By Jordyn Harrison for Yes! Media.
Broadcast version by Jordyn Harrison and Jonah Chester for Illinois News Connection reporting for the YES! Media-Public News Service Collaboration

From 100 feet in th­­e air, the parcel at 500 N. Waller Ave. in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago looks like the center of a donut. Surrounded by two churches, a fire station, a senior home, a town hall, a library, and a high school is a rectangular green space the size of five city lots. The land once stood empty and desolate, like many vacant lots in Chicago, but today, it houses beds of vegetables and fruits soaking in the sun and goats from a nearby farm resting under the shade of a tree. In the middle of the green space sits a gazebo with a hand-painted sign that reads, "Harambee! Gardens."

"From the start, it was something big enough that people would know about [it], partially because of the sheer size of it," says Seamus Ford, co-founder of the garden, as he gives a tour on a cool October day, picking raspberries and pointing out tomatoes along the way.

Ford, a Chicago-born outdoorsman, casually walks through the garden with humble familiarity. Every now and then, he pauses, looking over the expanse of green in wonder, and recounts a detail about the garden's beginnings.

In 2008, Ford, a special project manager for an educational company and a resident of the Austin neighborhood, became concerned about fossil fuel inputs and how food is grown.

"When fuel prices were going through the roof, it started to get really clear to me that there's a change underway, and it could be a bad one if we don't have answers to this," Ford recalls. And that's when he got into gardening. "I basically got rid of any grass, almost all the grass where I live, and built raised beds."

Around the same time, he often drove by a vacant lot and began to feel a "siren call" to build a community garden. According to the DePaul Institute for Housing Studies, there are nearly 32,000 vacant lots in Chicago. Though many contain debris and trash, they can be an ecological and social opportunity. Planting a garden amid an otherwise empty lot is an opportunity that an increasing number of communities are choosing to pursue, but it is also one that requires hard work to sustain.

Ford learned that the land belonged to a neighbor and got permission to transform the grass lot into a garden. He then co-founded Root-Riot, an organization with the goal of creating a network of urban gardens "growing local food, fostering resilience, and reweaving the fabric of our community, one planting bed at a time."

Now, 12 years in, the Harambee Community Garden can provide lessons about how it was able to last this long and where it's headed from here.

Sowing Seeds of Change

In late spring of 2010, Ford was mowing the lot's overgrown grass when Deandre Robinson, then a junior at Frederick Douglass Academy High School, walked across the street to ask Ford what he was doing. Robinson was thrilled with Ford's answer, because students and teachers at Frederick Douglass had been discussing what could be done with that very lot, which had stood empty for more than 25 years.

"His face lit up so bright," Ford says, recalling meeting Robinson 11 years ago. The resulting collaboration ultimately became the Harambee Community Garden, named for the Swahili word meaning "all pull together."

Austin residents and members of surrounding communities organized workdays to begin transforming the vacant lot. Eager student volunteers from Frederick Douglass, like Robinson, helped with mowing, preparing the soil, and building the initial 30 garden beds-which grew to 58 the second year.

Interested gardeners, experienced or not, could rent a 4-by-8-foot raised garden bed for $40 a year or $100 for three years (which remains the price to this day). The cost covers materials needed for the garden, such as soil, compost, tools, and the beds themselves. People take home the food that is grown or give it away to the firehouse, the senior home, or other neighbors.

The garden has brought people from all walks of life together across the road dividing the Austin neighborhood from its more affluent neighbor, Oak Park. "Everybody was able to link up together and find common ground and make a new friend, find mentors," Robinson says. A jobs program called Youth Guidance even got youth who were involved with local gangs to participate in the garden.

In the heat of Chicago summers, adults worked alongside youth to pull weeds and tend to crops. During the school year, they worked to make sure youth stayed on top of their studies and found other opportunities to add to their résumés. Adult gardeners helped Robinson study for the SAT and get an internship with local elected official U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis. Ford even took Robinson shopping to get his first suit and tie.

Though Robinson doesn't currently garden-he's now a petty officer 1st class in the Navy and an entrepreneur-he credits his work ethic and consciousness of how food is grown to his time spent at Harambee.

"When people talk about Chicago, when they ask where I'm from, I'm never embarrassed. I'm very prideful, because a lot of the time, they don't know us. ... They don't know our situation, our struggles," Robinson says.

He believes the way in which the garden exposed him to new experiences as a teen can also influence the current generation of youth for the better.

