‘(Re)Dreaming Conservation on the Farm with Pollinators in Mind’ by Erin Schneider, Hilltop Community Farm
“What are your conservation dreams?”
Recently, Allison Crook, WiWiC North East and Central Regions Coordinator, recently asked the WiWIC community this question in a regional newsletter.
This gave me pause. I didn’t dream of conservation or ask this of our farm when I stepped into the co-ownership/stewardship role of Hilltop Community Farm in 2007. Nor did Rob McClure, my farm partner/husband ask this of the farm when he started delivering CSA shares in 1993. Yet our farm dreams have mimicked conservation and I find myself making peace with dreams lived out and what to dream into being with the seasons ahead.
Growth and dreams are not always linear. Rather, they spiral like a Fibonacci series [posited in] sunflower seed heads or lean leeward like windswept seed spatterings of dandelions. I am grateful for the shapes my conservation dreams took and for the stamina that my mother taught me in keeping a strong root with flexible shoots. I rooted into farming. I grew lean and flexible, working off-farm jobs to keep health care and avoid start-up debts that come with scaling up with specialty crops like elderberry, quince, and currants in our orchard guilds. I dreamed into being hundreds of fruit trees and thousands of perennials and distilling nature’s beauty in bouquets and designs. I dreamed into being a quilt for Soil to have its say by helping co-create and unearthing a Soil Quilt as part of a local Farm Art/Dtour and later showcased a Soil Quilt at the U.N. headquarters in Rome.
I dreamed into being renewable energy, work parties and happy hours, preserving the harvest and helping others get out of a pickle or a jam. I dreamed of restoring prairies, seeding field borders, planting a series of food forests and a farm that partners with the ecosystems around us. I dreamed of sharing it through farmer to farmer workshops in our backyard and on the other side of the world.
I continued to dream into being awareness of Midwest prairie flowers and grasses, which I showcased in a Wisconsin-inspired botanical couture garment created for American Flowers Week. I co-created botanical details gleaned from the 42 species we intentionally planted including peak-of-summer ingredients like goldenrod, queen Anne's lace, native sunflower, amaranth, Joe Pye weed, wild quinine, rattlesnake master, vervain, celosia and strawflowers, with Aronia, and Viburnum berries and other pods. I shed light on the value that local, sustainably-grown flowers have. I dreamed of the resulting collaborations between land, pollinators, and plants, farmer florist and design team to cultivate beauty, style and truly unique designs for our clients and customers–all while supporting the other life forms that make these flowers possible.
I am grateful for this 16 ish year start up period of time it took to dream it all into being.
Yet sunlight alone doesn’t always pay the bills and our farm financial viability has shifted as our farm and bodies age, and our markets/life circumstances change.
I am grateful how it all played out. I am now dreamed out of these dreams.
And yet I could not shake Allison’s question, “What are your conservation dreams?”
I learned as our farm dreams played out, co-evolved and ran their course that nesting conservation at the center of your farm plans will help your mind rest in your heart. This lesson was hard learned for me and maintaining dreams comes at a cost. Somewhere in the currant harvest hustle, pollinators held sway, at the ready when the first plum blossom unfurl, to teach me how and when to intervene.
I am trying to keep a bit of dazzle and discernment, like the suddenness of a honeybee swarm or the emergence of a cicada cycle. I ask myself how do I intervene to disrupt the codling moth or curculio on next year’s crop of apples? I look for cues from the penstemon for when to divide and transplant. Planting perennials, with pollinators in mind, awakened me to the life cycles and life continuities that play out, whether it’s at 28 days or over 17 years.
Seventeen years later, I now ask for my dreams to hold wonderment as I try to hold peace with uncertainty and this new carbon baseline as our climate continues to change. I ask myself the hard questions/with more tenderness /without being a dream crusher, like, “How much time and energy do I realistically have?” “How do I maintain the 25 acre prairie 5, 10, 15 years from now when cost sharing no longer covers the costs of care? How do I balance off farm work with farm and land care? What happens when a sudden blowdown blows in reed canary grass, or the neighbor’s wild parsnip sets seeds and sets forth finding a new home in our field borders, or the birds inevitably poop out the autumn olive from 3 miles over?” “Who/what else is at the ready to assist with conservation maintenance?” Or sometimes it’s a matter of gut checks, ‘where are the clear yes’s, the clear no’s and what’s needed in the maybe zone to keep me dreaming?
