Minnesota farmer's plan could improve standing of state's natural resources

HERON LAKE, MINN. – Tony Thompson looked across this vast shallow lake the other day, watching as drake and hen mallards dabbled in its shoreline mud flats. Not far away, a rooster pheasant had just flushed, catching the blustery winds of southwest Minnesota and banking into a blue sky before settling in tall grass. Now an oasis in a vast landscape of corn and soybeans, Heron Lake is a mere shadow of the wildlife mecca it once was.

But on this day, it at least suggested a time a hundred years ago and more when so many canvasback ducks descended on its waters they blackened the sky.

Thompson's family has been hereabout since his great-great grandfather Horace Thompson established the family farm in 1873.

Not many years thereafter, in October and November, James Ford Bell and other Twin Cities notables would catch a train from Minneapolis to the town of Heron Lake, arriving just before the morning's shoot, their Labradors and other dogs at their sides. Not just ducks, but muskrats abounded then in Heron Lake, and they and the wild celery that grew profusely were telltale of a healthy marsh, the "Chesapeake of the Midwest," as it was known then to waterfowl hunters.

Thompson regrets those days are gone and, in that regard, his memory is seared as deeply as anyone's over what once was in this part of the state but is no longer.

But he's a farmer as well, and not a small one, and as such is intent as all business owners are to make a profit producing the food that people want and need, while also conserving the soil and water that give him and his family a living.

"There are trade-offs to everything," he says.

Now, Thompson senses change is due. The old paradigm in which farmers, wildlife groups and conservation agencies have vied for public and political favor from centralized battle stations has yielded no clear winners, he believes, while costing the state its clean water, and therefore, perhaps, its future. Worse, rural Minnesota has borne disproportionately not only environmental losses, but population losses, too.

Cottonwood County, for example, of which Windom is the seat, boasted 12,069 residents in 1900 and as many as 16,166 in 1960.

Today it has about 11,600. Median family income in a recent census was about $40,000.

"Windom is doing pretty well," Thompson said. "But more could be done that would benefit economically the people who live in rural Minnesota and also those who want improved land and water conservation."

A model to emulate, Thompson believes, lies in Minnesota's successful Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, in which member farms sell, in essence, seasonal memberships to consumers, in return for which members receive fresh produce throughout the growing season.

Key benefits to cooperating farmers: shared risk of production costs and a guaranteed customer base.

Member-consumers, meanwhile, gain access to fresh, locally grown vegetables and other food.

Now think, Thompson said, of a similar possibility — Community Supported Conservation, two models of which, nationwide, already exist.

One is the Malpai Borderlands Group, which is attempting to implement ecosystem management on nearly 1 million acres of virtually unfragmented landscape in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. The other is Blackfoot Challenge, in Montana, whose goal is "better rural communities through cooperative conservation."

"My idea," Thompson said, "would be to attract people to rural Minnesota from the Twin Cities and elsewhere. Some might come to hunt, others to look for shed deer antlers or morel mushrooms. Or whatever."

Broader community involvement also could be organized, in which state park activities, conservation-group banquets or festivals, trail walks or rides could be included, either as events offered on given days or weekends, or as activities available seasonally or year-round. In either case, the point would be to reduce from the macro scale that conservation is often implemented today — with marginal environmental payback — to the micro or community level, where shared interests, costs and benefits could be realized.

Either that or … steady as she goes.

In which case the grab bag of land- and water-exploitation goodies that lawmakers will have coughed up to special interests this session when the final gavel falls will be repeated again and again in coming years.

And why not? Losers in these deals, rural and urban alike, are too splintered to mount effective political counterattacks.

Which is why — as was evident the other day at Heron Lake — the state's farmlands might forever support only marginal numbers of ducks, songbirds, pheasants and other wildlife.

Dennis Anderson • 612-673-4424