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Land Legacies: My Farm Now – Mary Damm
The below essay was published in Land Legacies: Stories From Landowners for Landowners, featuring 11 Climate Land Leaders’ reflections on how they are actively planning for the future of their land, blending celebration, challenges, and honest introspection.
The 24-page booklets were printed with support from Renewing the Countryside and People’s Company. The entire booklet can be viewed as a PDF on our website.
I am a plant ecologist living in the forested hills of southern Indiana. I also own a pasture farm in the Bloody Run Creek valley in the Driftless region of Northeast Iowa.
My story of farm ownership began 20 years ago at the 2004 North American Prairie Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, where I met Dan Specht. We were on a field trip to a hill prairie above the Wisconsin River, and Dan made the comment, “This looks like my farm in Iowa.” I said, “In Iowa?” I was surprised, because I didn’t think of Iowa as having steep bluffs with so much natural vegetation.
That evening, Dan introduced me to Laura Jackson, a biology professor at the University of Northern Iowa. After the prairie conference was over, I went to a bookstore in Madison and found a book that Laura had edited, The Farm As Natural Habitat. I looked through it, and Dan and his friend Jeff were featured in the book. What a coincidence!
I first visited Dan’s farm, which is on a ridge close to the Mississippi River, later that year. I didn’t know much about farming at the time.
Dan showed me his farm animals, his corn, the birds, and the prairie. Dan rotationally grazed the cool-season pastures on his farm with a beef cow-calf herd, finishing the cows on grass on his land. He used portable electric fence to create temporary paddocks for the cows and calves to graze. He moved the fence and herd when the grasses still had enough leaves for regrowth of the plants in a month and another rotation of grazing. During dry years, Dan grazed the tallgrass prairie that he had planted. The prairie has warm-season grasses, so complements the cool-season grasses in the pastures. The prairie is green and productive mid-summer when the pasture grasses are dormant.
Dan raised pigs for quite a few years. They were free-range. They came up to the house and the big mulberry tree outside the kitchen window and ate mulberries. If they saw me in the window, they ran away as a group. They were so fun, curious, and skittish. Sometimes in the winter when I visited the farm, Dan received a truckload of outdated milk for the pigs. He and I stabbed the containers of milk, and the pigs ripped them apart and drank the milk. Dan lost money on pigs, so he eventually stopped raising them.
Dan was always learning, like with his sweet corn plots. For ten years he developed an open-pollinated blue and yellow variety. A few people grew it out, including the Meskwaki Community Settlement in Iowa. Dan’s brother Phil wrote a wonderful poem, “My Brother’s Hands,” about Dan’s corn and the Meskwaki’s and others’ interest in it.
Dan was passionate about grassland birds. Grassland birds, such as Bobolinks, are great ecological indicators of the health of an ecosystem. As Dan would say, “If birds are on the farm, It’s ALL WORKING.” The farm is a functioning, working ecosystem.
Grassland birds are in great decline. They show the greatest population decline – 53% – of any habitat group of birds since 1970 when documentation of bird populations began.
Bobolinks migrate over 6,000 miles from the grasslands of South America to the grasslands of the northern United States and southern Canada to breed, and 90% of the time Bobolinks return to the same nesting sites as the previous year.
Grassland birds are not only in decline due to the loss of native prairie, but also to the loss of pasture and hayfields. Maintaining appropriate habitat for the birds is important, and knowing how to maintain the pastures and hayfields for the birds was a skill Dan learned from trial and error. He learned to manage the pastures so that the cows and birds could co-exist. He learned to graze the cows so the pasture plants were preferred habitat for nests by different species of grassland birds and so the cows had enough room to walk and not trample the nests as they grazed the pasture. He delayed haying to allow for the young fledgling birds time to mature and fly away from the hay mower. He left sacrifice patches where he didn’t mow. The sweet songs of the Bobolinks still remind me of Dan.
Dan planted a tallgrass prairie in 2008 near the wooded valley that runs along the east side of the farm. The prairie is special because of the species-specific rhizobia (nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live inside the roots) associated with the legumes that Dan acquired from Peter Graham at the University of Minnesota. Dan met Peter at the 2006 North American Prairie Conference in Kearney, Nebraska. Peter studied rhizobia of soybeans from around the world for most of his career, but later studied rhizobia of the tallgrass prairie. Peter especially connected with Dan because Dan was a farmer interested in prairie legumes. Sadly, Peter passed a few years after the conference, so Dan’s prairie with the rhizobia has even more ecological significance now.
