After world war 11,
the revolution in agriculture took a different dimension in which the success of a farmer was measured
by level of production. In order to achieve sustainability in the agricultural
sector, farmers had to adopt farming approaches that are viable , sound and
acceptable. Based on the discoveries by research institutions, farmers have
been exposed to modern methods of cultivation
to enhance productivity. In the following article, Verlyn Klinkenborg gives an insight into the
activities that led to the revolution in agriculture and the sacrifices that
were made to make this possible. He also explains the various factors that help
engender sustainability of agriculture in the united states especially when
America was still able to get high production even when attention was shifted
from the use of chemical pesticides, herbicides
and fertilizers to focus more on organic farming tecniques such as
natural fertilizers, crop rotation and integrated pest management.
A Farming Revolution
SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Last summer my father told me a story about his father, who was a progressive farmer in northwest Iowa for most of the first half of this century. The story takes place in the early 1930s, when my father was still a boy.
In the fall the wagons came back full from the cornfields, and as the corn was being put into cribs, my grandfather watched for ears that looked especially full and large. These he tossed into bushel baskets, which were carried to the basement of the farmhouse. There, in the furnace room, it was my father's job to sort the corn onto wire grids 24 ears across.
From each ear of corn my grandfather took three or four kernels and placed them on an incubator tray—the position of the seeds on each tray matching the position on the wire grid of the ear from which they came. Then he dampened the kernels and waited. The ears whose kernels didn't sprout were fed to the hogs and chickens. The ears whose kernels showed good germination were set aside, shelled, and used as the next year's seed.
What interests me about this story isn't just the fact that my father tells it, or that it's a story about my grandfather, or that I see it as an instance of a golden age of American farming, because there are no golden ages in farming. The story is a reminder that the true agricultural technology is the knowledge of farmers, slowly accumulated and sometimes sorely tried.
By the 1950s and early 1960s, when I first began visiting that farm, the corn they were using had changed. The seeds no longer came from last year's crop; by then it was patented hybrid corn. It came in pallets full of 80,000-seed bags from national seed companies. It was purchased anew every year, because every year there was a new improvement and because hybrid corn will not develop properly from the planting of a previous year's kernels. Given enough chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and machine power, hybrid varieties of corn now result in yields my grandfather would have thought impossible in the 1930s—180, 200 bushels an acre, three and four times the yields he was getting in the good years. But to get these yields, farming had to change almost beyond recognition. It came to rely less on the skills of farmers and more on a chemical arsenal to suppress weeds and insects and to replace the diminishing fertility of the soil.
After World War II, production became the sole measure of a progressive farmer. It was all part of an order, a progress that seemed inevitable to someone growing up in Iowa, as I did, where people believed—and still do—that the duty of U. S. farmers is to feed the world. But alongside that new order, there were also farmers who worked their land according to a different belief, a different and in some ways more traditional conception of the earth and the farmer's responsibility to it. The practices of the few farmers who resisted the technological sea change of the past half century—the trend toward chemical, industrial agriculture—now look revolutionary in turn. Their principles, newly articulated, have inspired new research, new thinking. They have given rise to a movement called sustainable agriculture.
“Sustainable” is not yet a word with a clear-cut agricultural definition. It has been defined in many ways, but at its core lies a kind of farming that is, in a commonly used phrase, “economically viable, environmentally sound, and socially acceptable”—a kind of farming that encourages the farmer to earn a decent living growing good food on healthy land. Talking to researchers, policymakers, and farmers over the past year and a half, I've heard again and again the caution that there is no single approach to sustainability; there are many approaches. But what has changed in recent years is this: A broad effort has emerged on farms and at research institutions to discover which farming approaches are truly viable, sound, and acceptable and how they can be put to use out on the land. Behind this effort lies the awareness that the enormous yields of conventional farming have come at a high environmental and social cost, a cost we're only now learning to acknowledge.
There are as many visions of the farming future, of course, as there are definitions of sustainability. But they have in common greater cooperation with nature, greater economic independence from banks and government-subsidy programs, and diminished reliance on chemicals and petroleum.
