Playing De(er)Fence
May 6, 2009
Last week we encircled our largest production field with a permanent deer fence. I don’t like fences. They fracture the landscape and obstruct our goal of creating permeability between ecosystem and farm. Yet we had little alternative.
Sunnyside is a paradise for white-tailed deer. Just the other night, I counted 31 munching away in our pastures. Many transit back and forth from Shenandoah National Park, our neighbor to the north.
These animals do enormous damage. They devour our fruits and vegetables (in addition to flowers, shrubs and young trees). They spread Lyme disease, a serious and increasing threat to all who work and live here. They menace our vehicles – the market truck barely missed one leaving the farm on a recent Sunday morning.
Lethal control isn’t really an option. Not that we oppose hunting. In fact, we allow a friend and his father to hunt the farm each fall and enjoy the venison they provide us. It’s just that we’d need to kill deer at an unimaginable clip to make a dent. That would likely prove neither sustainable nor safe, to say nothing of the horrible spectacle it would create.
Our farm’s size and the dispersed nature of our best growing areas render many other options – repellants, dogs, sound machines, etc. – ineffective or impractical. So we do what we can: permanent fencing where the costs justify it, temporary (and marginally effective) fencing elsewhere, cages for our most valuable trees, Deet and high boots for the ticks, cautious driving on the roads. In the end, we’re playing defense and trying to prevent the other team from running up the score.
Contrary to how it may seem, this battle isn’t so much nature versus agriculture. It more accurately signals an ecosystem out of whack. In addition to the havoc they cause on the farm, deer are destroying saplings in our ecological restoration areas, gobbling up our forest understory and otherwise degrading habitat for other native plants and animals. Simply put, their current superabundance is denuding the landscape.
Unfortunately they are not alone. Many species, including aggressive interlopers from other parts of the world, are spreading rapidly thanks to a nasty cocktail of human activities: eliminating predators, fragmenting the environment, warming the climate.
In the end, the cumulative effect is to inhibit diversity and reduce complexity in the world around us. That spells trouble for both nature and agriculture. And so we must resist – keep playing defense – even if it means erecting more deer fences.
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