Beaver Cohabitation + Human Foodways

When beavers moved into 2 of the ponds on our farm, we welcomed them…

Yet their presence called something from us. We ourselves had to adapt and let go of the status quo we had been enjoying around our main farmhouse pond—the lovely mown path where we could stroll, circumnavigating the lively edge.

When the beavers raised the water level, we worried that the dam might not hold. When the floods came in 2024, part of the pond dam did breach, lowering and changing the pond ecosystem.

We lost significant pond depth, but the beavers built a dam to raise it back up, albeit to a lower level than before. This dam breach event exposed about 3 feet of pond edge as an opportunity to introduce water-loving plants that might thrive and also provide food for us and for resident wildlife.

We introduced wild rice prior to the dam breach. Now, we’re introducing her again, alongside wapato (duck potato), sochan (cutleaf coneflower, a native and prized wild green), elderberries, aronia, watercress…and a host of other plants to test their compatibility with this new wetland ecosystem.

This is our way of partnering with natural disturbances on the farm, partnering with the beavers…and learning how to change our own expectations and accept the losses on one side of the equation and the creative opportunities on the other.

This project was graciously funded with a matching grant in 2026 by Ma Earth and a host of generous donors. We continue to learn, experiment, and plant with this new and changing ecosystem as part of a resilient, re-wilded food system, and as part of our practice of conservation as a gentle and collaborative human presence, aka: conservation as presence.