Some sins against the land can be masked over with deep tillage, chemical inputs, and, when all else fails, moving dirt around with heavy equipment. But you can’t fool a good soil probe. For Mike and Jennifer Rupprecht, that revelation came when a retired soil scientist sunk his equipment deep into a couple spots on their farm in a hilly part of southeastern Minnesota’s Winona County. When the scientist probed one low spot on the Rupprechts’ land, he found roughly three feet of black topsoil had collected there.

“That black soil on the bottom was coming from up higher in the fields as a result of years of poor soil stewardship and poor farming practices,” recalled Mike. “When I saw that I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to do everything I can to keep these steeper parts of my farm in pasture all the time, just no tillage ever. Because we can’t have soil moving like that.’ ”

The unearthing of damage resulting from past practices reinforced the Rupprechts’ decision in the 1980s to break up some of their fields into paddocks, plant grasses and forbs, and rotationally graze cattle. On an August evening over three decades later, Mike and Jennifer were standing on one of their hillsides with around a dozen other farmers, checking out the long-term impacts of keeping their promise to the land.

Their cow-calf beef herd was grazing lush forage on soil that had soaked up and stored the copious amounts of precipitation that had fallen, sometimes in torrents, during the spring and summer of 2025. In one pasture was a Civilian Conservation Corps stone structure erected in the 1930s in an attempt to control the erosion that was rampant in this part of the Whitewater River watershed in those days. Today, the Rupprechts’ use of soil building practices like rotational grazing and organic crop production have made this structure, and others like it on the farm, mute monuments to an almost forgotten chapter in soil conservation history.

The farmers were gathered on the Rupprechts’ Earth-Be-Glad farm for a Land Stewardship Project Soil Health Hub meeting. As we described in the first three installments in this series, this past growing season LSP facilitated a series of Hub meetings on farms across southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa. These were not open-to-the-public field days. Rather, these were opportunities for livestock and crop producers to take part in the kind of private peer-to-peer learning required to step out of the mainstream and build a farming system based on living, biologically rich soil. These meetings involved building a level of trust so that folks are comfortable sharing failures and doubts, as well as successes.

For soil health practices to be truly sustainable, they must be economically viable, environmentally beneficial, and socially supported. As the first blog in this series illustrates, LSP’s Soil Health Hubs attempt to provide a forum for farmers to fortify these three “legs of the stool.” The second blog in this series described how, without the social component of the stool solidly in place, the other two legs have little chance of remaining balanced long-term. The third installment focused on the economic aspect of striking a sustainable balance.

In the fourth and final installment in this series, we look at how farmers are using the ecological health of their land not only as an indicator of whether they are on the right path when it comes to building soil health in an economically viable manner, but also as a way to make farming a little more enjoyable.

Gauging Progress

“I love the way the animals make the farm work,” said Mike Rupprecht while standing at the top of a sloping field that has been in nothing but grass since 1984. He explained that raising beef on perennial forages not only helps produce a healthy product for their direct-market customers, but works well with their organic crop rotation. The cattle spread fertility around the farm via their manure and urine and help break up weed pest cycles, all while building the soil’s organic carbon levels. “We’re imitating nature,” Mike told the farmers gathered for the Hub meeting he and Jennifer were hosting.

But imitating nature isn’t just about doing right by the world beneath one’s feet. During the 1990s, the Rupprechts were among a group of farm families that were part of the Monitoring Project, an initiative facilitated by LSP that brought together livestock graziers, scientists, natural resource professionals, and others to develop a set of indicators for measuring the sustainability of a farm from an economic and quality of life point of view, as well as from an environmental standpoint.

It’s not surprising that measuring soil health was a key component of this initiative. But it was a different sustainability indicator that generated the most excitement among the participating farm families. With the help of Tex Hawkins, who at the time was a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Rupprechts and other Monitoring Team members learned to identify grassland songbirds. It turns out species such as bobolinks, dickcissels, and meadowlarks are what ornithologists call “obligate species,” meaning they require a certain amount of good quality, diverse grassland habitat in order to survive and thrive. And because so much grassland has been plowed up and planted to row crops in recent decades, grassland songbirds are some of the most threatened birds in North America.