Because I lived in Indiana and Dan lived in Iowa, we communicated a lot by email and phone. He shared stories about the birds he saw and the plants that were flowering along the roadsides. He always gave a weather report, and if the Milwaukee Brewers had played, he gave me a recap of the game. He read a lot, and followed Aldo Leopold’s land ethic.Dan wanted to show by example that farms can feed people and be a place for nature; that conservation and a working farm can go together.
It was an eight-hour drive for me to visit, so I usually arrived at night. I saw the light in the kitchen window and felt myself relax as I drove the final stretch of gravel road. Dan had a meal ready for me, and we had a good conversation at the kitchen table. He had his newsletters out with articles for me to read and discuss.
A farm auction
Very sadly, Dan was killed in a tractor accident moving round bales of hay in the summer of 2013. After I left Dan’s memorial service, I went home knowing that Dan’s family would eventually do something with his farm. I thought maybe I could buy the house and some land around the house.
The following May – May 16th – Dan’s brother Paul, who was the executor of his estate, called and said, “We’re going to put the farm up for auction.” I couldn’t speak. My initial reaction was a gut one: “No, you can’t do that! What about Dan’s good soils?”
I then asked if I could bid on the farm, and Paul said, “Well, anyone can bid on the farm. There will be an auction on May 23rd. There are three parcels of land, two on the main farm and another across the road to the west. We are taking the five highest bidders for each parcel as an initial bid. The highest bidders will come to the local bank, and there will be an auction on each of the parcels. It will be a round robin – each person has an opportunity to increase the bid or pass and drop out.”
I had seven days to prepare for the auction – to learn land values and determine what I could pay. This was not a business I understood! Dan’s friend Jeff gave me guidelines and a price that was reasonable. “The land will hold that value,” he said. At the time of the auction in 2013, land prices had been going up and up and up.
I was one of the five highest bidders. Paul let me bid by phone on the day of the auction instead of driving to the bank near the farm. We completed a round for one of the parcels, and I was the highest bidder. Then we completed a round for the second parcel, and I was the highest bidder on that one too. The third round involved the land west of the road. A neighboring farmer and I kept bidding on that one. I was less interested in that parcel, which had been a hayfield. However, I wanted the land to protect the house from potential crop herbicides and insecticides used by a different land owner. I went over the price Jeff recommended, and the neighbor bid more. I eventually passed, and the neighbor acquired the land.
But the auction wasn’t over yet. Next, there was an opportunity for the neighbor and me to raise the total bid and buy all three parcels. I was sweating. It would have been a real financial stretch for me to buy the two parcels and the third at the neighbor’s price. I was really hoping he wouldn’t bid more, and he didn’t. The auction was over, and I was a farmland owner!
Now I am sad that I didn’t bid higher on the third parcel. The neighbor cut down and burned the trees in the valley and later plowed the hayfield and planted corn. “Dan, I’m so sorry,” I said when I saw the smoldering tree remains. I don’t look to the west anymore; I look to the east when I visit the farm.
When I visited the farm when Dan was alive, I would take my lawn chair out in the pasture and watch the birds. I still do and think, This is my farm now, my responsibility now. I want to manage the 120 acres the way Dan would have. Dan was a farmer, and I am an ecologist – we came from different backgrounds, but had a similar vision for caring for the land.
I have been the owner of Prairie Quest Farm for ten years now. I am no longer a visitor to the farm or new farm owner, but a seasoned overseer of the management of the land.
Originally, I wanted to continue grazing cows and maintaining habitat for grassland birds; I wanted to maintain the integrity of the grasslands and improve biodiversity, just like Dan was trying to do. I wanted to continue participating in the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). Dan worked for years to help establish a program for farmers to be paid for conservation on working farmland (rather than paid for retiring land from farming, like the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). I wanted to take baseline samples of Dan’s “good soils” and see how the soils changed over time. I wanted to include more fencerow and shrub plantings. I wanted to plant more prairie plants. I wanted to have the farm certified organic.
Some of the goals I had as a new farm owner have come to fruition; others have not. I am proud of two goals that I have accomplished, and I think Dan would be too. Beef cows and calves still graze the pastures that Dan planted so many years ago, and some of the cows are individuals that Dan raised and moved around the farm. And the grassland birds – Bobolinks, Dickcissel, Eastern Meadowlarks, and Sedge Wrens – still return to the farm from distant lands every year. That is a legacy that I am very proud of.
This essay is revised from a contribution to The Future of Family Farms: Practical Farmers’ Legacy Letter Project, edited by Teresa Opheim. Reprinted in Land Legacies with permission of University of Iowa Press, 2016.