I have found examples of sustainable farming on small urban farms in the East, plots just slightly too large to be called gardens, and I have found them on enormous tracts of land in the West, where growers like E & J Gallo, one of the world's largest commercial wineries, use sustainable growing practices to conserve soil, discourage insect pests, and improve their crops. But it scarcely mattered whether I was talking to a longhaired artichoke farmer on the California coast or a conservatively dressed member of the Nebraska Wheat Board. Wherever I went, I got the sense that a change of uncertain proportions had begun to come over agriculture. What I brought back from the road, from the farm, are some exemplary tales from a few places where sustainable agriculture has taken hold and is promising to spread throughout the United States.
“This is what gets us excited,” says John Williams, the irrepressible owner of Frog's Leap Winery near St. Helena in California's Napa Valley. The list of things that get John Williams excited is a long one, but soil comes well toward the top. Williams is standing in the shade of a row of grapevines, and he is holding neither a cluster of grapes nor a bottle of wine. He has put shovel to earth between the trellises—earth blanketed with cover crops of peas, oats, and vetch—and he is raising what he has shoveled to my nose. “Smell how alive that soil is,” he says. If the word “bouquet” means anything when applied to wine, it must mean something when applied to this soil. There are many undertones to the smell, but the overtone is that of a complex substance that is biologically alive.
Cover crops such as vetch, peas, and especially clover give farmers three good reasons to avoid many chemicals. First, these plants naturally supply an essential nutrient, nitrogen, to soil, largely eliminating the need to apply industrial fertilizers. Second, some cover crops provide habitat for beneficial insects that prey on destructive bugs; when that happens, the use of insecticides can be sharply reduced or eliminated. And finally, the very presence of a cover crop reduces erosion and hinders the emergence of competitive weeds; no weeds, no need to suppress them with a chemical herbicide.
We climb into the Frog's Leap pickup, and as we drive, Williams narrates a thumbnail history of Napa Valley farming. “In the old days almost none of these vineyards were planted on the valley floor. This ground was too good. You could grow a real crop. The grapes were all up in the hills.” Now the hills have been mostly relinquished to oaks and to California's soap-opera version of French provincial architecture. Three minutes up the road and we are trespassing in a very famous vineyard. The earth beneath the long rows of vines is absolutely bare. Applications of herbicides have suppressed the weeds. “This is what some growers really like,” says Williams. “A little bit of green stuff growing in the middle but nothing under those vines. This is conventional farming at its best. Feel this soil.” Williams chips at the soil and offers me a handful. It has the subtle undertones of an oily rag.
John Williams came to California from New York State in 1974 to study viticulture at the University of California at Davis. The first year Frog's Leap was in production, Williams sold 700 cases of wine. Last year he sold 45,000. The reason is quality. Nowhere on the Frog's Leap label do you see the word “organic,” even though virtually all the grapes used in making it are grown organically. (Instead, below the warning statements on the back label, you see a small cautionary note: “Open Other End.”) But over the years, with the help of an organic farmer and agricultural consultant named Amigo Bob Cantisano, Williams has one by one persuaded most of his growers to register with California Certified Organic Farmers, which requires them to use no chemical pesticides or fertilizers on their property.
I talked one morning with Amigo Bob, as everyone calls him, in a coffee shop in Colfax, a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range. In appearance Amigo Bob is an Illinois soybean farmer's nightmare, his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail.
If you travel the West Coast talking to farmers and researchers, you hear Amigo Bob's name again and again. He is a member of what I've come to think of as an alternative extension service, helping farmers make the transition from conventional to sustainable agriculture. “I don't envision that everyone is going to be a certified organic farmer,” Amigo Bob told me. “But the vast majority could cut their chemical use and save money and come out ahead. The irony is that they aren't doing that yet. Who shows up on the farm? A farm sales guy from the chem house. What does he talk about? Chemicals. Who else? A farm adviser. What's his experience based in? Chemicals. I think the transition to sustainable agriculture is 90 percent psychological and 10 percent technological.”
