t there in the soil seed bank, waiting to grow. Is bird’s foot trefoil there? I don’t know. But is yellow Indian grass? Yes. Absolutely, unequivocally yes. Is eastern gamagrass just waiting to explode? Yes.
When we first moved onto Timshel seven years ago, we did a full ecological study and identified no gamagrass. Not one blade. Today, we have pastures that are dominated by gamagrass. And they are dominated by yellow Indian grass, and by this unbelievable lush mix of autumn wildflowers. They are so dominant that we wrote a whole book about it, “Wild Like Flowers.”
You cannot in the spring or in the autumn come for a tour or a class at Timshel and not think, yes, this is what it means to be wild like flowers.
Biodiversity explodes, and the environment’s resilience explodes, when we step back and we lose the credit. I’m not saying credit is a bad thing. I’m saying when we become a member of the system, we lose our ability to control and colonize it. We cannot control and colonize something that we also inhabit.
When we become members of the system as much as they are, the system explodes, because it is in harmony and resonance with itself.
That’s the hope. We don’t need to manufacture abundance.