Tolkkinen: No shrubs, no native grasses. Was I really driving through southern Minnesota?

SOUTHERN MINNESOTA - On a May drive through southern Minnesota I was profoundly disturbed by what I saw.

For miles upon miles of country road, black soil stretched as far as I could see, an ocean of land seemingly devoid of life. No shrubs, no native grasses, no grasses at all, and here and there a farmhouse surrounded by a windbreak of trees. The land had been worked and sprayed with chemicals and refined to where only two things are allowed to live: Corn or soybeans. No milkweed or coneflower, no big bluestem or switchgrass, none of the native plants that for millennia fed an array of wildlife and people.

From Morris to Windom, from Mankato to Albert Lea, and north of Red Wing, a state that prides itself on its love of nature nourishes the tip of a dead zone that researchers recently compared with the Sahara Desert.

It is part of the Midwest Corn Belt, a region so bereft of life that migrating birds fly quickly over it as they would other inhospitable geographies, the researchers said.

Even summer brings no respite. While farm fields become green with corn and soybeans, many crops can poison insects that eat them, because insecticide is built into the seed. This increases crop yields and therefore profits and the farm economy, but at the cost of insects, birds, bats and other critters.

Farmers don’t want to kill birds or butterflies. Who would? Nobody markets seed or sprays saying, “Hey, this will fatten your pocketbook but by the way, you won’t see meadowlarks singing on your fenceposts anymore.”

The fenceposts are gone anyway. They were in the way of the increasingly huge farm fields.

And various farming practices do kill birds and insects, sometimes directly, sometimes by removing habitat or food source. From 1970 to 2020, the U.S. and Canada lost nearly a third of their birds. Grassland birds such as bobolinks have seen even steeper declines.

Farmers, or, as they’re called nowadays, agricultural producers, are simply guilty of something many of us do. It’s hard to see the bigger picture and easier to focus on what immediately affects you. In their case, yield, profit margins, and what the crops look like to neighboring farmers. It’s about paying off bank loans and trading up for more efficient equipment and thinking about how to hand over the farm to the next generation. It’s finding a guy to repair your tractor and forking over thousands of dollars for an engine overhaul. It’s about being surrounded by people who also grow or market corn and maybe don’t ever think about why we don’t see as many butterflies nowadays.

It’s not just the farmers, either. It’s all of us. A fraction of Minnesota corn feeds the world, while the rest goes into biofuels, plastics, sweeteners, and animal feed. Corn ends up in carpeting and shoes, in crayons and diapers and cosmetics. Sorbitol comes from corn and so does the binder in some inks. You can find corn in certain rechargeable batteries.

Our wants and our needs are replacing the wild world with its web of life.

Last year, corn was grown on 8.2 million acres in Minnesota. The value of corn exports has more than doubled since 2005, now about $1.69 billion annually, according to the Minnesota Corn Growers Association. It’s not the state’s top export, but it’s still significant. Soybean exports are tops, with $2.4 billion exported annually.

In this world, setting aside even 1% of land for monarch butterflies and meadowlarks is seen as an impediment, much less the 5% that earns farms a Bee Better certification or the 30% dreamed of by Mace Vaughan, director of Xerces Pollinator Conservation and Agricultural Biodiversity Program.

There are farmers willing to set aside some land, often marginal acreage that doesn’t produce well anyway. But it’s not even on the radar for others.

So that is why we see the endless seas of black dirt in spring and fall, the time of year when migrating birds most depend on this land for rest, seeds, nectar, and insects.

On my drive, I saw more trees and gardens in cities and towns than I did in farm country. City people also spray insecticides, but they love their trees and parks, and many are starting to plant pollinator gardens.

It may be that some critters prefer city to country.

The state bee, the rusty-patched bumblebee, whose population has crashed just since the 1990s, is spotted more often in urban Minnesota than in rural, including in the Twin Cities. That might be because there are simply more people in urban areas to report seeing them, says Elaine Evans, a University of Minnesota bee expert. But it might be that urban areas have become a better habitat.

“We are a ways away from being able to answer ‘Why’ as we are still trying to see if the pattern of association with urban areas is actually a real one,” she wrote to me.

When my husband and I started small-scale farming with his parents in 2010, we decided to forgo chemicals of any kinds. We left strips around every field for insects.

We didn’t get as much grain from an acre as the big, efficient operations. We made less money. Some years, we were downright poor, if you consider wealth to be only about money.

When we watch the fireflies at night, and the bees zip around the clover, we feel pretty wealthy.