It's one of the peculiarities of California agriculture that a vintner like John Williams can practice dryland grape farming in virtually the same climate as the one, 45 miles northeast, where Ed Sills grows organic rice in standing water at Pleasant Grove Farms. But as dissimilar as their crops may be, the two face many of the same problems and opportunities. Although California is one of the richest food-producing areas in the world, this state's farmland is being eaten up by real estate development. From Pleasant Grove Farms, a warren of barn-red buildings with a trailer office and a fenced yard, you can almost see the tract housing approaching, like smoke low on the horizon, across some of the most fertile soil in the state.
Ed Sills has a forestry degree from the University of California at Berkeley. His wife, Wynette, was a farm adviser when they met. Together they have taken an active stand to protect the farmland in their county, alerting neighbors to oppose a housing development that would destroy thousands of acres of agricultural land.
The Sillses grow organic rice, wheat, popcorn, beans, and almonds on 2,400 acres of flat alluvial land in the floodplain of the Feather River. Nearly all their rice is sold to Lundberg Family Farms, a major producer of organic rice in Richvale, 50 miles north of Pleasant Grove Farms. “The very top yield of rice grown conventionally around here,” says Sills, “is about 100 hundred-pound sacks per acre. The top yield we get organically is about 85—which is fantastic, because for organic rice we're getting more than double the conventional price. Conventional rice farmers are putting on about 50 dollars' worth of nitrogen fertilizer an acre and about 50 or 60 dollars' worth of herbicides. A lot of times they're putting on one or two insecticides. We put on none of those things. I figure we spend at least a hundred dollars an acre less than they do.”
California is blessed from the farmer's perspective, with diverse local markets and a climate and soils that support an enormous variety of crops. But on the Great Plains everything is different—markets, crops, weather, soils—everything except the basic problems of farming.
In central North Dakota the history of agriculture seems somehow to lie closer to the surface than it does in the Napa Valley. At dusk in late July near Jamestown, the fields are edged with mosquitoes whirling upward in ghostly pillars. There is something about the country here, if only the wind-shorn crab apple hedges or the potholes where ducks are feeding, that reminds you how recently it was put to the plow. Even in summer, weather comes on suddenly, so when, at midday, I visit a farmer named Fred Kirschenmann, who lives a few miles southwest of Jamestown, I'm almost blown onto the Kirschenmann place. The farmstead consists of an old clapboard house, a mobile home that serves as an office, and an array of farm implements, and all seem to have been deposited here during a drop in the wind.
Today Fred Kirschenmann is wearing a T-shirt, work jeans, and boots. He carries a pair of pliers in a holster on his belt. A tall, well-muscled, well-spoken man of about 60, with thick glasses and ruddy hair, he is one of the founders and a past president of the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society, an organization that began at an organic fertilizer sales meeting in Bismarck in 1979.
We climb into Kirschenmann's old pickup and drive north past pastures, fields, and prairie potholes, toward a small town called Medina. I count the tractors in the fields as we drive, spot sheep in a distant pasture. We pull into the parking lot of a restaurant called the C & R Dairy Treat, where the walls are decorated with jigsaw puzzles. While we wait for our food, Kirschenmann tells me a story to which he knows the beginning but whose end he is still trying to imagine.
“My mother and dad started farming on their own in 1930,” he says. “Their first years of farming were during the heart of the Dust Bowl. That had an important impact on my father, because he experienced firsthand what could happen if you didn't take care of the soil. I remember, growing up, every time there was a little bit of wind erosion, he'd go crazy. So I grew up with this notion that you needed to watch what you did with the soil.”
Kirschenmann places his heavy hands on the table and leans back in his chair. “When fertilizers came out in this part of the world in the late 1940s, early 1950s, my dad's first concern was, ‘Is that going to be good for the land?’ He talked to a couple of farmers whose opinions he respected, and he talked to the county agent, and they all assured him that it was. And so he bought the fertilizer attachments, and he bought the fertilizer. He saw his yields go up. And he became a convert like that. I remember him saying, ‘I could never, ever farm again without fertilizer.’”
