JONNAH PERKINS

THE BACKYARD STORIES presented by Protect Our Winters and Trail Runner Magazine
A podcast and web-colum that features athletes, farmers, and climate activists in their own backyards. through this project we explore urgent topics like wildfire, drought, the role snowpack plays in agriculture, air quality, decentralized food systems, revitalizing farming communities, food sovereignty, and raising kids in the anthropocentric epoch, and how political action is vital to protect wild places and regenerate our food system.

The Havasupai tribe, with many tribal members living within the Grand Canyon, have taken tremendous leadership in protecting their home as well as amplifying the message around the greater threats that our nation faces from uranium mining. Len, Mylo, and I had the honor of interviewing two tribal leaders to talk about why the designation is such an important political lever in protecting water sources, wild game, and the dignity of their relationship to the land.

PATAGONIA: Transplanting Traditions
“I have a memory of my mom touching the ground. She told me, ‘This is alive, you can touch it, you can see it, you can smell it, you can feel it is alive.’ I always remember her when I touch my hands to the soil.” Rodrigo Cala has had his hands in the dirt since he was a child, growing up in a small-scale agricultural community near Mexico City.

BESIDE MAGAZINE: Of Sheep and Sandalwood
Along with their livestock, the Europeans who colonized Hawaii also brought destructive grazing practices. They cleared forests and established aggressive grasses that could support large herds of cattle, sheep, and goats, to the detriment of the native ecosystem. For generations, the Háloa Áina property was owned and managed by cattle ranchers, who subdivided the acreage into paddocks built from lava. In the time since cowboys stopped grazing cattle there, feral sheep have moved in.

CIVIL EATS: Fishermen and Scientists Probe Phosphate’s Connection to Florida Red Tides
Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are the “Big Three” elements—often referred to as NPK for their chemical symbols—used in synthetic fertilizers to promote plant growth. Commodity farmers often work within razor-slim margins in an economic model that is based on global markets, making investment into reducing fertilizer use and improving soil through regenerative practices unfeasible for many.

The upcoming farm bill is the only mechanism to expand funding for agriculture conservation programs, which are aimed, in part, at reducing nutrient runoff. By gathering data around the damage facing coastal ecosystems, Kelble and Streeter are hoping to create political urgency in connecting the dots between dependence on fertilizer among land-based farmers and the resulting impacts on the ocean.

WHALEBONE MAGAZINE: In the Eye of the Storm
Just as the farmers, sailors, and intellectuals of the ancient world were mapping the night sky and tracking weather patterns to predict the next cataclysm, modern meteorologists are using computer science to tell us more quickly and accurately when the next weather event, or weather pattern, will pull us back into the grips of Mother Nature herself, whether that means a swell worthy of getting on a plane to Mavericks or a storm that will pound a coast. While Chris can’t tell us that everything is going to be okay, he can say that through data modeling there is hope for the future if we can do it together.

TRAIL RUNNER MAGAZINE: Flattening Mountains
Minerals extracted from the Appalachian Range are part of soil fertility in food production all over the world. Closer to home, the irony of trucking potassium-rich potash from Tennessee to Wisconsin to grow corn, then having it wash down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico to worsen its hypoxic zone, is a central criticism of mine as an environmental writer. Like so many trail runners, I have spent hundreds of hours getting lost in wild spaces, only to look the other way whenever it comes to understanding natural resource mismanagement. Coal mining’s history of environmental and human exploitation in West Virginia is not underreported. But as I learned more about mountaintop removal, I felt an unsettling sense of how close we can be to ecological destruction, yet too swept up in our sport and lives to pay attention.

MAD AGRICULTURE: Potatoland, Wisconsin
Five winters ago, my husband, Jesse, and I would spend our lunch breaks lying on the floor of the farmhouse where he grew up. I would ask him, “If we could make this farm into anything, what would it be?” As logs snapped in the wood burning stove, the duck canvas of my overalls would get so hot that the metal grommets would sting my skin through my long johns. That winter, we were getting ready for our final year as a CSA and entering a new era in the life of the farm.

In 2019, after 24 years as a community supported agriculture farm, one of the largest of its kind in the nation, Vermont Valley Community Farm would no longer be growing food for the greater Madison, Wisconsin area. Farms are relationships between farmer, land, and business; and sometimes the dynamics need to shift for the relationship to stay strong.

PATAGONIA: Sowing Trust
Agriculture in the southwestern corner of Wisconsin is often like fitting a square peg into a round hole. Much of the Midwest has over a foot of black dirt, but this region in Wisconsin is much more erodible and not well suited for “one-size-fits-all” commodity crops, like corn and soy. Despite this fact, local farmers have had few to no economic incentives to grow crops—like small grains—that thrive in this particular biome. With a community-forward mission, the Wepkings are not only creating a market for the 20 varieties of small grains, dry beans and open-pollinated corn they grow on the farm but also providing an artisanal processing facility and outlet for other regional grain farmers—a community milling hub.

THE DRAKE MAGAZINE: Cattle and Brookies
Some 10,000 years ago, glaciers formed during the last Ice Age were retreating from the Upper Midwest. While portions of Wisconsin were scraped into the rolling landscape found across much of the state, a roughly 24,000-square-mile piece of land at the intersection of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa was left untouched. Broad ridge tops with shallow soil, river-formed valleys, and steep, craggy ravines make the Driftless Area a geological anomaly. For millennia, this was fertile brooktrout habitat, but in an evolutionary blink of an eye, these waters became threatened by modern agriculture. Across this region of sandstone and limestone bedrock, there is more than 6,000 miles of trout water, with about 1,300 miles of public access. But many of these creeks continue to compete with agriculture to survive.