"Why not give them the opportunity to appreciate something by growing it, raising it, by having a sense of ownership?" he says. "You treat things different when you have a sense of ownership."

Lessons From Another Generation

In addition to attracting students from the high school, Harambee pulled together people from other surrounding buildings. The churches started doing Sunday school classes in the garden, the firehouse supplied water, and the local library got a bed and started doing after-school programming.

Senior home residents, who had a full view of the garden from their apartment windows, gradually made their way outside to get involved. Ford says a number of the neighborhood's older residents grew up in the rural South with a basic knowledge of how to grow food. Many of them came north during the Great Migration, when, between 1916 and 1970, millions of African Americans left the rural South and landed in Midwestern cities like Chicago in search of economic opportunities and to escape from racial violence and Jim Crow segregation.

Once they landed in the city, many of these new Chicagoans sought ways to remain connected to parts of their agricultural history and reap the benefits of spending time outdoors amid an industrialized urban environment, according to Brian McCammack, author of Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago.

"Migrants' 'kinship with the soil' was never completely severed in Chicago," McCammack writes. Instead, relationships with nature were actively reshaped, recast, and reimagined in the city's landscapes of hope."

Accessing green spaces wasn't always easy though.

"Low-paying jobs and racially discriminatory housing policies had the effect of clustering Black Chicago's working classes in the most impoverished and segregated neighborhoods, so building connections with nature in their own private green spaces was virtually out of the question.

At the same time, the parks and beaches most easily accessible to them were small, ill-equipped, and even hazardous-landscapes that could inspire more disillusionment than hope," McCammack writes.

So when the Harambee garden opened in Austin, a neighborhood that has endured decades of disinvestment, residents old and young latched on to the opportunity to sow seeds of change.

"Suddenly, [senior residents] were able to come out and teach people about how to do so many different things: growing a tomato plant to growing okra, how to manage your soil," Ford says. "Some people couldn't walk, and they'd just sit in motorized scooters on the sidewalk giving instructions to the kids."

Growing Through the Gravel

To be sure, sustaining the garden has been an ongoing challenge. The original wooden beds fell apart and were replaced with cinder block beds that are nestled on a plot of gravel. The gravel, too, was a response to the problem of invasive bindweed, which required constant mowing and removal. The weed almost choked the life out of the garden at one point, but a core group of gardeners devoted themselves to keeping the garden alive. In 2019, NeighborSpace, an urban land trust, purchased and protected the land and installed gravel to help prevent the bindweed from taking over.

Community gardens like Harambee are becoming increasingly popular, with more than 29,000 garden plots in city parks in the 100 largest U.S. cities. However, a national survey by the American Community Gardening Association reports that only 32.3% of community gardens last for more than 10 years. The most commonly cited reason for gardens dissolving was "lack of interest by gardeners."

While the Harambee garden is embraced by the community, the number of Austin residents who rent garden beds fluctuates year to year. Still, the commitment of the garden's most active members have held it together during its most difficult times. One of them, Maria Sorrell, was walking through the neighborhood in 2010 when she saw banners advertising the garden.

"Originally, I was just going to make a donation, because I wasn't into gardening," Sorrell says. But as a retiree with lots of free time, she decided to rent a bed in the garden's very first year and has been making connections and learning to grow vegetables ever since.

Over the years, volunteers have traveled from various parts of the city and western suburbs to help in the garden, including high school students and others seeking volunteer hours as part of their community service.

"The people that tend to come to volunteer days often are people from outside the community," Ford says, "and the active people participating are not always necessarily reflective of the community." Ford sees this as a challenge and an opportunity.

Participating gardeners, about 30 currently, are considering building a steering committee for the garden to decide how they might get more Austin residents to rent beds and increase the number of gardeners involved in events and planning.

"The space belongs to everybody," says Ford, who still resides in Austin and actively participates in the garden. "This isn't a club. This is just a facility for the community."

Expanding the Garden's Reach

Over time, the garden has become increasingly self-supporting. While Harambee once relied on the generosity of the senior home and firehouse for its water, NeighborSpace has since installed an underground water system and aboveground watering stations.

The gardeners still collaborate with organizations in the community to educate people on growing their own food and serve as a location for gathering and connecting. For instance, this past summer, a group of youth in the Park District's TRACE (Teens Reimagining Arts, Culture, and Environment) program worked with alt Space Chicago, an Austin art organization, to build seating for the garden with repurposed wood. Future plans include adding a play area for children, installed with the help of the West Side Nature Play Network, a group of community partners dedicated to creating accessible and safe opportunities for children and caregivers to explore the outdoors on Chicago's West Side.