Fred Kirschenmann left the family farm and became a college teacher and administrator. One day in 1970, in a class he was teaching in Dayton, Ohio, he met a student named David Vetter, who had been studying what happens to soil under conventional farming practices, which rely heavily on nitrogen fertilizer, and what happens to it under organic farming practices, which recycle nonsynthetic nutrients like animal manure and plant residue. It was clear to Vetter that soil quality deteriorates steadily under the rigors of conventional farming. Chemical fertilizers, substituted for natural ones, deny soil the organic matter it needs to maintain its tilth—its texture, nutrients, and ability to hold moisture—and thus its fertility.
“I started talking to my father about some of these changes in soil structure,” says Kirschenmann. “And he said, ‘Yeah, I can see that on our farm. I know that's happening.’ Of course it bothered him that there was a better way of taking care of the land, and it bothered me too. But he was 68 years old, and his response was, `What you're talking about is a whole different way of farming. And that's not for me. It's too late for me.'“
In 1976 Kirschenmann's father had a mild heart attack, and Fred offered to take over the 2,600-acre farm if he could operate it organically. Having done that, he increased the average yield of spring wheat from 28 to 35 bushels an acre. And Kirschenmann no longer had to borrow money each spring—as his dad did—just to pay for tons of industrial fertilizer.
Kirschenmann has come to liken conventional farming to a treadmill, and organic farming to a dance. The dance lies in the rhythm of seasons and crops, in the way the same piece of farmland is made to alternate year to year between cool-season plants, like wheat, rye, flax, and oats, and warm-season plants, like buckwheat and millet, between broadleaf and grassy plants, between deep-rooted and shallow-rooted plants, between cash grain crops and soil-building legumes like yellow-blossom sweet clover. The dance helps break up disease and pest cycles and restores nutrients to the soil.
On a conventional farm, says Kirschenmann, you use a pesticide one year and then find the next year that it's not effective anymore because the surviving pests have built up resistance to it. “Each time you do that,” he says, “it ratchets up your costs, squeezes the margins more. Seven hundred fifty million pounds of pesticides are now being used on farms every year in the United States, and we're losing more crops than were lost before pesticides came into use.” (Crop loss due to all pests hovers around 37 percent, according to David Pimentel, professor of insect ecology at Cornell University.)
In agriculture as in almost everything else, it's easy to believe that if the present has gone astray, things must have been better somewhere in the past. Yet Kirschenmann takes exception when people say to him: “You're farming the way your grandfather used to.” Not true, Kirschenmann is likely to reply. “The way my grandfather farmed, he'd break up a piece of prairie, plant wheat, maybe oats, maybe occasionally some corn, until the nutrients were mined out, and then he'd go break up a new piece of prairie. If you look at this thing historically, just about the time they ran out of new prairie—during the war effort in the 1940s—the commercial fertilizers became available, and that made it possible for him to stay in one place and go on farming the tired land year after year.”
In the November wind in Nebraska, 400 miles south of Fred Kirschenmann's farm, you can hear the rattle of dry cornstalks. On the horizon trains pass almost constantly along the tracks of the Union Pacific. This is corn country, a place where, as visibly as anywhere else in the U. S., the landscape has been shaped by the underlying economics of farming. “It's been all corn for, well, clear back into the fifties,” says one farmer who is picking a field full of Pioneer 3417.
To sustain 45 years of growing corn—a heavy user of nitrogen—so much fertilizer was poured into the soil that the groundwater became contaminated with nitrates, and many towns and farms in this region have had to dig deeper wells to find safe water. Excessive nitrates in drinking water are believed to be responsible for reducing bloodstream oxygen to dangerous levels in infants.
I have just visited David Vetter's farm near Marquette, in east-central Nebraska. In a region where single-family farms of more than 2,000 acres are common, Vetter farms on 280 acres. That land helps support his own family, his parents, and his sister's family. He employs 13 neighbors in his grain-processing operation. By rotating crops, Vetter, like his former teacher Fred Kirschenmann, is actually improving his soil, year by year, while the soil on neighboring farms is deteriorating. Vetter told me: “My number one management decision is what's best for the soil.” And his father, Don Vetter, said: “Farming you learn every year. You don't get it all at once. One of the hardest things for farmers, and I include the researchers in this, is that to change, they've got to admit they've been wrong in the past, and it's awful hard for us human beings to admit that we've been wrong about something.”
