From the Margins: Wilding the Edges of Agriculture

By Omar de Kok-Mercado, MS and Dan Kane, PhD

Across the rural landscape, fragmentation is the norm. Protected areas and remnant habitats sit amidst vast fields of monoculture row crops, hay fields, and pastures. Crisscrossing all that are powerlines, railways, and roads. These features divide the land and disrupt the natural flows of life. Fragmentation reduces the quality and continuity of habitat, making it harder for plants, animals, and pollinators to thrive. But, within these landscapes there are abundant opportunities.

Marginal field edges, flood-prone areas, and low-yield patches are often subprofitable and require high management costs. This includes heavily trafficked areas, end rows, field margins, etc. When restored or reconstructed with perennials, these areas have the potential to become high-functioning habitat without reducing overall farm profitability. Stack the intention of connectivity and they do more than support life. They begin to stitch together a larger ecological whole that supports agriculture and the broader ecosystem.

At Mad Agriculture our mission is to create a regenerative revolution in agriculture, transforming it into a system that heals the land, supports farmers, and fosters a deeper connection between people and the Earth. Mad Agriculture’s Wilding effort invites agriculture to grow beyond yield and efficiency. It calls forth a new kind of abundance that includes healthy soils, clean water, thriving biodiversity, and vibrant rural economies. It sees farmers not just as producers but as stewards and designers of biodiverse living systems.

What is Wilding?

Wilding is an innovative regenerative agriculture strategy that blends farming, conservation, and infrastructure to create interconnected, biodiverse ecological corridors. To accomplish this, Mad Agriculture has built a multi-stakeholder, long-term plan to implement Wilding, starting in the Midwest.

Wilding is not rewilding: it doesn’t aim to return land to a prehuman state but rather imagines a future where humans are active participants in ecosystem restoration and reconstruction. Where human infrastructure, agriculture, waterways, and wild spaces are woven into multifunctional systems that support life. Wilding is a framework that encompasses:

• Perennial agriculture: native prairies, silvopasture systems, and perennial crops

• Biodiverse ecological corridors: multi-functional habitat connectivity

• Ecological infrastructure: regenerative use of under-utilized industrial corridors

• Stacked land use: food, fiber, energy, and ecosystem services from the same acre

• Cultural repair: integrating Indigenous wisdom and land stewardship values

Wilding is how we begin to heal land at scale by starting at the margins.

Mad Agriculture’s commitment:

Mad Agriculture’s Wilding effort aims to work with farmers and a diverse group of stakeholders to transform 65 million acres of marginal land into thriving, multi-use biodiverse ecological corridors​ over a 50 year period. That’s roughly 20% of all cropland in the US, which has been suggested as the amount that needs to be restored to maintain ecosystem services and protect biodiversity [1] [2].

We call that 65 million acre vision the Wild Grid.

Why the Wild Grid?

Globally, agriculture has been responsible for the conversion of vast acres of native habitat. In the United States alone, hundreds of millions of acres have been cleared for row crops, feedlots, and urban expansion [3]. While some working agricultural land can provide habitat, most evidence suggests that intact wild spaces offer stronger ecological outcomes. If one of the aims of regenerative agriculture is to counter this historical pattern, it raises an important question. How?

Within the agroecology and environmental sciences, there has long been a debate about how best to balance food production with wildness. The central tension is often framed as land sparing versus land sharing.

Land sparing is the idea that we should minimize the human footprint on the landscape by intensifying agricultural production (more food per unit area), concentrating settlements, and working to create more wild spaces with minimal human presence. Proponents make compelling arguments for this vision, demonstrating that human communities can hypothetically achieve a similar standard of living on less agricultural land area if efficiency is the focus [4].

Land sharing takes a different approach. It acknowledges that true separation between people and nature is often impractical and inequitable. Instead, it proposes that we design human-dominated landscapes to support both production and ecological function. Proponents argue that agricultural intensification doesn’t universally lead to land sparing, and that land sharing is more realistic given current land use patterns and may offer broader benefits, including reduced runoff, better soil retention, and stronger cultural connection to place [5] [6].

In practice, both strategies have value. What matters most is not choosing between them, but designing with intention. Wilding aligns with the land-sharing approach while also recognizing that strategic sparing, especially of sensitive or high-value ecosystems, also plays a role.

Recent studies suggest that 20-25% of human-managed landscapes need to remain or become semi-natural habitat in order to maintain essential ecosystem services such as pollination, pest control, and soil erosion control [7] [8]. Other research has demonstrated that existing protected areas often lack the connectivity needed to support species movement in response to changing climates and that fragmentation reduces biodiversity not just at the patch scale but at the landscape scale [9] [10]. This makes biodiverse ecological corridors, not just isolated reserves, a critical piece of the solution. Habitat connectivity is key and can be achieved, in part, by wilding marginal areas in agricultural landscapes.

That’s where the Wild Grid comes in.

What makes the Wild Grid unique?

Many organizations have done meaningful work to restore habitat in agricultural landscapes, and the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program alone has retired millions of acres from production. These are critical contributions. What makes the Wild Grid distinct is our integrated approach to regeneration across ecological, economic, and infrastructural dimensions.

