The Wild Grid: Field Margins as a First Step

By Omar de Kok-Mercado, MS and Dan Kane, PhD With contributions from Clark Harshbarger and Phil Taylor, PhD

A few months ago we published From the Margins: Wilding the Edges of Agriculture, explaining the what and the why of our burgeoning Wilding program here at Mad Agriculture. Over the next two months we will be publishing a series of articles explaining the how, one scale at a time.

How exactly do you go from several small prairie plantings in Wisconsin to a grid of 65 million acres of interconnected natural habitat?

In our From the Margins post, we introduced the Wild Grid, a 50 year vision for weaving fragmented landscapes into a connected, living system. Now we turn to the on-the-ground work of Wilding. It begins in the flood-prone, the low-yield, the hard-to-manage: the margins. These are the tributaries where Wilding begins to form the Wild Grid.

This piece focuses on the field scale, the foundation of the entire system. Before corridors can connect communities or regions, they must begin at the edges of individual fields. Here we examine how marginal acres are identified, why they make economic sense as a starting point, and how they become the first units of a larger, connected design.

We start where all infrastructure starts, with a plan.

INFRASTRUCTURE AS ANALOGY

Why do we call it the Wild Grid? Because infrastructure offers a useful analogy for what we are building. Infrastructure is the connective tissue of society. When it functions well, it hums quietly in the background, supporting daily life without demanding attention. Roads, power lines, and water systems shape how we move, work, and live, even when we rarely stop to notice them.

It is easy to overlook what an extraordinary feat of engineering and coordination it was to design a road system that can take you from one point to nearly any other across the country. The same is true of the electric grid, which delivers power to almost every home and business with remarkable reliability. These systems were not built all at once. They were designed in layers, each scale reinforcing the next.

Roads follow a nested logic. Local roads are shaped by the land and connect places within a community. State highways link those communities together. Interstates connect regions and enable movement across vast distances.

We imagine the Wild Grid in a similar way. At the field scale are plantings along margins, low spots, and edges that connect one field to the next and link working lands to remnant habitats and conserved areas. These plantings form local networks that, over time, grow into broader corridors across the landscape. The goal is not only ecological continuity but also functional infrastructure. When these systems are connected, they become easier to manage and more economically viable. Movement through the corridor becomes an act of management. Livestock can graze across properties. Equipment can follow ecological patterns rather than field boundaries. Harvests of seed, forage, or biomass can be planned at a landscape scale. Stewardship becomes collective. And because these corridors filter water, support pollinators, reduce erosion, and sequester carbon, this management becomes a form of public service. In time, it may be possible to ride on horseback from southern Wisconsin to the Missouri Breaks in northern Montana, traveling through a living, working mosaic of habitat and agriculture.

But reaching that future requires intention and design. How do we decide where to start? How do we determine which small pieces can grow into something much larger? In the Substacks ahead, we will walk through each scale of the Wild Grid, beginning with the foundation. That foundation is the field scale. To understand why marginal acres are the foundation, we have to look not just at ecology, but economics. What makes a corner of a field more pain than profit?

FROM THE (MARGINAL) MARGINS

To make Wilding work, it has to work for those stewarding the land, the farmers. When you’re asking someone to take land out of production, you’re asking them to forego potential revenue from crop sales. A prairie strip in the middle of a high-yielding field is a tough sell. As we saw between 2007 and 2012, more than 7 million acres were lost from the Conservation Reserve Program as ethanol production raised corn prices and incentivized the switch [1, 2]. That’s why we’re targeting marginal acres where yields are suboptimal.

When you’re looking at yield averages for a given field it’s easy to forget that those numbers are just that—an average. In a corn field that’s yielding an average of, say, 180 bushels per acre, not every acre is hitting those numbers. Some parts of the field are more like 40 bushels, while others might be pushing 200 bushels.

It might seem like any amount of yield is good for the bottom line of a farm. But as most people tuned into ag have likely heard, profit margins these days are thin. The average cost to plant an acre of field corn in the US in 2025 is around $897/acre [3], and it takes the same amount of labor, fuel, and seed to plant a bad acre as it does a good one. Farmers spend money per acre, but they make money per bushel. Farmers using variable rate fertilizer application technology might be able to reduce fertilizer applications and thereby costs in those areas that typically do poorly, but that tech can be expensive and that approach may not always work. Cost per acre explains what is invested. Cost per bushel reveals whether that investment pays off.

The three-year average price per bushel for conventional field corn across the US from 2020-2024 was $5.50 [4]. But the price per bushel varies over the course of any given year and by region—in 2025 non-high amylose conventional corn averaged $4.22 per bushel in Wisconsin [5]. That means that WI farmers had to achieve an average yield of 212.6 bushels per acre to outrun average costs in 2025. In 2023, the most recent year for which a comprehensive yield report is available [6], the average yield statewide was 176 bushels per acre. Southern counties were generally higher than that (180-210), but no county averaged higher than 210 bushels per acre.

