A Case for Stewardship
December 2024
This article started as some errant thoughts when I was scrolling through social media.
There are a few social media accounts that I follow (which are fairly well known, but will herein remain unnamed) that are strictly vegetarian and, what would appear to be, anti-rural; or at least oblivious to the fact that some people like living in the country and not everyone is a city enjoyer. Now, of course everyone is entitled to their opinion (even if it’s wrong 
) , but one point that comes up time and again with the anti-animal agriculture activist is that virtually all livestock farming is unethical from an environmental standpoint.
Animal agriculture uses too much land for grazing and too much land to grow grains to feed non-ruminant animals (like chickens and pigs). All that land, even quality farm land, should be re-naturalized and left to its own devices to heal itself from the horrors of humanity and prosper without those pesky humans ruining everything!
But between fiery, anti-agriculture / anti-rural, posts and articles (which are usually of high quality and contain data), there are light and fun photos of the account owners doing things like enjoying a secluded beach with their domestic dog. We will come to the topic of domestic pets shortly.
Now, I am not at odds with every aspect of the position taken by these vegetarian activists. Humans have, after all, spent the last 100,000 years essentially ruining every environment that they encountered. But I do start to take issue with someone’s personal opinions when their opinions affect my life, my work, and my life’s mission – and it is, arguably, incomplete.
In the book ‘Sapiens’, Yuval Noah Harari creates a very strong historical case to show that, according to the fossil record, as soon as evidence of humans appears in a region, virtually all the megafauna immediately go extinct. Once humans became seafaring, the clock started ticking for everything that didn’t have giant teeth and claws. Only some extremely secluded islands like Madagascar and the Galapagos survived our prehistoric explorations – and we spread across the earth extremely quickly (from a historical context).
I know that starting with “humans have been ruining everything since time began” doesn’t seem like a good foundation for an anti anti-agriculture argument, but trust me. I am going somewhere with this.
Humans have forever been shortsightedly eliminating everything that lives. Sometimes, like in the ancient world, our conquest of the natural world would have been born of necessity; if I have a pointy stick and nothing to eat, it’s reasonable that an unfortunate Diprotodon would end up on the other side of it. These days, however, with New Zealand lamb, oranges from Florida, grapes from California, and canned pears from South Africa all adorning the shelves of your local supermarket, it’s hard to keep “necessity” in context. What I’m saying is, humans have long been doing what humans do: led by our desire to survive. Then suddenly, in the 19th and 20th century, humans started riding a wave of cheap fossil fuels. Moving people became cheap and fast. Ships from Europe came regularly. Planes traveled around continents with ease. Suddenly, people (and more importantly – unintended stowaways) from everywhere were now everywhere else virtually instantly.
Think about all the wildly damaging species that have been devastating native flora and fauna even in our own short lives: Dutch Elm Disease, Emerald Ash Borer, Japanese Knotweed, Zebra Mussels, Sea Lamprey, Gobie. The list goes on and on. These species have devastated native populations of grasses, leguminous plants, trees, animals, fish, and birds. And then there’s the indirect human impacts. In Canada every year, domestic cats kill 200 million birds. There are 8.5 million domestic cats in Canada compared to 6,000 cougars. Approximately 8 million domestic dogs compared to 55,000 wolves.
Why am I talking about things like invasive species, petroleum, dwindling songbirds, and super-predator populations? What I’ve been slowly bringing in to land is that, to put it bluntly, this is the hand of cards we have been dealt. While we might not agree with the way things have happened, our predecessors did what they did and we are where we are.
Such begins my case for forward-looking land stewardship.
Grasslands are an integral part of any environment. Whether it’s in Alaska or Southern Ontario, a key component to any biome is grasslands. One very important aspect to this specific ecosystem is the edge where a forest or brushy area meets short and medium grasses. This is where a huge majority of action – of life – happens. Wild turkeys like to live in forests and brush, but specifically seek out openings like pastures and other farmland to feed and can be seen grazing these areas alongside deer.
On our farm, we have a small 6 acre pasture carved out of the bush. To the south is our hardwood forest, to the north are wetlands, and straddling the pasture on the east and west are mixed forests and old, abandoned farm fields. That pasture is home to a revolving door of species that come to forage off the short grass that I chop once per year as we prepare it for grazing animals.
As the year goes on, the abandoned farm fields east of my property overgrow. Thistles and dog strangling vines can be seen flowering and seeding. What grass remaining in these fields grows, goes to seed, and then languishes: turning brown and blocking the sun from hitting the ground. The area that I mow is green and lush, the new flowers of Queen Anne’s lace, new milkweed growth, and the beginnings of clover patches sprout proudly from the ground. Deer congregate around the southeast corner, grazing on the greens while the fields of dry brown grasses stay un-grazed and abandoned. There is no better way to see the benefits of caring for the land responsibly than living on it every day.
Since taking over the farm in 2021, we have converted about 12 acres to a silvopasture: a combination of trees with pasture lands, much like a savannah, but intensely managed. You get the effect of stacking the carbon sequestration in both the soil (as you improve it) and the trees while also taking advantage of benefits offered by the trees such as shade for your grazing animals, area cooling, and the water-pump like effect that the roots create. While it might not be relevant in some of my very rocky and shallow soiled areas, the deep rooted plants like Sugar Maple and some Sumac species reach down further than the surface grasses are able and can pull up water and nutrients from the deeper levels to within the grasses’ reach.
