A Restored Midwestern Landscape: On Mark Shepard's "Restoration Agriculture"

Mark Shepard | Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers | Acres U.S.A. | Jan. 1, 2013 | 344 pages

In our time of growing awareness around food and farm issues, many Midwesterners know that industrial agriculture is bad for the ecology and economics of our region. The disastrous flooding of 2019 may have woken us up to how annual agriculture compromises the soil’s ability to hold water or its tendency to generate toxic runoff into groundwater. Massive farms empty our landscapes of people without freeing farmers from the constant risk of catastrophic failure under even a single bad year.

Yet while the food movement has done essential work in highlighting all these concerns, Midwesterns may not fully realize what we have lost in the biodiversity of our landscapes. The tallgrass and shortgrass prairies of the Great Plains and the oak savannah of the upper Midwest once awed settlers with their scale and beauty. Today they have largely disappeared under a monotonous wave of corn, wheat, and beans. We should not ignore this loss even if more systemic ecological and economic problems take precedence over preservationist concerns.

Defenders of conventional agriculture and its fields of grain often assert that their system, despite its many costs to soil, wildlife, and local culture, is essential because it “feeds the world.” Even while lamenting the ecological and economic costs of commodity-crop agriculture, many Midwesterners seem unable to conceive of our landscape without it. Wisconsin farmer Mark Shepard, however, refuses to take this claim at face value, arguing persuasively that “restoration agriculture”—a style of farming that models itself after the natural ecosystems of the Midwest rather than a manufacturing facility—can not only restore biodiversity but provide better nutrition and a better economic foundation for our communities.

Though an acre of corn produces an incredible amount of calories (around 13.9 million), Shepard observes that it provides nothing like the nutrients needed for a healthy human diet. A person forced to subsist on corn would develop scurvy as well as deficiencies in calcium, folic acid, vitamin B12, retinol, and vitamin E. Corn, like the other major crops, must either “be supplemented with a wide variety of compensating intakes, or it is actually a toxin.” Moreover, the majority of those 13.9 million calories actually become ethanol or feed for livestock, so that only about 3.06 million calories of corn per acre go into the human food supply.

Moreover, annual grain farming is not feeding the world. We are far from abolishing hunger or food insecurity, as the supply-chain disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear. Meanwhile, conventional agriculture carries on destroying ecosystems and emptying Midwestern communities, flattering itself all the while that it is filling bellies that in fact remain empty.

Though Shepard, like other critics of industrial agriculture, sees monoculture grain farming as a dead end, he does not expect to convert our food system back to a Jeffersonian patchwork of smallholdings. Rather than insisting on “small is beautiful” traditional farming, Shepard’s “restoration agriculture” system accepts the scale necessary to truly feed the world. However, Shepard employs the efficiencies of scale not to pursue monoculture corn plantings, but while “farming in nature’s image”—cultivating a diverse ecosystem of useful plant and animal species, modeled on natural biomes of the Midwest and managed to promote the health of the land for as long as the next 1,000 years.

As in the mature natural ecosystems that made up the Midwest before European settlement, tree crops are foundational: chestnuts, hazelnuts, and apples make up the canopy of this food forest. Vines and berries grow as an understory. Perennial vegetables like asparagus grow in alleys, while mushrooms thrive in mulch beneath. Shepard runs cattle, pigs, sheep, and poultry through the system, and maintains hives of bees. This structure mimics a mature forest ecologically, a landscape that builds topsoil and maintains itself without human labor, while still contributing extensively to the human food supply.

Such a diverse system might sound impossible for a farmer to manage, and it would be using traditional cultivation, which aims for maximum yield and aesthetic perfection. The restoration agriculture farmer must adopt a more laissez-faire attitude, what Shepard calls the STUN system: Sheer, Total, Utter Neglect. Shepard does not need aesthetic perfection because he does not sell his goods as supermarket fruit but rather to become industrial ingredients like juices and dried fruit—a larger income stream anyway. Moreover, he pursues genetic diversity and local adaptation to better enable growing via STUN, planting thousands of unique apple seeds rather than cultivating familiar varieties like Fuji or Honeycrisp. The varieties that succeed can produce good crops without costing the farmer hours of labor to maintain. Those that don’t? Shepard won’t spend the money to maintain their inferior (for his location) genetics. His system thus aims through this and other methods at producing a high-value crop while eliminating the enormous overhead typically associated with agriculture today.

Nobody makes much money in agriculture—80% of farmers have off-farm income and most get by with loans and federal aid. Farmers themselves cannot solve that systemic reality, and Shepard makes no claim to having done so. However, restoration agriculture does resolve the economic absurdity of modern farm life. Most farmers sell their goods on the cheap, grossing perhaps $8.00 a bushel for corn, then—because many no longer grow a garden—buy them back at “value-added” prices at the grocery store. In contrast, the restoration agriculture farmer can eat her cosmetically imperfect produce, choosing on her farm from an entire healthy human diet including meat, eggs, sugar, starches, fruits, and vegetables. Restoration agriculture also provides a better prospect of retirement, since it increases the quality and attractiveness of the farmer’s land, where annual agriculture results in a degraded, dreary, and potentially hazardous site. Even if the restoration agriculture farmer doesn’t escape the need for an off-farm income, she nonetheless lowers her cost of living and reduces her dependence on volatile commodity markets, making for greater quality of life and a better safety net.

All this may sound attractive. But can it, any more than industrial agriculture, feed the world? Though we cannot know exactly how restoration agriculture would scale up, Shepard shows he can produce as much as 5.9 million calories per acre, all of which enter the food system, a figure that competes favorably with corn’s 3.06 million. Restoration agriculture thus provides a larger and more nutritional caloric output than our current system while better serving the land, the farmer, and the rural community.

In this book, which merits much more attention than it has yet received outside the small permaculture community, Mark Shepard proposes an alternative future for our food system and for the Midwestern landscape. If restoration agriculture were to take hold among us, we could look forward to landscapes that mitigate flooding rather than worsening it; that trap carbon and build topsoil; that promote local, antifragile supply chains; that support more farmers with greater economic self-sufficiency; and that restore something of the beauty and diversity our landscapes once possessed.