Wild Farm Alliance

Long Branch is also featured in "Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches," a book that identifies models and resources to help farmers incorporate conservation practices in their farms and watersheds.

The Wild Farm Alliance was established by a national group of wildlands proponents and ecological farming advocates who share a concern for the land and its wild and human inhabitants.

Our mission is to promote a healthy, viable agriculture that helps protect and restore wild Nature.

To make our food systems sustainable in the 21st century, we envision a world in which community-based, ecologically managed farms and ranches are seamlessly integrated into landscapes that accommodate the full range of native species and ecological processes.

WFA Platform

Recognizing that:

• the current rate of species extinction signifies an unprecedented biodiversity crisis.
• industrial agriculture is a primary cause of species losses and a devastating threat to sustainable family-scale farms and ranches.
• protected and interconnected wildlands are essential to assuring biological diversity and sustaining healthy rural landscapes.

We believe:

• agriculture must be conducted in ways that are compatible with preservation of native plants and animals.
• sustainable family farms and ranches nourish healthy human communities and help safeguard natural communities.
• the current biodiversity crisis calls for a new conservation ethic that promotes ecological recovery within agricultural lands and across the entire landscape.

We acknowledge:

• healthy ecosystems provide us with many life-giving services, including pollination, insect pest control, nutrient cycling, clean water, and erosion control.
• the need of farmers to succeed economically while farming ecologically.
• the right of farmers and indigenous peoples to maintain control over sustainable food production.
• the right of consumers to know how and where their food is grown, and the responsibility of consumers to support ecologically sound agriculture.

We support:

• farming practices that accommodate wild habitat and native species, including large carnivores and wild fish.
• local and regional food and fiber systems that boost rural economies.
• agricultural practices that strive to eliminate the use of environmentally toxic chemicals and contamination of soil and water resources.
• locally adapted crops and animals that are not genetically engineered.
• existing community-based efforts to create a continental wildlands network in which large protected areas are connected by wildlife movement corridors and are complemented by ecologically managed farms and forests.

For more information:

• http://www.wildfarmalliance.org