Conscious Choice: Reversing Our Dismal Farming System

December 2002 | News of the Earth

Reversing Our Dismal Farming System

by Dave Aftandilian

The United States loses two billion tons of topsoil a year to erosion according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, That’s about 51 dump truck loads of soil a minute. In all, 90 percent of U.S. cropland is losing soil, and losing it 17 times faster than it’s being replaced. Along with the soil go various pesticides and fertilizers, and when they reach the ocean, those chemicals create vast dead zones, such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi. Fish and other aquatic creatures in these areas die not just from direct exposure to chemicals, but also from being starved for oxygen. This is because the nitrates and phosphorous in fertilizer stimulate the growth of algae, which grows so fast that it uses up all the oxygen in the water, leaving nothing for the fish. These chemicals also make their way into groundwater, polluting drinking water supplies for rural and urban communities alike.

To give you a local example, this past summer, the Illinois Sierra Club reported the results of 11 months of water quality tests its members had conducted along a 33.6-mile stretch of the Illinois River near Peoria. Phosphorous levels in the river exceeded amounts considered healthy by the U.S. EPA in seven out of the 11 months that samples were collected. Nitrate levels exceeded safe drinking water standards six times. Additionally, in four samples the levels of dissolved oxygen in the water fell below the amounts that the Illinois EPA considers healthy for aquatic wildlife. The main culprits polluting the Illinois River? City sewage and farm runoff.

In direct damage to agricultural lands and indirect damage to waterways, infrastructure, and human health, soil erosion and related water pollution cost the United States $44 billion each year. And that doesn’t include the costs of importing the fossil fuels needed to manufacture commercial fertilizer. We often think about oil powering our cars and factories, but our agriculture runs on it too. This is a scary thought given recent international developments. Energy experts predict global oil production will peak and then begin a permanent decline in the next 20 years or so, eventually dropping to 10 percent of its current rate by the end of this century.

As if all that weren’t enough, traditional agriculture is also notoriously inefficient. For instance, it takes 10 fossil fuel calories to grow one food calorie here in the United States. And at best, one percent of the pesticides we apply to our farmlands actually reach their targets. So even though we have increased pesticide use more than eightfold since 1950, from 15 million to 125 million pounds, the amount of crops lost to insects has nearly doubled over the same period, from 7 percent to 13 percent of total harvest.

What do all those statistics mean? That the way we grow our food is not sustainable over the long term. Unless we want to risk widespread food shortages and permanent degradation of our agricultural lands, we need to come up with a new way of doing things. Put another way, conventional agriculture has been squandering the natural capital that geological processes have built up over a period of millions of years. Until we start to reverse that process, the Agricultural Revolution that brought humanity to where we are now may eventually prove to be our undoing.

Turning to Natural
Systems Agriculture

That’s where Natural Systems Agriculture (NSA) comes in. The NSA approach was introduced by Wes Jackson, visionary cofounder and president of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Jackson has a Ph.D. in genetics from North Carolina State, and founded the environmental studies program at California State Sacramento in the early 1970s. Since then, he has written several books on people and the land, including New Roots for Agriculture and Becoming Native to This Place, and has won a number of prestigious awards, including a Pew Conservation Scholars Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Right Livelihood Award.

He has come up with a simple, yet brilliant, idea to revitalize American agriculture and farm communities. What if, instead of farming in unsustainable monocultures that drain the soil of its fertility and require enormous chemical and fossil fuel inputs, we instead tried to farm like a tall grass prairie? Prairies run very cheaply — on just sunlight and water. Instead of using up natural capital, they create it from these simple inputs. Their deep root systems make prairies extremely resistant to fires, storms, drought, and other natural disasters; use water and nutrients very efficiently; and hold onto the soil rather than letting it run off into rivers and groundwater.

Prairies also consist of a rich mix of species — a polyculture as opposed to the single-species monocultures you’ll see on most of our farmlands. Some prairie plants are legumes, which capture nitrogen from the air and convert it into a form other plants can use (nitrogen is a key ingredient of fertilizer). Some tolerate shade, while others like direct sunlight. Some prefer poor, rocky soil, while others need rich, deep soil. Some even produce natural pesticides. In addition to the roles of the individual plants, the great diversity of a prairie ecosystem also provides a built-in safety net: if one type of plant does poorly one year, because of climate change or insect predators or disease, other types of plants will likely do well, keeping the prairie, as a whole, healthy and resilient.

But how can we get all the ecological and efficiency benefits of a prairie, while also having the high grain yields traditional agriculture can give us? The key, according to Jackson, is mimicking the structure of a prairie to achieve its functions (as described above). Through more than two decades of painstaking research, Jackson and other researchers at the Land Institute have demonstrated that an NSA — based on the tall grass prairie — is feasible. (Independent researchers in Sweden and Australia are also developing NSAs that draw on the natural communities of their own regions.)

This perennial polyculture would consist of at least four species grown together, one from each of the four functional groups of plants on the prairie — warm-season grasses, cool-season grasses, legumes, and composites. Land Institute researchers have been investigating both breeding wild perennials for higher grain production, and hybridizing perennials with related, higher-yielding annuals. For instance, they’ve been field-testing a combination of Illinois bundleflower (a legume whose seed contains 38 percent protein), mammoth wild rye (a cool-season grass), eastern gammagrass (a warm-season grass related to corn but with three times more protein), and Maximilian sunflower.

Allies and Enemies of NSA

To get from where the Land Institute is now to the end goal of a fully developed, high-yielding, perennial NSA, Jackson estimates his group would need about five million dollars annually for the next 25 years. That may sound like a lot, but when you compare it to the billions we lose annually to erosion and water pollution, it starts to look pretty cheap. It’s also less than a fraction of 1 percent of what the United States spends on conventional agricultural research each year. So far, Jackson has "hit a brick wall" with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And as you might imagine, purveyors of the fertilizers and pesticides that NSA would replace haven’t exactly been too keen on the idea, either.

But NSA has a lot of natural allies, too, especially among farmers and others who live in rural communities — and, of course, among all of us who eat farm produce and drink the water that farm runoff empties into. For one thing, as Jackson puts it, "Farms have become among the most dangerous places to live." A recent study of cancer risks among farmers found that "significant excesses occurred for Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma, leukemia, skin melanomas, and cancers of the lip, stomach, and prostate," likely due to the pesticides farmers apply to their fields and ingest from polluted groundwater. Pesticides and other farm chemicals have also been shown to disrupt the human endocrine system, which controls growth and development, metabolic rate, and reproduction.

Just as important as the adverse health effects of the pesticides and other chemicals applied to our farms is what large-scale industrial agriculture does to rural communities and economies when family farms are pushed out of business. When this happens, the families are not the only folks to suffer. Whole communities can disintegrate, leaving towns abandoned and taking people away from a way of life that produces a closer connection to land and nature than many of us will ever experience in the city. NSA would be a powerful way to revitalize these communities because growing perennial polycultures would require the expertise and caring hands of committed farmers more than industrial-style machinery. As the Land Institute says in its mission statement, "When people, land, and community are as one, all three members prosper; when they relate not as members but as competing interests, all three are exploited."

Our current monocultural, industrialized agriculture tends toward exploitation, displacing farmers from their communities and disconnecting them from the land, and depending more on machinery and chemical inputs than on nature. NSA can help reverse this trend, giving us an ecologically stable, agriculturally productive, and socially responsible way to grow the food our country, and many others around the world, depend on.

Get More Info

The Land Institute

U.S. Department of Agriculture

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