Giving Compass' Take:

• Feargus O'Sullivan explains that Dutch farmers are altering practices to improve wetlands outside of Amsterdam as part of a $9 million experiment. 

• How can funders support farmers shifting to or sustaining environmentally-friendly practices? What natural features are hurt by farming in your community? 

• Read about protecting the world's wetlands. 

Travel beyond Amsterdam’s northern outskirts and you enter a scene that looks like a 17th century Dutch painting. Cows chew their cud in lush pasture fringed with reed beds, in a region of pretty villages whose houses are often snapped up by wealthy urban commuters. By Dutch standards, this watery landscape has been left relatively undeveloped. Scratch the surface, however, and all is not well.

“We saw that biodiversity was going down and that peat was disappearing,” says Saline Verhoeven, who is currently leading a project to restore the local environment. Hemmed in by heavily developed land, the area still needs to sustain farmers. But current agricultural methods often drain significant water from the meadows, leaving the peat vulnerable to erosion and creating conditions that threaten marshland species.

To find a way to restore the marshlands and pastures while maintaining its agricultural capacity, the Amsterdam Wetlands project will plow $9 million of funding into experiments. The scheme, a a collaboration between three nature preservation agencies, is intended to incorporate more water into low-lying areas instead of damming and pumping it out.

If fully realized, it could demonstrate how restoring land and making it more storm-resilient needn’t just mean rewilding terrain through marsh expansion and turning it all back to nature. Agriculture, if well-managed, can also play a role in maintaining balance, providing habitats in places where humans have been reshaping the landscape for more than a thousand years.

Read the full article about farming and land restoration by Feargus O'Sullivan at CityLab.