What about organic producers? Organic corn yields, 18-35% lower than conventional systems, although the size of that gap depends on context and quality of organic management [7, 8]. But organic, of course, fetches a premium price compared to conventional. The five-year average price for farm-gate, feed grade organic corn has hovered around $9 per bushel, but in the past two years it’s declined, reaching a 2025 average price of $7.51 per bushel [9]. Likewise, cost centers for organic producers differ a little bit from conventional, with slightly lower seed and crop protection costs but more tractor time, but the average cost per acre is generally pretty similar to conventional. A University of Minnesota report on organic farm enterprise budgets in the Upper Midwest reported that the average cost per acre from 2020-22 for corn operations was $786.32, which adjusted for inflation is $934.24 in 2025 dollars [10]. By those numbers, organic producers would have to yield ~124 bushels per acre to break even, which is well within range for organic producers in the Upper Midwest, ~143 bushels per acre average [11]. In other words, for all those areas within fields yielding less than 124 bushels per acre, farmers are losing money.

Table 1. Comparative Economics of Non-High Amylose Conventional Corn and Feed-Grade Organic Corn in Wisconsin

All these numbers serve to illustrate that you don’t have to be too far off average for things to not pencil out. In many cases, simply removing chronically underperforming acres from annual production is already a rational business decision. But our goal with Wilding is not only to stop losses. We seek to design those acres to generate revenue in a different way. We also want to clarify that marginality is not an ecological weakness but rather economic misalignment.

WHAT’S MARGINAL?

To start, let’s consider what causes a corn plant to yield poorly from an agronomic and plant physiology perspective. First, a crop can’t yield if it’s not there. When soils are too cold or wet, seeds may not germinate, or if they do, they die off or are killed by pathogens before they break the soil surface because growth is delayed. Dry, hot soils can have the same effect.

But even if a seedling manages to emerge under poor conditions, small delays in emergence have a cascading effect that reduces yields at harvest. Plants develop reproductive structures that ultimately produce grains during the vegetative growth stage. The size, architecture, and yield capacity of those structures is determined by source-sink signaling at key vegetative stages. If a plant is too small or is experiencing poor growth early in the season, it conservatively reduces its total yield capacity to ensure that it can still produce seed at all. Despite millennia of crop breeding for maximum yield, a plant’s base genetic coding is still to just make it another generation at all costs. Even if conditions get better after emergence or a period of early stress, yield losses are often baked in. A 2023 study found that individual plant yields dropped by 8.5% each day emergence was delayed [12]. Readers interested in the mechanics of this process can look to research on crop phenology, source-sink dynamics, and developmental plasticity in maize, which explains how early stress alters reproductive architecture and grain set [13]. This relationship is well documented in agronomic literature where early vegetative stress constrains ear initiation, kernel number, and final grain fill.

This same dynamic also applies when plants emerge on-time but then are growing in suboptimal conditions. Crop plants need sufficient nitrogen, water, and sunlight to grow. Any reduction in those reduces their capacity for photosynthesis and vegetative growth. Likewise, high temperatures lead to faster accumulation of growing degree days, accelerating phenological development and leading to faster onset of reproductive life stages. If a plant reaches that stage too early, then its yield is reduced, and if temperatures are too high or water too low at key stages in the reproductive phase, grain fill is reduced, meaning the plant doesn’t reach its full yield potential—think of an ear of corn where the kernels are just missing on the end.

So, field crops have a real goldilocks complex. Not too hot, not too cold. Not too wet, not too dry. They need things to be jussssst right. Farmers know the low spots and the high spots in their fields because they spend hours on the tractor, in the combine, or walking the fields. Observing where emergence is poor, where the soil gets waterlogged, where the soil is thin and rocky, and where the plants get chlorotic or have poor grain fill. Mad Agriculture values farmers’ lived and worked experiences deeply, and we rely on time in the field with them to identify the corners where they’d be fine never planting again.

But when you’re managing hundreds or thousands of acres it can get difficult to remember all these spaces, draw precise boundaries around them, or track how they might vary year to year. Do they always yield poorly or just when it’s too rainy or too dry? What are the landscape features, then, that tell us if a given acre is going to be marginal or not?

To move beyond memory and anecdote, we can map marginality directly. Several spatial layers consistently identify row crop acres that struggle to produce stable yields.

• Land Capability Class III through VII soils, indicating increasing limitations for intensive row crop production due to slope, erosion risk, drainage constraints, shallow depth, or frequent flooding.

• Soil drainage class, particularly poorly drained and very poorly drained soils that experience ponding, delayed planting windows, and higher risk of denitrification and root disease.

• Hydric soils and mapped floodplains, signaling seasonal saturation and recurrent flood events that undermine reliable annual crop performance.

• Slope and erosion risk derived from digital elevation models, especially convex slopes and gradients above 5 to 9 percent where soil loss accelerates and nutrient retention declines.

• Topographic position index identifying depressions, swales, and ridgelines that drive internal field variability in water availability and stress.