What the Rupprechts and other farmer-members of the Monitoring Team learned was that the more grassland songbirds they saw on their land, the higher the probability that they were managing it in a way that grassland habitats were thriving. And the more high-quality grasslands they had, the better their beef and dairy cattle did. For the Rupprechts, an equation emerged: more bobolinks = better beef. Once that connection was made, they started to take steps to improve life for their farm’s feathered residents, by, for example, adjusting grazing and mowing schedules to accommodate nesting seasons.

But noting the presence of birds also boosted another aspect of the farms’ sustainability: it made doing chores more enjoyable. “The Monitoring Team meetings often got sidetracked by farmers engaging in good-natured one-upmanship on bird sightings,” recalled Hawkins recently.

Hawkins and the other natural resource professionals participating in the Monitoring Project were thrilled that farmers were able to link healthy wildlife habitat with a healthy bottom line. Such a link was highlighted this year at a June field day hosted by Hoosier Ridge Ranch, which is just up the road from the Rupprechts. Owned and operated by Eric and Michelle Heins, Hoosier Ridge raises a diversity of crops and uses adaptive rotational grazing to produce livestock. Water running off this hilltop farm feeds three watersheds, and the Heins are very mindful of how they can produce food while building the kind of soil health and diversity that supports a healthy hydrological cycle and the environment in general.

“We want to be conservationists as well,” said Eric during the field day.

In recent years, the farmers have spread that working land conservation ethic beyond the borders of their farm. Since 2019, cattle being raised on Hoosier Ridge Ranch have had a chance to browse the forage available across the road in a reclaimed 15-acre prairie that’s being managed by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR). It’s been a win-win: the DNR land provides low-cost forage for the Heins while giving their own pastures needed rest, which improves soil health and supports grassland bird habitat on the home place.

DNR habitat experts, for their part, have found rotating the cattle through the prairie reduces the presence of invasive species and is helping build the soil to the point where it can support deep-rooted native species of plants.

“There’s definitely more diversity in there since we started grazing it,” said Christine Johnson, the wildlife manager for the DNR’s Whitewater Wildlife Management Area, during Hoosier Ridge’s field day. She’s been working with Eric and Michelle to coordinate the rotations in a way that they balance what’s best for the habitat as well as what works for the farmers. “It’s definitely moving in the right direction,” she said of the prairie.

Making Room for Giggle Birds

That theme of linking a successful farm with a healthy environment emerged repeatedly during LSP’s series of Soil Health Hub meetings this year. For example, one of the farmers attending the Rupprecht Hub meeting in August was Leslea Hodgson, who, along with her husband, Brad, raises grass-fed beef south of the Rupprechts in Minnesota’s Fillmore County. The Hodgsons took LSP’s Farm Beginnings course 25 years ago and through that experience learned about the Rupprechts’ grass-based beef business; they then decided to pattern their own business and production model after Earth-Be-Glad’s.

But it wasn’t just the fact that the Rupprechts ran a livestock enterprise based on rotational grazing that appealed to the Hodgsons. As the couple explained during a Soil Health Hub meeting they hosted at their farm, Root Prairie Galloways, in late June, Mike and Jennifer’s commitment to linking environmental sustainability with food production also appealed to them.

“Our goal was always to farm with nature, to improve the soil, improve everything we can improve here, and do it in the right way biodynamically,” said Leslea as around 15 area farmers gathered in the Hodgsons’ on-farm cabinetmaking shop.

Across the road from the Hodgson farmstead, an exposed face of limestone full of cracks and cavities was a reminder that this is country underlaid with karst geology, which means groundwater is extremely vulnerable to being polluted by nitrogen-based fertilizer and other contaminates. The Hodgson farm is in the Root River watershed, which is on the receiving end of eroded soil and chemical runoff. That pollution eventually makes its way to the Mississippi River downstream.

