Faith in the Land

Three farmers show us how to trust nature again

Many Americans are getting in touch with good food -- organics have gone mainstream, farmers' markets proliferate, and co-ops are no longer the sole domain of the granola set. But how much do we know about where food actually comes from? The land and its cultivators are often overlooked as we consider the quality of the foods that sustain us. Here, sustainable agriculture writer Lisa Hamilton profiles farmers who have a deep intimacy with nature. And acclaimed novelist Barbara Kingsolver reveals the satisfying world of farmers who revel in their role as stewards of the land. She echoes Hamilton's call to deepen our relationship with the food on our tables. -- The Editors

Silence is a way of life in the High Plains: Antelope slip from one place to the next; cows rarely bellow; and of course coyotes are nothing if noticed too soon. When there is a noise -- the beating of wings, the thud of a kill -- it is muffled by a sea of grasses or lost to the open sky.

Not so in the Childress, a 4,000-acre valley in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming. It is the ugly duckling of Mark Gordon's pastureland. On March 19, there is no grass here, only dry dirt that rises in a mound every five yards. Between the humps, prairie dogs run madly, as if under fire. Wherever they go they chirp, and the noise bounces off the bare ground and into the air. As we drive through, their chorus hangs above the land like music in a supermarket.

Mark explains that it's natural for prairie dogs to cultivate bare ground. By disrupting soil with their mounded burrows and shearing vegetation to nothing, they are better able to see predators. The problem here is that the last rancher to lease this land practiced short-term pragmatism: When the rodents made it unprofitable for grazing, he plowed the ground and planted wheat. No matter that the bumpy, unirrigated valley was not given to growing grain; if he couldn't get a crop, at least he could collect the federal wheat subsidy.

The plan backfired. He got his subsidy, but plowing made the ground softer and more hospitable to prairie dogs. In no time their town became a metropolis, and the rancher moved on to greener pastures. That's when Mark Gordon took over.