The goats that graze on the other side of Harambee belong to GlennArt Farm, a small goat farm down the street from the garden that opened around the same time as Harambee. Seeing goats lounging in the middle of a city neighborhood often evokes curiosity from people walking by.

"They're just so interesting to people that people stop along the fence, and they'll pull up some grass and feed it to the goats," Ford says. "And a weird thing happens when you're standing next to a stranger observing something that's kind of wondrous.

"If you're there long enough, you feel obliged to introduce yourself. And the introduction is like a threshold ... it's a subtle form of connection," Ford says. "The garden is a place where individual human connections get made."

Jordyn Harrison wrote this article for YES! Magazine.


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By Brian DeVore for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Under pewter-colored skies, Alan Bedtka tramps through the snow and past a stand of sorghum-sudangrass, its chest-high stems rattling in the harsh wind. The tall forage stands out in southeastern Minnesota’s corn and soybean fields, which this time of year have been reduced to stubble poking through the snow.

Bedtka is in his mid-30s and working to raising a small cow-calf beef herd profitably. That requires cutting costs and labor, and he’d like to keep input-intensive corn and soy out of the picture if he can. Instead, he wants his cattle to harvest their own feed via managed rotational grazing, even in the winter.

“Any day you can graze is better,” says Bedka.

It turns out a system that relies less on row crops isn’t just good for a time- and resource-strapped young farmer. A snowball’s toss away, a trout stream called Crow Spring snakes through the white landscape. Yet the bucolic scene belies an environmental problem roiling beneath the surface: The groundwater in this part of Minnesota is so contaminated with nitrates running off farm fields that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently called on three state agencies to take action to protect the health of rural residents.

That’s where the sorghum-sudangrass comes in. It works as both a cover crop and forage for the cattle, and it’s helping Bedtka build up organic matter in his soil. He was paid to plant it by the Olmsted County Groundwater Protection and Soil Health Program, a local effort that seeks to reduce overall fertilizer use by building soil—therefore cutting down on the nutrients that enter waterways—while helping farmers save money.

In its inaugural season, the program has already helped keep tens of thousands of pounds of nitrates out of area water. The initiative goes beyond pushing the establishment of an isolated practice to take a holistic, integrative approach. And its early success has conservationists and lawmakers hoping it can become a model for local, state, and federal farm conservation programs, and in the process serve as a way of disrupting the corn-bean-feedlot machine that dominates Midwestern agriculture.

Nipping Nitrates at the Source

In 2022, Olmsted County commissioners Mark Thein and Gregg Wright approached staffers in the local soil and water conservation district office and asked a seemingly straightforward question: How can we keep nitrates out of the groundwater? Thein, whose family runs a well drilling business, is troubled by the increase in contamination he’s seen over the past few decades in the aquifers he taps throughout southeastern Minnesota.

“It’s not in society’s best interest to look the other way,” he says. “I don’t think it’s fair to the next generation.”

Southeastern Minnesota is a hollow land—its geology is characterized by porous limestone that allows contaminants to easily make their way into underground aquifers. Nitrates are a particularly troublesome pollutant, given their ability to escape the surface and seep deeper into the Earth, often in a mysterious and unpredictable manner. High nitrate levels can cause a sometimes-fatal condition called “blue baby syndrome” and has been linked to colorectal cancer, thyroid disease, and neural tube defects.

The EPA has set the drinking water standard for nitrate at 10 milligrams per liter, or 10 parts per million. Recently, research has hinted at serious health problems associated with nitrate levels lower than that. Minnesota Department of Agriculture testing has shown that over 12 percent of the private wells tested in the eight-county karst region of southeastern Minnesota exceeded the EPA’s drinking water standard. More than 9,000 residents in the region have been or still are at risk of consuming water at or above the EPA standard, according to a letter the agency released in November 2023.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency says 70 percent of the state’s nitrate pollution is coming from cropland. Corn requires lots of nitrogen, and it’s by far the most commonly used fertilizer in the United States. Iowa farmers, for example, apply it on 87 percent of their fields at a rate of 149 pounds per acre. Annual crops take up only about half of the nitrogen applied, and the rest often ends up polluting groundwater in the form of nitrate.