• Multi-year yield stability maps derived from combine data, highlighting acres with persistent low or highly variable performance relative to field averages.

• Soil depth to restrictive layer or bedrock, which limits root development and water holding capacity.

• Soil texture variability, including sandy knolls prone to drought stress and heavy clay pockets prone to compaction and prolonged saturation. This includes textures with a high percentage of coarse fragments.

• Proximity to drainageways, ephemeral streams, and tile outlets where nutrient losses are elevated and perennial cover would provide measurable water quality benefits.

Individually, each of these layers signals constraint and when taken together, they reveal patterns. In practice, identifying marginal acres is a synthesis. Public soil and topographic datasets provide the first pass then it’s onto multi-year yield maps that demonstrate where instability persists. Farmers then validate what the data suggests, confirming which acres consistently underperform and which are simply weather-dependent. Identifying marginality is part science, part pattern recognition, and part farmer insight. Where those parts converge, marginality becomes visible. Our current plan is to identify marginal acres using GIS tools and spatial analysis.

Marginality is rarely random. In the agronomic context, it tends to cluster along drainageways, trace ridgelines, and repeat across neighboring fields. What appears on a yield map as scattered underperformance begins to resolve into a spatial structure. These acres are not simply failing to keep up with the field average but are expressing the land’s underlying hydrology, soil depth, and topography. When we zoom out, marginality starts to look less like noise and more like a rough draft of a network.

Marginal acres already interrupt the field. Instead of fighting that interruption, we can design for it. The places that refuse to reliably yield bushels may be inviting a different form of yield altogether.

CONNECTIVITY IS THE MISSING CROP

If we look closely at marginal acres, what we find is not simply low productivity but repeating patterns. Drainageways already trace lines through fields. Low-yielding slopes reveal where soil has thinned. Flood-prone depressions show where water wants to gather. Fence lines, access roads, and property edges already form a loose geometry across the landscape.

In other words, the beginnings of a network are already present.

For decades the dominant approach has been to treat these acres as problems to be corrected: tile them, level them, fertilize them harder, plant through them and hope the averages work out. Sometimes that works but often it does not.

When margins are thin, even small inefficiencies matter. But what if marginal acres are not inefficiencies at all? What if they are signals of where a different form of productivity belongs?

When we describe connectivity as the missing crop, we are not speaking metaphorically. Connectivity is a functional input as it allows water to move more slowly and predictably across a watershed. It allows pollinators and beneficial insects to persist across seasons. It allows livestock to move across properties in ways that reduce stress and expand grazing opportunities. It allows management to operate at a scale larger than a single field.

Our work now is to translate those functional gains into durable economic structures, whether through ecosystem markets, new perennial and biomass crops, enhanced productivity driven by improved ecological performance, or other mechanisms that recognize connectivity as a revenue-generating asset rather than a passive benefit. The next step is ensuring that these functional benefits are recognized economically.

None of this requires taking productive land out of production. It begins precisely where production is already strained.

The materials for this shift are already in our hands. Prairie species adapted to stabilize soil and host biodiversity. Agroforestry systems that combine perennial crops with shade and forage. Cool-season pastures and silvopastures that thrive in places where row crops struggle. Grazing systems capable of converting perennial biomass into food while maintaining ecological function.

These systems are already present and they are not waiting to be invented, only to be connected. We are being called to design for their connection.

Importantly, this cannot be framed as a new burden for farmers. Asking individual producers to convert acres into public ecological infrastructure, without compensation or structural support, repeats the same mistake we have made for decades. Farmers did not design the system that created uniform, high-risk landscapes, and they cannot be expected to privately finance its redesign.

The last century built hard infrastructure that connected markets.

This century can build living infrastructure that connects life.

We keep asking farmers to fix a system they did not design, with margins they do not have. So the Wild Grid changes the unit of action. It is not one farmer at a time. It is shared corridors, financed and staffed like infrastructure.

Marginal acres can become the first sites of a shared stewardship economy, one financed and staffed as infrastructure rather than treated as voluntary sacrifice.

As corridors begin to form along these edges and low spots, new roles emerge. Beginning farmers who lack access to land can enter through managed grazing contracts. Ecological managers can steward reconstructed prairies and novel perennial systems. Seed production, biomass harvest, and rotational grazing become coordinated across properties rather than isolated experiments.

And once corridors are in place, they begin to influence the fields beside them.

A connected perennial edge changes how water moves through a field. It changes how livestock can be integrated. It creates incentive to plant cover crops that can be grazed as herds move between perennial strips. It rewards greater rotation diversity because diversity becomes operationally useful, not just philosophically desirable.

In this way, the Wild Grid at field scale is not a boundary project. It is a lever. By redesigning the margins, we create the conditions for in-field transformation. What begins as connectivity at the edge can gradually reorganize the interior of the farm.

Marginal land, then, is not land set aside. It is land set to work differently.

The margins are the foundation from which a more connected agriculture can grow.