The Wild Grid is not about setting land aside. It is about weaving habitat into working lands and infrastructure in ways that support both wild species and farming communities. It differs from traditional conservation norms in several key ways.

First, it centers on working lands. We build habitat directly within working lands, not just on their edges or outside of them. Unlike traditional conservation efforts that focus on preserving isolated refuges, our work aims to restore the connective tissue of the landscape: inviting life back in, quite literally, until the land is singing again.

Second, it prioritizes biodiversity and thoughtful ecological design. We aim for high-diversity restoration and reconstruction. This means careful preparation of the space and starting with a diverse, regionally appropriate native seed mix, rather than simply halting cultivation and allowing succession to happen.

Third, it leverages existing infrastructure. Across the country, powerlines carry electricity to all corners, roads connect even the most remote places, and waterways permeate the landscape. These distributed and redundant corridors already offer connectivity, it’s just that they are human-centric and/or under-utilized. We work to transform these existing corridors into ecological infrastructure by layering habitat, biodiversity, and perennial systems. Rivers and their tributaries are the lowest hanging fruit.

Fourth, it supports multifunctionality. We understand that marginal land can still hold economic value for farmers. Marginal field areas are not low yielding or unprofitable every year, and removing land from production presents risks and opportunity costs for farmers. So instead of wilding land and then simply preserving it in perpetuity, we aim to keep these spaces as working land to the extent that they can be balanced with ecological goals. Existing conservation options, such as Conservation Reserve Programs, often don’t allow continued use. Integrating grazing is a great place to start. Grazing animals can help to manage grass in these areas while providing additional revenue to farmers. And if the areas are all connected, imagine being able to rotate livestock throughout a watershed without ever having to move them in a trailer.

Beginning Construction

To bring the Wild Grid into reality, we’re partnering with Whole Foods Markets on a pilot project in the Driftless Area of Southwest Wisconsin. The Wild Grid is starting in and around the Lowery Creek Watershed and the Military Ridge Prairie Heritage Area (MRPHA).

This region is part of a globally significant grassland complex. The MRPHA is a rare remnant of what once covered millions of acres across the Midwest. It supports over 30 species of greatest conservation need, including grassland birds like the Henslow’s Sparrow and Eastern Meadowlark, and offers some of the best potential for large-scale native habitat reconstruction in the state.

Our three-year pilot aims to transform working lands into connective tissue between prairie remnants, protected lands, and managed rights-of-way. Mad Agriculture is making the business case for integrating cultivated and wild spaces to build resilience across working landscapes.

Three-Year Pilot Objectives:

• Reconstruct 1,000+ acres of marginal or degraded cropland into diverse native grasslands, rotational pasture, or savanna systems, with an initial focus on prairie, which is regionally appropriate and has multiple demonstrated benefits [11].

• Link private regenerative farms with public lands, utility corridors, and prairie remnants to increase habitat continuity across the MRPHA and the broader Southwest Wisconsin Grassland and Stream Conservation Area.

• Integrate rotational grazing and fire as both an ecological tool and economic strategy, using livestock to manage grasslands while generating revenue for landowners.

• Test market-based incentives like ecosystem service payments, supply chain premiums, and performance-based contracts to fund long-term stewardship.

Land base we are prioritizing:

• Fields with steep slopes, poor yields, or high erosion risk.

• Land adjacent to known conservation targets and public lands.

• Parcels intersecting with transmission lines, trails, and water systems that can function as wildlife corridors.

• Land in existing farmer networks

• Land managed by farmers actively practicing or transitioning toward regenerative agriculture.

The Wild Grid is both a map and a myth

But beyond the more mundane why and how, we see the Wild Grid as an opportunity to further reimagine rural landscapes. For animals, for plants, for people living in reciprocity.

The Wild Grid is a map in the practical sense: a spatial strategy, a blueprint, a way to connect fragmented landscapes through corridors of prairie, savanna, and high-diversity pastures. It’s data layers, soil surveys, marginal yields, powerline easements, railways, and soggy field corners. It’s the identification of the places where native habitats can return, not in spite of agriculture, but because of it.

The Wild Grid is also a myth, an ethos, a deeper kind of truth, the kind once carried in sacred stories. It names our species as ecological keystones, calling us to remember what we already know about our role in the larger web of life. The land is not blank, not broken, and not beyond repair. What we need most is already here. The infrastructure for regeneration is hidden in plain sight. We do not need to invent regeneration from scratch. We need to reawaken it.

In a world oversaturated with metrics, plans, and performance indicators, wonder has become subversive. It refuses to be efficient. Wonder insists on asking “what if” and “why not” in systems built on “because that’s how it’s done”. The Wild Grid sees the possibility of complex, interconnected, post-industrial landscapes that honor both biodiversity and human need. It’s not a return to some prelapsarian wilderness, nor a doubling down on industrial growth. It is not nostalgia, and it is not acceleration. It is something else entirely. A framework of connective tissue that integrates wildness into working lands.

This cartography of wonder leads us into action. It is not abstract or romantic. It is a call to make beauty practical. What would it look like to ride on horseback through an interconnected grazing network that spans watersheds and regions, alive with native habitat, birdsong, and possibility?

That’s the world we’re beginning to build, starting at the margins, stitching together the Wild Grid one acre at a time.

Photos by Omar de Kok-Mercado