We Need More People, and Fewer Factories, in Farming

By JIM VAN DER POL

There is considerable anecdotal evidence accumulating that soil organic matter (thus carbon sequestration in the soil) can be built considerably faster than conventional wisdom says it can. Farmers who use planned grazing systems and who incorporate livestock herds into annual cropping rotations, in which they plant and grow cover crops for grazing in between and in addition to the cash crops report increasing organic matter levels from 3% to 5 or 6 percent in the space of not more than a decade. This is not yet scientific dogma, but it is exciting. My own experience with the large and unexpected changes resulting from a change to perennials on my farm suggests to me that it may be possible.

The farmers doing this experimenting are trying to improve their own farms. And it is important to note that they are helping themselves, by encouraging each other. They have the help of a certain number of Natural Resources and Conservation Services employees, a few Soil and Water Conservation District employees as well as certain scattered university scientists. These people are all joining their efforts, in spite of there being no particularly large buy in from their agencies or universities. And the farmers — I include myself here — are but a tiny remnant that has managed through scrappiness, hard work and no small amount of luck over the last decades and generations, to retain a certain level of independence and room to manage their own farms.

Independence is not the norm in American farming. We are now mostly at the mercy of systems imposed from above and for the benefit of those who live by shuffling money rather than working.

My farm, almost impossibly small at just 320 acres, has at least five different soil types, which means different soil composition. Each of them features different natural fertility, each with its own percolation and drainage characteristics, its own ph levels and elevation, with a large variety of different slopes and solar aspects.

Add to this the impact of the weather, the mix of crops and other uses preferred or needed by the owner (me), the needs and contributions of the farm’s two livestock operations, and the changes those uses will encourage or impose upon the land and the situation on this tiny piece of midwestern soil gets very complicated. I do not know, and will not guess, as to the proper level of “eyes to acres” needed to protect and nurture the land we have in use. I will say that it needs to be more than we have now.

Wendell Berry says it well in a recent New York Times issue:

“Agricultural choices must be made by these inescapable standards: the ecological health of the farm and the economic health of the farmer.”

And thus we come into view of the most difficult argument of all. We need more people, not just in agriculture, but in farming. This is because the ecological health of the farm depends upon the proper understanding of the economic health of the farmer. This cannot be some kind of lifelong money chase only. The idea of economic health of the farmer implies the time to work without the goad and prod of hurry, so that the needs of the soil can be noticed and dealt with. We need farmers to identify more as gardeners, rather than as entrepreneurs, farmers to live in as well as on their farms. It is this that will protect and build the ecological health of the farm. And it is impossible not to notice something similar to this is badly needed by all the working people in the nation.

We need to bring the food animals out of confinement. My farm is now surrounded by four dairy factories, each milking 10,000 cows. There is soon to be a fifth. There is also a 5,000-sow hog generating unit in the neighborhood. It is easy to be critical of these establishments, but the fact is that the trend that made these corporate outfits possible started on individual farms decades ago. It was not the corporations that separated the livestock from the land, but individual farmers, always at the prompting of the most modern University advice. If we could legislate against these things, which is a long shot, it wouldn’t work. Legislation cannot accomplish what the farming culture cannot conceive.

What are people for? This question is at the center of many of our modern problems both on and off the farms, from our hysterical politics to our various addictions, our tendency to drift around aimlessly, our faddishness, and our propensity for violence. The goal of the systems we have surrounded ourselves with appears to be the perfect uselessness of all humanity. And don’t take my word for it, ask Silicon Valley, enablers of, among other things the robot revolution and the Uber driverless car.

Facing this question is long overdue on our farms, which have consolidated themselves nearly out of existence, and certainly beyond any person caring about or being willing to take on the complex management tasks that go with care of the soil.

It is difficult not to see the karma in our current situation. We got here by means of several great exterminations, none of which we have so far admitted. Desiring to exterminate the native people, we (the government, the capitalists?) exterminated the bison, upon which the natives depended. We (the settlers) turned the sods of the great tall grass prairie, beginning the extermination of its soil life. The idea driving this was to create great wealth for some by appropriating the fertility of the soil and the labor of many. Having performed these things, what was built in these absences now faces destruction by a changing climate. And the cure I can see is to try as we can to rebuild the soil life we have so foolishly wasted. So far as I know or have been able to read, no one with a white skin ever stood in the tall grass a century and more ago and wondered about what the natives and the bison and the grass had going here. A tragedy of epic proportions. All the more reason to be awake now.

Necessary will be a major move from annual crop plants to perennial plants of all kinds, the bringing of food animals out of confinement and on to the land, and the development of more perennial plants for human food. Also needed will be cultural and governmental support of a more democratic and diversified agricultural market so that we intentionally widen biodiversity and improve the chances of more people on the land, and hopefully thus the management of the land. Many more people pursuing a right livelihood will be required in order to understand, use and protect the earth in all its detail, complexity and diversity. Our agriculture is a considerable distance in the wrong direction, causing more than a little of our social, economic and climate misery. It is not for us to wonder about the shortness of time. Rather we need to take on the work.

Jim Van Der Pol farms near Kerkhoven, Minn. A collection of his columns, Conversations with the Land, was published by No Bull Press (nobullpressonline.com).

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2019

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