This doesn’t just create problems in local drinking water wells. Nitrogen and phosphorus escaping Midwestern farm fields are the major cause of the hypoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, which is about the size of Yellowstone National Park. The EPA’s latest National Rivers and Streams Assessment found close to half of the country’s waterways were in “poor condition,” and nutrients such as nitrogen are a leading culprit.

Southeastern Minnesota’s Olmsted County is a microcosm of agriculture’s dependence on nitrogen fertilizer. Since the 1940s, oats, wheat, hay, and pasture have been replaced by a duoculture of corn and soybeans. In addition, large concentrated animal feeding operations, which have become more prevalent there in recent years, add to the problem by disposing millions of gallons of nitrogen-rich liquid manure.

Olmsted County officials acknowledge that water in certain areas of the county will continue to see increasing nitrate levels as the contaminant moves deeper into aquifers. And when nitrates are present, it’s inevitable that other contaminants, such as pesticides, are also polluting the water. “We’re allowing this to happen,” says Caitlin Meyer, the water resources coordinator for the Olmsted SWCD. “But what can we do to prevent this in the first place?”

Dialing up Diversity

One standard approach to cleaning the water that runs off farms is planting cover crops. Indeed, studies have shown that when cover crops grow between the corn and soy seasons, they provide the kind of soil environment that builds natural fertility and cuts nitrate leaching by anywhere from 40 to over 70 percent.

Cover cropping has also gained a reputation as a tool for sequestering carbon and thus mitigating climate change. Since 2016, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has made available more than $100 million in funds to help farmers establish cover crops.

Despite the resources devoted to advancing the practice, however, only around 5 percent of U.S. farmland is regularly cover cropped. The cost can be prohibitive, and it can be tricky to fit them into a conventional row-cropping system. A 2022 Stanford University satellite study reported that although cover cropping reduces erosion and improves water quality, it also causes significant yield hits for corn and soybeans. And some scientists are concerned that cover cropping’s role in climate change mitigation has been overplayed.

For a time, the Olmsted County SWCD administered a traditional cover-crop program funded by the USDA that helped farmers with establishment costs. Angela White, a soil conservation technician for the SWCD, says the program was valuable in getting cover crops established in the region and showing that it could work, but it had limitations as far as producing environmental benefits. Farmers would often plow the cover under early in the spring before it could provide optimal soil health benefits, and USDA restrictions didn’t allow much flexibility.

Ray Weil, a University of Maryland soil ecologist who has worked with farmers in numerous states, says when farmers are paid to implement an isolated practice such as cover cropping, they can become too focused on the minimum needed to qualify for payments, and they don’t consider the overall soil health picture.

But Weil and other experts also say cover cropping can be a “gateway practice” for implementing the five principles of soil health promoted by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service or NRCS: armor the soil, minimize disturbance (i.e., reduce tillage), increase plant diversity, keep roots in the soil as long as possible, and integrate livestock.

Plant diversity and covering the land has long been associated with more resilient soil. But experts say the integration of livestock via rotational grazing can also help reduce reliance on continuous plantings of fertilizer-intensive crops. And that’s where the Olmsted County Groundwater Protection and Soil Health Program enters the picture. The program pays farmers to plant cover crops, but it digs deeper to ensure that they get real results.

Research shows that allowing cover crops to grow to significant heights can dramatically reduce pollution. So, the program pays a farmer $55 an acre to grow their cover crops to at least 12 inches; at 24 inches, they receive an additional $20 per acre. Planting a cash crop within a living stand of cover crops, a technique called “planting green,” garners a farmer an additional $10 an acre. Farmers can also receive payments for growing so-called “alternative” crops such as oats and other small grains, and for converting crop acres to deep-rooted perennial systems like hay and pasture.

Each farm can qualify for a maximum of around $15,000 in payments per year. When Olmsted County SWCD staffers originally brainstormed with area farmers about setting up the soil health initiative, they considered a per-farm cap of $20,000 to $25,000. However, the farmers insisted on a lower cap so that more money could be spread around on more acres.

“I put $6,500 total expenses into seeding—the program paid back $3,500,” says farmer Logan Clark, who used the program to convert cropland to rotationally grazed pasture on his hilly, erosion-prone farm. “So, I’d at least be $3,500 more in the hole if I didn’t have the program.”

SWCD staffers say one advantage of the program is that because funding comes from the county—the commissioners agreed to set aside $5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for the program—rather than the USDA, they have more freedom to allow farmers to experiment and learn from their mistakes.

