From the Ground Up is an initiative to assemble, plan and launch a long-term campaign to engage farmers, landowners and other residents of the Greater Blue Earth Watershed in a major effort to restore natural habitats, native wildlife and ecological health to this landscape. We are spending the first year of the campaign putting together an organizing tool. This is a book of illustrated essays featuring lands of ecological and natural significance that still survive in the watershed.

The book is organized around a multilayered GIS map of the watershed showing potential wildlife corridors and lands that would be significant to restoring ecological connectivity to the watershed.

Essays will bring together the principle tenets of sustainable agriculture and conservation biology. This project builds on the Land Stewardship Project’s The Farm as Natural Habitat and the Wild Farm Alliance’s Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches. This is a collaborative effort of Rural Advantage, a watershed NGO, the Wild Farm Alliance, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, the Three Rivers RC&D, the Mankato DNR office, and local citizens.

Project directors: Paula Westmoreland and Lansing Shepard.