During their Hub meeting, Brad and Leslea took participants on a pasture walk that showed off how they are intermingling the domestic and the wild to produce meat. At one point, the Hodgsons guided the group through a 20-year-old stand of big bluestem, a deep-rooted native prairie grass that builds soil and provides good wildlife habitat. The stand was above the knees and thick enough to hide a badger hole, which Leslea stumbled into at one point. Native grasses aren’t always known for being of top quality when it comes to livestock forage, but the Hub participants were impressed with this stand, which, as a warm-season grass, would produce particularly well in deep summer, when domesticated cool-season pasture grasses tend to go into a slump.

“I don’t know if anyone would be interested in grazing this, but we are,” said Leslea.

“This is a beautiful stand,” said Chad Crowley, who grazes and milks dairy cows near the Mississippi River town of La Crescent, Minn. “I would graze my dairy cows on this.”

The Hodgsons were visibly pleased that their grazing paddocks were in good enough shape to impress other livestock producers. But during the rest of the tour, it was clear they also wanted to show off the farm’s ability to produce a bit of wildness. As the Hub participants walked the farm, dickcissels, cedar waxwings, red-winged blackbirds, an eastern phoebe, and a mourning dove were calling. Barn swallows were swooping overhead, snagging bugs out of the air.

Then, while Brad was moving the cow-calf herd of American Galloways into a new paddock, a black-and-white bobolink, or “giggle bird” as one Hub participant called it, flashed through the grass on the other side of a field road separating pastures. It perched on a tall grass stem and emitted its bubbling call, which some have compared to the sounds R2-D2 makes in the Star Wars movies. Other farmers shared stories of seeing bobolinks in their grazing paddocks; Leslea was ecstatic — here was a visual and audio indication that their livestock production system was working well with at least one aspect of nature.

The Hodgsons explained that striking such a balance doesn’t happen by accident. Leslea calls what they do “pivot grazing” — they might go out with a plan in mind for a certain pasture and it turns out nesting bobolinks have shown up or an abnormally hot, dry period or torrential rains enter the picture. Then it’s time for a pivot to a different grazing plan. Or, as one of the other participants in the Hub meeting put it, to do some “stick shift” grazing, rather than relying on an automatic transmission, so to speak, to move forward.

In fact, there was one pasture the Hodgsons hadn’t done anything with since earlier in the spring because bobolinks were nesting there. “We do try and accommodate the wildlife as much as possible,” said Brad. “It’s part of the ecosystem. They’re depositing nutrients and transferring it around — we’ve just got to incorporate everything to work together.”

Such an adjustment in the name of the birds is not as much of an economic sacrifice as it might first appear. Remember: farmers like the Rupprechts have found that more grassland birds means more grass, which results in better livestock productivity. The Hodgsons’ pasture that was left ungrazed during the spring could serve as a source of reserve forage later in the growing season, all while it builds the kind of soil health that can pay dividends in future years.

After the cattle were moved, the pasture walk continued, during which the Hub participants carried on a wide-ranging conversation on a variety of topics: the merits of clipping grasses to maintain palatability, watering systems, weed control, pasture seed mixes, the difference between managing forage for beef cattle and dairy cows, breed selection, soil amendments, length of rotations, dealing with sacrifice areas in muddy conditions, good vendors for equipment.

And they also talked about the joy, while moving fence, of seeing and hearing a good-natured black-and-white bird, giggling its way through a sea of grass.

Brian DeVore is LSP’s managing editor. You can read the first installment in this series here, the second installment here, and the third here. For more information on the Soil Health Hubs, contact LSP’s Alex Romano, Shea-Lynn Ramthun, or Sarah Wescott. For more on LSP’s Soil Builders’ Network, click here.