CIVIL EATS: In the Arid Southwest, Growing Seeds for Climate Resiliency
Working to reintroduce varieties that have evolved in arid climates is part of Parker’s approach to working with—rather than against—her region’s often-harsh growing conditions. Leading with the intricate relationship between weather patterns and crop needs has led her to intervene as little as possible. “Conventional breeding is trying to bend nature to what they want, but what we are doing is looking for and pulling out the qualities the plant might already have,” Parker says.

THE DRAKE: That’s So Metal
Whether it’s ice, boat, or shore fishing, Nathan takes a deeply granular interest in being a student of pike, always observing and learning the ways of these carnivores. “In the spring on the lakes around here, pike will pluck ducklings right off of the surface. They’re apex predators for sure—they keep the lakes balanced.” When I asked Nathan about any distant destinations that he fishes, he told me that he mostly stays close to home, partly because of his birds and his work in the family business, but also because he doesn’t feel he needs to leave in order to find good fishing. “I just like the stream in front of my house, a few of the feeder streams, and the lakes. There are a lot of hardcore fishermen around here who’ve never fished any of the lakes because they think there aren’t any fish in them. But how would they know without trying?”

MAD AGRICULTURE: Farming with Water, Not Against It
Water always wins, eventually. Moving water, holding water, stopping water, and redirecting water is an integral part of agriculture. Humans have shaped their lives around their capacity to control water. In my region of the Midwest, the challenge is both too much water and not enough — often in the same growing season. When I first moved to rural southwest Wisconsin in 2007 to work on my boyfriend’s family farm, I had no concept of what I now know as resource management — the moving and shaping of land, water, minerals, plants, animals and wind.

EDIBLE MADISON: Seed Work is Slow Work
After meeting at a Ho-Chunk food-tasting competition, Jessika and Elena began supporting one another through seed saving and food sourcing. Jessika remembers how Elena and her daughter, Zoe, helped her plant a quarter acre of corn, squash and sunflowers. “Seed work is slow work. As much as you want to be able to grow acres and acres of something, when you start off with a handful of seeds, that takes a long time to get it to that population size. While I was working for the tribe, I had put a call out for anybody who could help me do this hand seeding. The only person who kept showing up was Elena and she would bring Zoe along. Zoe already had caught the seed bug, whether she knew it or not.”

MODERN HUNTSMAN: Red Desert Rangeland
Mark Carter's scrappy childhood, driving cattle and running a ranch alongside his dad and brother, created a hardened ap­proach in other areas of his life. Many people know Mark more for his career as a pro snowboarder than for the work he does pushing big animals through the high desert. ''I'm a rancher in the summer and then I'm a snowboarder in the winter. It's all just navigating the natural environment and it's very intuitive for me to just be outside all day. This is what I've been doing my whole life. I didn't have the best snowboarding gear growing up, and I'm used to being cold on a horse, but that was good because then I just learn how to tough it out. There's no bad weather, just weak people."

SAVORY INSTITUTE X THOUSAND HILLS LIFE TIME GRAZED: A Traceable Future
A short film about the connection between regenerative, grass-fed beef production and a traceable leather supply chain. Through the partnership between Savory Institute, Thousand Hills Lifetime Grazed and Timberland, we can see a path toward a more sustainable future, while supporting rural economies.

MODERN HUNTSMAN: Cultivating Perennialism
The realization that humans are a collaborative part of nature, and that we cannot slam our ecosystems into submission, is the great humbling lesson of our modern regenerative movement. This production philosophy can be applied to any micro-region, varying in implementation depending on the natural landscape.

HIHEYHELLO MAGAZINE: Reverse Engineering a Life Outside
I’ve poured through old pictures, scrolled through early Instagram posts, scoured more than a decade of Facebook musings looking for the impetus, the beginning of the quest for more depth, more life. It’s interesting how hashtags can be like a trail of breadcrumbs to our most potent selves: #runwild, #runfree, #wildandfree, #selfpropelled, #eatlocal, #supportlocal, #eatthefarm. As if each hashtag was a little prayer to my future self to stay the course even if the course is unmarked and uncharted.

LA SPORTIVA NORTH AMERICA Farm Life
This focus on what we can source from our own micro-region makes me curious about what other parts of the country are producing for their communities. As we all turn inward, we should challenge ourselves to see how much we can sustain ourselves from our local food economy and other small business.

RANGE MAGAZINE: Wild Foods: The Conscious Omnivore’s Search For Meaning In the Hunt
After years of farming, I had realized that there is no such thing as a farm free of animal death. For every acre of forest that is cleared, countless animals lose their lives or suffer habitat loss. In running tractors or implements across the earth, animals die. Farmers trap and kill pests. There is no food production without death, so why not meet the animal in the wild?

RANGE MAGAZINE: Chasing Wild: An Organic Farmer Harnesses the Power of Trail Running
Weaving up from the valley floor to a clearing in the forest, I see the sun is starting to change the sky as it shifts from black to the deepest navy to blush pink and every mauve and lavender in between. The sound of popping and snapping comes from a dark thicket on my left and a family of whitetail deer stares into the cyclops eye of my headlamp beam before bounding away. I accept every opportunity to run with wild creatures, so I take off after them on a parallel trail. I’m envious as the deer leap with an animal athleticism I will never know.

TRAIL RUNNER MAGAZINE Moms on the Run
There’s a breed of trail runner not only finishing out front at nationally competitive races, they’re raising their children along the way. The challenge of being a mom may not lend itself to the elite runner’s life, but this bold class of women is rewriting what it means to be a mother athlete.

“People will judge you and you need to ignore that judgment. The outside pressure of what motherhood looks like doesn’t apply. You just need to do what’s right for you and your family. The longevity of my running is in large part due to taking time off for my pregnancies.