When you see perennial pasture grasses juxtapositioned beside annually-planted grain crops they look, to your eye, similar in height and thus many assume they are also of an approximately similar mass under the surface of the soil. This is not the case – as demonstrated by the included, somewhat famous, photo comparing the root systems of wheat to grassland grasses. When grass is cut, either mechanically or with grazing animals, the far reaching, and now redundant roots die off, leaving both biomass and new capillaries in the soil. This aerates the soil and allows water to trickle in, increasing water collecting abilities of the land.
The point of this is not to condemn modern agriculture. We all need to eat, and many of my animals rely on conventional grains to round out their diet.
My point is that, while the root growth / retreat cycle naturally occurs with perennial grasses, I’m able to insert myself into the middle and effectively supercharge the process by mowing, thus causing the cycle to happen more frequently. Moreover, grasses grow most vigorously in the earlier stages of their growth, so keeping them in this stage for more of the year allows for the capture more solar energy, which is then stored in the roots, the soil, or a bale of hay inside the barn.
If I just abandoned my field it would be overrun with invasives. Completely independent of my input, a monoculture of ugly, waxy, and unpalatable plants would take over the field as has happened with much of the abandoned fields in my area: dog strangling vine, european buckthorn, wild parsnip, giant hogweed, and poison ivy are prevelent. I hope nobody wants to go for an evening stroll! You only need to drive on the 401 into Quebec to see the hectares of yellow flowers of wild parsnip warning you to keep away. Without my input, this is the future of my land.
Philosophically, I would love it to be hundreds of years ago when abandoning the land meant giving it back to grazing wild animals and predators like wolves and hawks hunting the plethora of available fauna. But we don’t live in that world anymore. We, and our domestic animals (both livestock and pets), make up the vast majority of mammal biomass on the planet. In case you didn’t click that link, wild land and water mammals combined make up only 4% of the biomass of mammals on earth. That’s all the David Attenborough documentaries, all the youtube videos of lions, all the disney movies that captured our imaginations. 4%.
I think that sometimes, very blessed people with wealth who live in the most beautiful parts of the world forget that ‘we’ make up almost all that is ‘mammal’. It’s sad, but that means it’s up to us to do our best to mimic systems that we destroyed. Sometimes that means managing systems to help with the work. Sometimes that means inserting myself directly via actions like mowing fields, and clearing trees and invasive bushes. My sheep graze the grass, depositing seeds around and naturally introducing fertilizer into the area. My chickens follow after, helping break up the concentrations of sheep droppings and assisting in the control of bugs and other nasties left behind (like fly larvae). Given where we are in the world, I have to bring these animals to the pasture, because there is nothing left to manage the landscape on its own. I manually pluck the seed pods off of dog strangling vine because otherwise it will take over everything and I will need to invest money and fossil fuels to turn the soil and start again.
My sheep have become the bison and my chickens the songbirds: extinct or driven away by human development.
Beavers would help slow down rivers, streams, and other tributaries which would create riparian areas beneficial to other wildlife and while beavers are not at risk of extinction, they are nowhere near their original population. In fact, on the watercourse that runs through my wetlands all the way to Lake Ontario, farmers previously went through and demolished all the beaver dams because the water was inconvenient. The Ministry of Natural Resources then came for a visit, gave them a stern talking to and then helped re-introduce the dams to slow the loss of water.
This is stewardship that I can get behind.
Currently, there are programs running across Ontario freshwater systems to restock fish species whose populations were devastated by human behavior. Think overfishing and the introduction of invasives. Here is a chart showing all the different places and times that various species have been stocked in just our small part of the world. Hundreds of thousands of fish have been reintroduced in an attempt to bolster their populations and ensure their niche remains filled by them. I would say this is important work: trying to use our brains to apply, to the best of our abilities, practical solutions to issues the people before us created.
When I arrived at my farm, it was an overgrown mess of red cedar, buckthorn, thistles, and bullrushes. As I’ve cleared enough to make grazing animals practical, I’ve seen an explosion of new life coming in and out of my pastures. Squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, wild turkeys, and deer pop out into the pastures regularly to pick at the grasses and forage in the short pasture for berries (such as wild grapes), nuts, and seeds while small predators such as owls, hawks, and crows sit on the edges of the forest and brush, watching the grass intently for any creatures scurrying about. Of course, this creates its own problems. If one of my juvenile chickens escapes from a range hut, it’s basically game over. But this is a small price to pay for having a piece of paradise teeming with life.
This spring, for the first time on this property, I watched a red tailed hawk swoop out of a tall ash tree and snipe a chipmunk out of the pasture and then fly 200m into the forest. Sad for the chipmunk, but it made me very happy.
Stewardship comes in all shapes and sizes. Golf courses are stewarded land, so are 5 acre grass turf lawns that someone has attached to their mansion. Although not all stewarding is created equal, I’d argue that in my little way, I help improve the world by designing my world with the future in mind.