Near the Missouri River, the state of Nebraska begins to crumple and tilt. The highway east toward Walthill drops from a crest that shows you the whole town at once, laid out between railroad tracks and the hillbound horizon. Like many small farm towns, including the one I grew up in, Walthill in some weathers looks like emptiness.
There has been a string of bad years in farm towns across the Midwest. The number of farm families has diminished. Those that remain are not numerous enough to support the business life of a small town. The schools are gone. So are the car and farm-implement dealerships, the clothing and furniture stores. This is often explained as an economic fact of life, a natural consequence of industrial agriculture, in which farmers either seek to increase the amount of land they cultivate or stop farming, sell out, and move away.
But anyone who grew up in a farm town during its heyday remembers a time when the link between a populous countryside and the busy streets of town was a vital one. It's not just nostalgia to believe that something important has been lost. Small farm towns are now little more than depots for the bushels of grain that pile up in their elevators and spill onto their streets in bumper years. Eventually the grain is carried away and turned into profits somewhere else.
I stop at an old brick building on the edge of uptown Walthill, the home of a nationally known agricultural institute called the Center for Rural Affairs. I have come to visit staff member Chuck Hassebrook, one of the most cogent voices in a nationwide organization called the Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture. The campaign aims to build provisions for sustainable agriculture into the farm bill Congress is debating this year. Among those provisions are plans to reform the USDA commodity programs, so that farmers who rotate their crops don't risk losing their eligibility for price supports and other benefits. There are also plans to enhance soil- and wildlife-conservation programs, to promote marketing alternatives for farmers, and to redirect scientific research toward sustainability.
Hassebrook and I sit at a large table in a second-story room that looks like the office of a derelict law practice or a one-horse newspaper. Hassebrook has the big-boned frame of a young man who has tossed his share of hay bales. He has spent the past 18 years analyzing the problems of farmers across the Midwest. He grew up on a small Nebraska farm and came to Walthill in the mid-seventies as a VISTA volunteer. That was a prosperous time for U. S. agriculture, an era when farming looked like a high-profit venture with little risk.
It's a ripe autumn day in Nebraska, and farm trucks are barreling down the gravel roads outside Walthill, their boxes full of corn. But in town, below the windows of the room where we are sitting, the streets are still, the shops empty—a reminder, in this busiest of farm seasons, of how depopulated the countryside has become. “If there's one thing that's clear,” Hassebrook says, “it's that the process of big agriculture continues, and it's killing these towns. But the farming approaches that can be beneficial environmentally are the same ones that can be beneficial socially. If we can learn to farm in concert with nature by using a farmer's knowledge and skills instead of purchasing fertilizers and pesticides, we can help the environment, but we can also carve out a bigger share of the food dollar for the farmer, and we can create a role for more people in agriculture.”
From time to time it has become clear to me how sweeping the ambitions of the sustainable agriculture movement really are. This is one of those times, sitting in a dimly lit room in a tiny farm town, drinking stale coffee, listening to a man with his feet up on the table while dusk settles in outside.
After more than a century of migration from the country to the city, the number of U. S. farmers has reached a new low. In 1910, farming families represented nearly 35 percent of the population. Today fewer than 2 percent of American families farm.… What Hassebrook and his colleagues envision is ... more farms, smaller farms, more carefully managed farms, intensive only in their use of a farmer's knowledge, not in terms of the chemical consumption. And with the coming of new farmers to the land, they also envision the renewal of rural towns.
“We take a pretty broad view of what constitutes sustainable agriculture,” Hassebrook says quietly. “We say that if agriculture is worthy of being called that, it needs to sustain community and provide decent economic opportunities for people.”
