Postcards from the Heartland
By Ingrid Evjen-Elias*
Segment 1 -
Dreams of Kansas
The Plains, according to those who know little about them, are flat, boring, and just plain dull.
I, too, was ignorant about this huge swatch of the country. When we first started planning our trip to the Midwest, I had to consult a map to find out which states border Kansas. Supercilious coastal urbanites were incredulous when Katharine and I mentioned we were about to embark on a 500-mile bike journey through southern Nebraska and Kansas. “You’re going to the box states, the red states?!” they chuckled. “But why?” And they call Kansans closed-minded.
Neither of us had attempted more than an overnight bike journey before, and we found traveling on two wheels to be an extraordinarily intimate way to experience the land – the smells, the dips, the weather.
But rural America, that chunk of the U.S about which many of us on either coast know so little, also produces the majority of our food. And not coincidentally, the Heartland is suffering. A New York Times article in the December 2003 series “Vanishing Point – The Empty Heartland” noted that 7 of the nation’s 12 poorest counties are located in rural Nebraska.
“The decline of rural society,” writes Ohio farmer Gene Logsdon, “leads unerringly to the decline of urban society.” If we see food and food production as a lens through which we can view all of our relationships -- cultural, social, economic, and ecological – then a crisis in the nation’s Heartland signifies a profound crisis for us all.
So, fitting our bicycles with plastic peanut-butter bucket panniers, Katharine and I took a train to Lincoln, Nebraska.
Biking south from Lincoln through wave after orderly wave of wheat about to be harvested, we felt like tadpoles swimming in an ocean. After two days of furious biking we arrived in Salina, Kansas, just in time for a weekend course at The Land Institute , a non-profit research organization dedicated to promoting socially and ecologically stable agriculture.
The philosopher-scientists at The Land Institute describe industrialized agriculture as intensely dependent on fossil fuels and thus disastrous for both the land and for its inhabitants. Plowing the land annually to grow vast monocultures means that literally tons of topsoil erode away. To compensate for this loss of nutrients and to keep up production, conventional farmers feed the dying soil a drug cocktail of petroleum-based chemicals.
Because they have significantly longer roots, native perennials are much more effective at holding down topsoil than are annuals. Researchers have grown different plant varieties in a preservative so that the roots remain after the substrate is washed off. The compass plant, a Kansas native, has roots that can reach up to 12 feet deep!
The Land Institute believes what they call Natural Systems Agriculture is a more viable approach than subjecting the soil to yearly chemotherapy treatments.
NSA involves planting different kinds of crops that mimic ecological patterns. Growing a diversity of mutually beneficial crops means the farmer doesn’t
have to control every aspect of the crop system by plowing and applying herbicides and fertilizers.
Jerry Glover, of The Land Institute.
“One thing that we have found as human beings -- we don’t make very good micromanagers of complex processes on large landscape areas. And most of our current agricultural management strategies, like most of our other behavior, is based on minutely controlling and regulating those processes. We have some three million miles of tiledrain in the Midwest. That’s to regulate the flow of water to the soil. And it’s not working. We try it with nutrients…controlling nitrification….we would rather plants, the vegetative structures, be the micromanagers of those complex processes, rather than us having to constantly be out there turning some switch or knob or something to try and get a complex system to do what we think it needs to do,” said Jerry Glover.
Some say a quicker way to solve farmers’ problems is through crop biotechnology. We had our own questions about the implications of genetically engineered crops, so after leaving the Land Institute we called up the biotech company Syngenta.
Researchers at The Land Institute hope to breed perennial grain varieties by crossing native grasses with annual grains (Here is triticale, a relative of wheat). Although they have had some success, they admit that the process will take generations.
Chris Novac, Syngenta’s science communications manager, was planning to attend BIO 2004 that week, the largest biotech gathering in the U.S. Novac seemed eager to discuss the corporation’s efforts to develop disease-resistant wheat varieties for the Dakotas. But when I asked him if he thought growing crops in monocultures is ecologically problematic, he dodged the question by answering in economic language.
Chris Novac, of Syngenta.
“What I’d prefer to focus on, and that is the idea of serving farmers… farmers have been from very early days extremely responsive to the marketplace. And we do have today a situation where we’ve got tremendous new uses for corn and for soybeans, which has created the demand for those products, has pushed up the price that farmers receive for those products. And accordingly, farmers are planting corn and soybeans because they know that when the crop is harvested they can walk away with money in the bank as opposed to struggling from year to year,” said Chris Novac.
Farmers we met later would confirm Novac’s assessment that farming nowadays is a struggle. Escalating costs of land, equipment and fertilizer, compounded with low returns, have left many growers without much choice but to chase the whims of the market or lose their farms. Even farmers who recognize topsoil erosion and water contamination are forced to seek higher and higher yields of crops by any means they can – with more chemicals, or by growing genetically-modified crops.
Despite the biotech industry’s assertions otherwise, agronomist Dr. Charles Benbrook of the Northwest Science and Environmental Policy Center (NSEPC) concludes in his article “Monsanto’s Big Lie Exposed” that growing Roundup Ready soybeans requires 2-5 times more herbicides than does growing conventional beans! A 2001 NSEPC report states that the biotech industry’s claims regarding herbicides and GMO soybeans "fall somewhere between misleading and dishonest.”
The USDA estimates that 2004-2005 corn production will reach a record high of 11.8 billion bushels, with a surplus of 2.05 billion bushels.
The basic assumption behind Novac’s position is that the market knows best. According to Syngenta, as long as farmers demand the products, the ecological considerations are less relevant.
Fred Kirschenmann, Director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, believes that nature, not the market, has the last word. Kirschenmann agrees with the Land Institute and believes that growing crops in monocultures is what’s causing crop disease in the first place.
Fred Kirschenmann, of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.
“Whenever one species becomes too dense within an ecological neighborhood, then nature finds a way to reduce the numbers of that species in order to bring it back to some synergy within that system. When you have these enormously dense species, whether its plants or animals, you’re constantly struggling against nature’s effort to reduce that. And so we have increased diseases, we have increased pests of various kinds; these are all part of having to struggle to keep that system going. In my view, we need to go back to – we need to go forward, rather I should say -- into a more intelligent, diversified farming system on the landscape. Transgenic technology is simply another tool to make the monoculture work a little longer, but it’s contrary to the system,” said Fred Kirschenmann.
A field of wheat in Kansas. Wheat farmers in Montana and North Dakota are trying to pass Farmer Protection Acts to shield themselves from lawsuits should their fields be accidentally contaminated with GM wheat.
We left Salina with more questions than answers. Biotechnology doesn’t seem to be a solution. Natural Systems Agriculture is promising, but may take years to develop. Meanwhile, farmers are forced to make choices that are unhealthy for the soil in order to compete in the marketplace.
Back swimming in wheat, we tadpole-bikers had become more observant. We noticed topsoil-choked streams, a product of intensive plowing. Dusty machine graveyards reminded us of the race for faster and more expensive machines that’s driving many a small farmer out of business.
Once we stopped our bikes and crossed a busy highway to interview a farmer spraying his crops with chemicals. Imagine his surprise when two random bikers called out over a dripping field that we were from California and would like to chat with him. He refused, and gruffly drove off to continue spraying. This farmer’s reticence was a rare exception to the overwhelming friendliness that we would experience from most locals.