I dream of unlearning the warring language applied to ‘invasive species management’ and the transactional costs of production farming and what it’s cost some of my relationships.
And that is just the land story. The human story is its own set of uncertainties as land shifts hands and hearts through generations of time and life cycles. My conservation dream now is planting for life continuities. I tell myself, it’s o.k. to plant trees which outlast my lifetime. It’s o.k. that every intervention on the farm is not measured as a cost of production, a billable hour, or produced for the Schedule F. It’s o.k. to pause and write this poem.
You wake to them calming the wind,
Watch a Viceroy larvae flit on your serrated sill,
Its grip stilted, tender even
Maybe it once trusted and suckled the leaf laughter in you
Before its monarch-mimicked wings could fly,
They winged its way with you.
One day you would wonder and pick apart this shift.
I ask the swallowtails, bats, and bumblebees to keep pollinating this farm into the next best possible outcome for whom/whatever comes next. I send gratitude to the Xerces Society for the pollinator planting kit support this year along with wishes to the nighthawks during their sky dance south, thank them for eating insects! I try and trust in migrations/hope in their return.
I learned that anytime (not just on your farm) you commit to dreaming with nature, magic can happen, dreams will unfold, but not always in the way you imagined. As I walked out into the prairie the other day, there were literally spiral clouds of dragonflies everywhere. I feel like they were thanking us, or just wanting to participate.
In addition to networks like WiWIC, below are a few key Conservation Programs/Resources that have supported our farm:
Xerces Society Wisconsin Pollinator Habitat Kits – https://xerces.org/pollinator-conservation/habitat-kits/wisconsin
Excellent program to weave in native plants for pollinators at the field edge, as an alleyway in the orchard. Bonus: some of these native plants also work great in a cut flower bouquet.
USDA/NRCS Conservation Reserve Program – 25 acres enrolled on a continuous contract for Native plant/prairie restoration. We’ve enrolled in CRP since 2004. It’s been a great program and helps cover our property taxes. About 8 years ago there stopped being cost share support for maintenance activities like prescribed burning. If you’re going to enroll, consider the costs of maintenance and not just start up.
NCRCS - Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program – One time cost share for establishing a 2 acre field border of native plants around our orchard. We enrolled before the Conservation Stewardship Program came into being, which is another great option for conservation practices that work with your farm.
Check out: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs-initiatives to see what programs might be a good fit.
NCR- SARE (North Central Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) Program
Check out the Partnership, Youth Educator and Farmer Rancher Grants – https://northcentral.sare.org/
We received a grant in 2009 and it helped us experiment, test food forests/species mix as a design tool for growing our orchard ecosystem. In 2013 we teamed up with two other farms, Elsewhere Farm and Mary Dirty Face Farm to explore markets for uncommon fruit crops like currants, elderberry, honeyberry, and serviceberry.
Design tools/species lists to support pollinators and perennialize your conservation dreams
Native Plants for Cut Flowers (handout)
Food Forests and Plant Guilds (see species list handout)
Erin Schneider stewards Hilltop Community Farm, a small-scale diversified market garden specializing in fruit, flowers, and food forests. Erin has opened her heart and mind to conservation throughout her life. Her curiosity has led her to explore and grow gardens, map soils, teach native plant restoration, and most recently farm. Erin credits her own efforts and learning in conservation education to grow as a prairie restorationist, agroforester, educator, tour guide, orchardist, host, fisherperson, forager, world farmer to farmer traveler, maker, soil quilter, seed keeper, peacemaker and tree planter, sometimes financed by currants but mostly by her day job as a Grants Administrator for the University of Minnesota, doing gig work, writing the occasional poem, and the grit to be and love in a world that can feel at odds with conservation. Erin is a WiWiC Conservation Coach in the Central Region. Erin recently presented on a lovely WiWiC Webinar with her sister, WI Chief State Forester Heather Berklund.