Mark Stokes has been using no-till cropping for 26 years. Around five years ago, he noticed that even on his no-till acres he was seeing erosion, so he started growing cover crops utilizing traditional cost-share programs. He isn’t afraid to experiment—he’s grazed his beef cow herd on a mix of nine cover crops, and a few years ago, after seeing it being done on YouTube, mounted a seeder box on his combine so he can plant cover crops while he’s harvesting corn.

Stokes enrolled in the Olmsted SWCD program in 2023 to help cover the risk of yet another innovative practice. Through the contract, he agreed to plant his corn and soybeans into growing cereal rye green and terminate the rye after it hit 12 inches tall. It turns out the dry conditions made it a bad year to let a cover crop grow tall. On the other hand, the oats he raised in 2023 thrived.

When it came time to sign up for the 2024 round of the program, Stokes took advantage of its flexibility. “I signed up for more oats, so we don’t have to worry about the cereal rye so much, and if we have to, we can terminate it sooner.”

Not all participants in the program are going to check all five soil health principle boxes, but flexibility can serve as a seedbed for aspirational farming. Alan Bedtka wants to follow as many of the principles as possible. In 2023, he used the program’s funds to grow his cover crop to 12 inches. He also signed up to raise cover crops for seed production, which qualified him for the alternative crop portion of the initiative. Finally, his use of rotational grazing and the growing of forages on formerly row-cropped land qualified him for the haying and grazing payment.

“Protecting water quality is a perk, but the main reason I’m doing it is to try to be more profitable,” says Bedtka as he stands in a recently grazed cover-cropped field that he hasn’t had to add fertilizer to for two years. Nearby is an exposed limestone hillside, a reminder of the area’s vulnerable karst. Bedtka explains that his healthier soil absorbs and stores precipitation better. “So that means you’re growing more grass and more cows per acre. All the benefits are kind of tied up into one.”

Like Stokes, Bedtka is now able to take a more integrative, whole-systems approach with less financial risk.

“I know farmers who have been cover cropping or strip tilling for decades . . . Now they are hungry for what’s next,” says Kristi Pursell, who, when she headed up the watershed group Clean River Partners, supported farmers adopting practices to keep ag pollution out of southeastern Minnesota’s Cannon River. “The Olmsted SWCD program respects the knowledge that these farmers have of their land and their previous experience.”

Truckloads of Disruption

Soon after the Olmsted County program was launched as a pilot in 2022, 52 farmers signed up to grow tall cover crops—more than double what was expected. In total, they agreed to grow cover crops up to 12 inches high on over 5,300 acres and 24 inches on 2,700 acres. This year, over 70 farmers have signed up to raise cover crops under the program, representing almost 13,000 acres.

There are 240,000 acres of cropland in the county, so the majority of the area’s farmers aren’t participating in this initiative. But the program may be having an outsized impact on soil health. The SWCD estimates the environmental results of the program by combining the nitrate reduction directly observed on its own research farm with some of the wider research that’s been done. It estimates that in 2023, the program kept roughly 310,000 pounds of nitrates out of the county’s drinking water.

Surveys show that most farmers plant more cover-crop acres than they are getting paid for— something they can afford to do because the SWCD contracts pay so well, says Martin Larsen, a farmer and conservation technician for the district. When the SWCD includes those additional acres, the amount of nitrates being kept out of the water goes up to 560,000 pounds—or the equivalent of 23 semi-truckloads of urea fertilizer.

“The contracts are generating a nearly two-to-one payback in terms of soil health practices that are put in place on the farms,” says Larsen.

At the SWCD office, Caitlin Meyer, the water resources coordinator, points to a color-coded map that shows where farmers have signed up for the program so far; soil-friendly practices are being used in most areas of the county. “If we could get 30 percent in our subwatersheds put into cover crops, we’d be making real progress,” she says. One estimate is that some watersheds are approaching the 20-percent mark.

Larsen, who got his start using regenerative practices by planting cover crops a few years ago, then displays a chart showing what kind of acreage changes could occur if the program lives up to its potential over the next five years—9 percent less corn, 13 percent fewer soybeans, 417 percent more cover crops, 95 percent more oats, and 5 percent more pasture. If the effort succeeds, in other words, it could significantly disrupt the corn-soybean system in the region.

