Wine has given us a useful word for thinking about food: terroir.
At its simplest, terroir is the idea that a food or drink reflects the place where it was produced. Soil matters. Rainfall matters. Temperature matters. The plants that grow there matter. The farmer’s decisions matter.
We usually talk about terroir in connection with vineyards because two vineyards growing the same grape can produce noticeably different wines. The difference is not simply the grape variety. It is the combination of climate, soil, topography, biology, and management that makes one place different from another.
We believe the same idea applies to farming.
And once you begin thinking seriously about place, even something as ordinary as mowing a fence row becomes worth reconsidering.
At Tyner Pond Farm in Central Indiana, many fence rows are being left unmowed this year. The decision began with a simple question: What are we improving by mowing them?
There are places where mowing is necessary. Farmers need access to fences and gates. Vegetation cannot block roads or interfere with equipment. Visibility matters around entrances and intersections. Certain unwanted plants sometimes need to be controlled.
But there are also miles of agricultural edges where mowing has become more habit than necessity.
When there is no practical reason to cut an area, leaving it alone can create something increasingly scarce in modern farm country: biological variety.
The Farm Landscape Has Become More Uniform
The Indiana agricultural landscape of several generations ago was generally more complicated than the one we see today.
Fields tended to be smaller and were frequently separated by fence rows, pasture, waterways, lanes, woodlots, and uncultivated corners. Farmers were not necessarily creating these areas for wildlife. They were simply part of how farms were organized.
As farming became more efficient, equipment became larger and many neighboring fields were combined. Fence rows were removed. Brushy corners disappeared. More of each acre could be planted, and farm edges were increasingly kept short and clean.
That made sense from an efficiency standpoint.
But it also simplified the landscape.
A field of one crop bordered by another field of one crop contains far fewer types of habitat than a landscape containing pasture, tall grasses, flowering plants, shrubs, trees, water, and crop ground.
That distinction matters because agriculture does not operate separately from biology. Agriculture is biology.
Biodiversity Is Part of Food Security
Food security is often discussed in terms of production: acres planted, pounds of beef produced, bushels harvested, or calories available.
Those numbers matter, but long-term food production also depends on the biological system supporting them.
Different plants have different root structures. Some tolerate drought better than others. Some respond differently to excessive rain or heat. Insects pollinate plants and provide food for other animals. Birds eat insects and seeds. Fungi, bacteria, and other organisms beneath the soil help cycle nutrients and decompose organic material.
A more biologically diverse system has more possible responses when conditions change.
That led to another question at Tyner Pond Farm: Can a healthy agricultural system really have too much biodiversity?
There are obviously invasive species, diseases, and destructive pests that farmers do not want to encourage. But when we are talking about useful and native plants, insects, birds, wildlife, and soil organisms, the larger problem across much of modern agriculture is not excessive diversity.
It is simplification.
That realization changed the way the farm looked at fence rows.
What Happens When the Mower Stays Parked?
An unmowed agricultural edge begins to look different very quickly.
Plants reach different heights. Some flower. Others produce seed. Insects use those plants throughout the season. Taller vegetation creates cover for birds and small mammals. Different layers of vegetation provide different feeding and nesting opportunities.
None of that prevents the pasture beside the fence row from producing food.
The cattle can still graze.
The fence still separates paddocks.
The farm still functions.
The difference is that the narrow strip along the edge is allowed to perform another job at the same time.
This is one of the places where the idea of terroir becomes especially interesting.
Terroir is not simply the soil directly beneath the animal or crop being raised. A place includes the surrounding plant community, insects, birds, water, trees, weather patterns, and countless biological relationships occurring across the landscape.
The edge of a pasture is therefore part of that place too.
Cattle Have Already Taught Us to Value Variety
Tyner Pond Farm has spent years becoming more comfortable with biological variation inside its pastures.
The goal is not to grow one perfect grass species.
Cattle encounter grasses, clovers, broadleaf plants, seed heads, and other forage. Different paddocks grow differently depending on soil, rainfall, temperature, and how long they have been resting since the previous grazing.
The cattle have also been selected over many years for their ability to thrive within that variation.
The farm sometimes describes the ideal animal as one that “eats like a goat”—a curious, adaptable grazer willing to use a wide variety of plants rather than waiting for one preferred forage.
Once diversity became desirable inside the pasture, it became difficult to explain why uniformity should automatically become the goal at the fence.
Indiana’s Pheasants and Quail Show What Was Lost
The history of upland birds in Indiana offers a useful example of what agricultural simplification can mean.
Ring-necked pheasants are not native to Indiana, but after their introduction they became closely associated with parts of the state’s farm country. Their populations were much larger during the middle of the twentieth century, when the landscape contained more small fields, pasture, weedy areas, fence rows, and other permanent cover.
Bobwhite quail are native to Indiana and depend on a mixture of grasses, low-growing vegetation, shrubby cover, and transitions between different types of habitat.
As farms became more uniform, many of those areas disappeared.
No farmer removed all of Indiana’s bird habitat in one decision. It happened gradually. A fence row was removed here. A brushy corner was cleaned up there. A larger field replaced several smaller ones. Another edge was mowed.
Thousands of individually reasonable decisions eventually produced a very different landscape.
That history raises an important question about what farmers mean when they call land productive.
A fence row may not produce something that can be sold by the pound or bushel, but it can still perform useful work. Flowering plants support insects. Seeds provide food. Tall vegetation provides cover. Perennial roots protect soil. A strip of vegetation can allow wildlife to travel between larger areas of habitat.
Those functions are harder to measure than crop yield, but they are still part of the productivity of a place.
Finding Local Partners Who Understand Habitat
While exploring this subject, Tyner Pond Farm recently learned more about the Pheasants Forever organization working in Hancock County.
That is particularly interesting because their work extends beyond pheasants. Improving upland habitat can also benefit quail, songbirds, pollinators, and other wildlife that depend on grasslands and field edges.
The farm hopes to learn more about their work and look for opportunities to coordinate.
Between Tyner Pond Farm’s own acreage and the partner land incorporated into its grazing system, there are many miles of pasture edges, fence rows, waterways, and small areas that do not need to be intensively managed.
Some of those places may be far more valuable when managed for habitat than when repeatedly mowed.
There is also something encouraging about the potential partnership. A cattle farmer may approach a landscape thinking about forage and soil. A hunter may be thinking about pheasants or quail. A birder may be watching meadowlarks or kestrels. Someone else may be focused on pollinators.
Different interests can lead to the same conclusion: the biological health of the place matters.
Terroir Is More Than Soil
This is why we think the idea of terroir deserves a much larger place in how Americans think about food.
The character of a farm is not determined by a certification or a feeding claim alone.
It comes from where the farm is located, how much rain it receives, the soils beneath it, the plants growing there, the genetics of the animals, the farmer’s management decisions, and the biological community sharing that land.
Central Indiana is its own place. It has deep soils, substantial annual rainfall, long spring and fall growing periods, summer heat, winter cold, and plant communities adapted to those conditions.
The food produced there should reflect those realities rather than attempt to erase them.
Leaving a fence row unmowed is a very small management decision. It will not transform an ecosystem by itself.
But it reflects a larger change in thinking.
Instead of asking how uniformly we can manage a farm, we are becoming more interested in how much biological complexity the farm can support while continuing to produce food.
At Tyner Pond Farm, that now means asking a simple question before starting the mower:
What will mowing improve here?
Sometimes there is a clear answer, and the area gets mowed.
When there isn't, the plants are increasingly being allowed to grow.
The result may look less tidy.
But it may be a better reflection of the place.
And good food begins with a place.
0 comments