River Stories Minnesota River Summit River Stories - Audrey Arner

Audrey Arner

Opening Remarks at the Summit
The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program has transformed the Minnesota River Valley below our farm, with dense willow growth where conventional cropping was, for a century, tilled and harvested. My attention is now drawn to the lands that are necessarily still in production. The Multiple Benefits of Agriculture research reveals that we can’t just tweak the corn and soybeans rotation and expect a clean river, with a best management practice here and there. We ought to be taking a lesson from the great prairies to foster as much continuous living cover as we can in the landscape. Productive conservation, that is conservation on working lands, should be rewarded when considering biofuels and feedstock choices.

The Met Council estimates 1.2 more Minnesotans by 2030. We owe it to them and our own descendents to first factor ecosystem health when determining how to house, feed and provide energy needs of our expanding population.

From the front porch at Moonstone, we look can see some of what we and our river valley community need. Locally, with respect to energy use and global warming, it has everything to do with fundamental units of energy that fuel humans. Increasingly, environmentally conscious consumers are voting with their food dollars for the kind of farming landscape they prefer.
A growing number of farmers are prepared to meet that consumer demand with stewardship based practices that produce foods that are healthy for the ecosystem, the animals and humans.

We must be nurturing the most challenging crop—beginning stewardship-based farmers.

We ought to modernize the federal farm program, basing payments on indices of environmental performance, rewarding stewardship, including reduced energy consumption. Conservation programs should be consolidated and streamlined. We should fully fund and implement the Conservation Security Program.

River Story
On becoming river friendly farmers…Audrey Arner, Moonstone Farm, Montevideo

We came to live at the old Handeen place on the bluffs of the Minnesota River just upstream from Montevideo in spring of 1973. The fields looked a lot like the farms surrounding it, and like most modern, educated farmers, Richard’s dad was using the conventional available technologies to fertilize the crop and knock down the weeds.

The farm had evolved to the rotating bi-culture we all know so well: all corn one year, then all soybeans the next. Beauty was a spit clean field that succeeded in suppressing biological succession enough to nurture the mono-crop and, if we were lucky, bust the bins. Here in farm country we now have a couple of generations of guys and a few women whose skill set, equipment resources, access to technical assistance and public policy supports have all been geared to turn the Minnesota River Watershed into a sea of two primary crops.

We grew organic corn and beans for while, selling, for example, to the Japanese tofu market on the other side of the planet. We were told, “You can’t change agriculture.” In fact, agriculture has always changed and until post WWII there hadn’t been a soybean growing in southwestern Minnesota.

Richard, when asked about how we started altering the way we farm, still always talks about our early experience in the community of food co-ops in the Twin Cities, and that we wanted to farm in keeping with how we wanted to eat, in support of the general level of health we strive for. Also, the Minnesota Valley Alfalfa Producers formed in the later 1980’s and, as members, we planted our first perennial crop on corn base acres. These were among the drivers that helped us to formulate, in the early 1990’s a long-range goal based on the Quality of Life we wanted to achieve and what Forms of Production would support that. We also described our landscape not how it was, but how we understood that it must become to effectively capture sunlight, cycle water and nutrients, and become more biologically diverse.

An old teacher of mine says that the best way to move cattle, and the best way to make effective change, is “slowly.” Because we wanted to make a living from our home acreage and reduce our purchased inputs, we started our cattle herd in 1993, the first breeding livestock on the place since the early 1950’s.

We are no longer growing any annual crops, despite losing federal farm commodity supports that are based on production: the more corn, soybeans, wheat rice or cotton you produce, the more the taxpayers will reward you. Today our farm is completely perennialized. There is continuous living cover on 240 acres, which sequesters our carbon, provides an attractive habitat for wildlife, is aesthetically pleasing, and supports the general level of prosperity that we seek. With cost share support from the Natural Resources Conservation Service we have eleven plantings with about 7,500 trees of 42 different species including hardwoods, softwoods, conifers, deciduous, fruit-bearing, nut-bearing, ornamentals and medicinals. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program has also helped us to substantially improve our internal fences and deliver water to every grazing paddock.

The nature of our work has changed quite a bit. We don’t farm with headlights anymore, and we don’t use much fossil fuel. We’re at home a lot, which is part of our goal. We rely on the fertility generated from biological diversity and rotating the cowherd frequently among pastures. We don’t write big checks for production inputs produced by companies based in New Jersey or Switzerland.

About 97% of the shoreline in the Minnesota Basin is comprised of little tributaries like Moonstone Creek, which flows through our grassland and woods, fed by springs and drainage tile upstream. We regard our little farm (and in our neighborhood we are a very small farm) more as a water catchment area rather than a water “shed.” While the installation of more pattern tile drainage goes on all around us, we choose to hold rainfall as much as possible where it lands. Deeper rooted perennials, soil cover and our pond have become increasingly important in facing drought and the likelihood of higher temperatures.

Our support system has come from other farmers, most of whom we’ve met through our involvement with the Land Stewardship Project and the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota. We are each other’s mentors and students, dialogically learning the lessons of the great prairies, of the complex biological relationships we will never fully understand, of the dynamics of holistic decision making, of animal behavior, and the demands of marketing that does not include the elevator in town or the Chicago Board of Trade. Well, actually, we have just joined with 18 other Minnesota Farmers Union members to offer our grassland carbon credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange. The cattle herd is our main bread and butter, which we market directly to restaurants in Minneapolis and to families in our greater neighborhood.

We are among a growing community of agriculturalists producing fresh, local food for people who want to vote with their food dollars for the kind of healthy landscape, healthy animals, and healthy human bodies they wish to experience. Together we are a renegade movement that seeks to become a norm, supported through a federal farm program that will reward stewardship, inviting the entrepreneurship of beginning innovative farmers, and doing our small part to assure that the water that leaves our farm is ever improving in quality.

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This page was last updated 11/06