It might also serve as a model in other counties in Minnesota and beyond. Dagoberto Driggs, who coordinates the National Healthy Soils Policy Network, says the data from the Olmsted effort’s research farm helps determine an accurate estimate of the program’s benefits, ensuring public resources are being invested wisely. He adds that a program like this fits well with the current push on the part of regenerative agriculture groups across the country to create conservation incentives that are flexible enough to allow farmers to innovate and adapt. Driggs would like to see something like the Olmsted County program tried in other parts of the country.

“We really need a more holistic approach based on the soil health principles, which is what I find striking with this program,” says Driggs.

Mark Thein, the well-driller and county commissioner, hopes a cost-benefit analysis could show that such a proactive program saves taxpayer money by reducing the need for new drinking water infrastructure to deal with pollutants. It would be ideal, he adds, if the state would create a large-scale version of the program, taking pressure off local governments.

The timing could work in his favor. An analysis by the Star Tribune newspaper found that despite the fact that Minnesota has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce nitrate pollution over the past few decades, the problem has not gone away.

When the 2024 session of the Minnesota Legislature convened in February, lawmakers began drafting legislation that would create a pilot nitrate-reduction program modeled after the Olmsted County initiative. Pursell, who is now a state representative, is working on the legislation. She’s frustrated with the lack of progress made to reduce ag pollution and blames federal policy such as the farm bill, which encourages farmers to grow little other than corn and soybeans.

If a local pilot is successful, Pursell says it could help farmers transition out of the corn-soybean duoculture in a financially viable manner—and give taxpayers a return on their investment in the form of clean water, a crucial public good.

“I want to make sure that when we are spending money, it’s for an outcome, and it’s not just to tick a box,” she says. “For generations we’ve been telling farmers to do exactly what they’re doing. If we want them to change, we need to change.”


Brian DeVore wrote this article for Civil Eats.


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An annual march for farmworkers' rights is being held Sunday in northwest Washington.

This year, marchers are focusing on the conditions for local tulip and daffodil workers.

Alfredo Juarez, organizer for the farmworkers rights organization Community to Community Development, said tulip and daffodil harvesters are raising concerns about pay, pesticide use near where they are working and the need for clean restrooms. He noted the march coincides with the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival.

"During the tourist season when you show up here, you see all the beautiful flowers and different colors, design," Juarez acknowledged. "But the work that goes into making all that happen is done by the workers and that's people that you don't really see. You just see the flowers."

The farmworkers' march, known as La Marcha Campesina, starts at 10 a.m. Sunday in Mount Vernon. The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival is the largest tulip festival in the country and draws a million visitors annually.

Juarez emphasized the workers want to see better conditions in the fields.

"We really like doing the job," Juarez pointed out. "It just gets very tough and it's hard for us sometimes when we do so much. So, everybody else enjoys it, but for us when we're doing the work, it's tough."

The march will follow a 7.5-mile loop. Juarez added the march typically takes place in May, but the date was changed this year to coincide with the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival.

The milk you drink or the beef you eat may have come from a farm that rotates its livestock in a certain way to establish a healthier landscape. Wisconsin farmers who practice managed grazing have another chance for new federal funding.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced $22 million is available for regional networks of farmers who offer peer-to-peer technical assistance on this practice. Managed grazing involves raising and feeding livestock on a pasture and moving them regularly, to allow that section of land to recover.

When federal funding was restored last year, Margaret Krome, policy director at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, said the demand was overwhelming.

"It really wasn't a very long application period, and we still had a lot of applicants that couldn't get funded because there was just not enough money," she said, "and we anticipate that will happen again; we really want to make sure Wisconsin farmers have their organizations apply."

These waves of assistance come after a 15-year absence of federal funding for the Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative. Krome said they're hoping to regain the momentum for this practice from previous decades. The application deadline is May 26. Benefits linked with managed grazing include improved soil health and carbon sequestration.

In northwestern Wisconsin, dairy farmer Kevin Mahalko has been doing managed grazing on his land for nearly 30 decades. He said it has allowed his operation to survive difficult stretches, including drought. And it keeps his expenses lower.

"The cow is doing more of the work," he said, "and using fencing instead of as much equipment, it cuts down on a lot of repairs and maintenance and diesel fuel."

Krome said expanding these education networks can especially help beginning farmers as technology improves, with things such as electric fences for moving livestock.

"That technology, and others that are emerging, has made it a much less expensive investment than many, many approaches to farming," she said.