One last stop, on the eastern edge of the Palouse, one of this country's most fertile agricultural regions, a rolling sweep of pea and wheat fields. This is a place where agriculture is still young, yet the crowns of many of its hills are nearly bare, the topsoil washed downhill. Just east of Moscow, Idaho, I visited Paradise Farm, run by Mary Jane Butters and her husband, Nick Ogle. He is a lifelong farmer in his mid-40s who grew up on the land he farms. She was raised in Utah and worked for many years as a wilderness ranger and fire tower lookout for the U. S. Forest Service before buying five acres at the base of Paradise Ridge. In 1986 Mary Jane Butters founded the Palouse Clearwater Environmental Institute, an organization committed to sustainable agriculture, environmental preservation, and consumer education. Mary Jane and Nick have been married for two years. He lives at his house, just a mile and a half down the road, with his children, and she lives at her house with her children. There is a family reunion almost every day.
I came to visit in June. The roadsides were full of cow parsnips, or “floating doilies,” as they're called on this farm. Mary Jane's farmhouse is perched on a knoll, surrounded by perennials set in straw mulch, and it looks out over mature conifers onto the fields of the Palouse, which roll off to the horizon like heavy seas. Her mail-order company is called Paradise Farm Organics, Inc.—instant falafel, hummus, tabbouleh, and dried turtle beans, lentils, and split peas. She has recently introduced a line of organic backpacking foods called Backcountry Ecocuisine. The raw ingredients are grown by local farmers, and the foods are packaged by Moscow residents, some of whom make two and three times the local average hourly wage working for Paradise Farm Organics.
“We had as many sales the first week of June as we had the whole month of May,” Mary Jane says. We are standing in what would be the living room of an ordinary house. But shelving runs around the walls of this room, and on a clean, wooden bench there is a food scale and a heat-sealer and a rack to hold open unfilled food packages. Barrels of bulk grain and spices line the floor. The scent of cumin hangs in the air. “Because we created a market,” says Mary Jane, “we made it possible for farmers to convert to organic production. It's not like you're dealing with politicians or beating your head against the wall. You just do it. I like the idea of creating social change through the business community.”
Later that morning Nick and I drove down the road to get the mail and to look at two pea fields planted side by side, one grown conventionally, the other organically. I found it hard to tell them apart, if only because in the Palouse it is hard to keep your eyes from following the hills as they porpoise off into the distance. “What we're trying to do here at Paradise Farms,” Nick said, “is to make it profitable to go out and try new things. The conventional farmer gets his price-support check, but I don't view that as being a price support for the farmer. It's for the consumer, keeping the price of food down so the consumer can have cheap food and more disposable income. That'll catch up with us. The fact is we're going to run out of oil. I don't care if it's 50, 100, 200 years, we will run out of oil. We will run out of coal, all the things that agriculture feeds on. We're using resources at an alarming rate, and people don't realize that there's going to be an end to all this.”
It's tempting to believe that sustainability is an issue that begins and ends on the farm. But that is neither where it begins nor where it ends. Standing beside a pea field, listening to Nick, I was reminded that it is the consumer who should—but often does not—have the final voice in how farmers farm. In hundreds of locations a growing number of consumers are having their say: In downtown farmers' markets from Manhattan to Hollywood, at roadside stands on rural routes in the Berkshires and the Great Smoky Mountains, through co-ops and consumer-owned farms scattered across the country, through mail-order outlets such as Paradise Farm. To be sure, the marketplace still lags behind the demand. The challenge of reestablishing a distribution system that once connected the consumer with small farmers remains a formidable one throughout much of the nation.
Still, in the tone of Nick's voice out by that pea field, I was reminded of something Fred Kirschenmann had said to me at the C & R Dairy Treat in Medina, North Dakota. He was telling me about an evening when he and a television interviewer visited a friend of his, a successful conventional farmer. “She asked him a whole bunch of questions about how he was running his farm,” Kirschenmann said. “And then as she was about ready to go, she said, ‘Tell me how you feel about the future.’
“It got real quiet, and he said, ‘Well, I'll tell you. I'm just glad I'm as old as I am. There's so many problems, I'm glad I won't be around much longer.’”
Fred pushed back his chair and laughed. “My feeling was, hell, I wish I was at least 40 years younger. There's so many things I want to do.”
Source: National Geographic, December 1995.
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