Creative Destruction in Agriculture

By JIM VAN DER POL

Sometimes an economic, or a social or political loss is so apparent that it hits you in the face. But too often, really almost always in agriculture, you have to look for it to see it. Such was the case in our extremely wet 2018 growing season here on the wet prairies of western Minnesota.

The farm just north of us was all planted in corn which the neighboring dairy factory cut for corn silage. Silage is a time sensitive operation and even more more so when huge quantities must be cut, quantities enough to feed ten thousand milking cows. It was cut in the constant rain, with track tractors pushing semi trucks through the mud as they were filled by the forage harvester. The operation left wheel ruts, some as deep as two feet, pretty much from one end of the farm to the other.

The rains continued through September and those ruts stood full of water. There simply was no more room in the soil for water. The water table was essentially at the surface. In late October, the dairy laid out flexible piping along roads and through crossing culverts to pump out its manure filled lagoon. These pipes are laid for miles, getting to each field that is to get the manure. It is applied by a large track tractor pulling the flexible hose at the end back and forth across the field injecting the material about a foot into the ground. The operator got the farm north of us manured in about two days, driving across and through all those water filled ruts. He could hardly have done otherwise; the ruts were everywhere. At the field ends the manure puddled and stood on the surface next to the rain water in the ruts. In many areas the manure was put directly into the standing rain and ground water in the ruts. The farm stood that way until freezeup.

The country rule is to avoid criticizing your neighbor. After all, in a dire situation such as a fire or tornado or terminal disease you are apt to need him. The rest of the population and certainly the government is too far away often to be much help. But these things are serious, critical to the health of my water well and the survival of my grandchildren and everyone else’s. This is about water quality and soil health, the two most important matters dealt with by agriculture. So I will try to focus just upon practices, not people.

I am tired, after a lifetime of fighting the direction of agriculture, of the constant assumption in our culture that we must accept whatever new thing technology comes up with and adjust our humanity accordingly. In farming, the new thing always involves more consolidation and fewer people. We have lived for a long time now in farming and also now in the entire economy with the effects of “creative destruction” I have come to hate that arrogant phrase for the upset, human misery and waste it causes and partially hides. But it is soon apparent, if you go to the hearings that precede the building of these things, that people do not count. You cannot make the argument on the basis of smell, or vastly increased truck traffic in the neighborhood, or destruction of rural beauty for rural residents. Even the demonstrable fact that each of these huge factories is the cause of the failure of many smaller farms, often by the processing industry squeezing them out in favor of the big supply, is dismissed with the same careless wave of the hand. The communities and schools damaged by these failing farms don’t count either.

We are told of the wonders of the calculations that show manure can be spread at agronomic levels and that a suitable number of acres is within reach, that it will “always” be knifed in and that spills do not happen. We are most assuredly not reminded that nature is uncontrollable and that when it comes raging in the front door there will be no enforcement no matter how the rules are infringed.

The counties that permit these things have no enforcement arm and can not afford one. The state agencies that back the counties up or supplant their authority in the case of their having no permit process of their own has little in the way of enforcement capabilities and is sufficiently under the control of industrializing agriculture that it wouldn’t use them at any rate.

All of human life is absolutely dependent upon healthy soil and clean water and has been for centuries. The fact is there is little equivalence between the dangers we are all subjected to by a milking herd of two hundred cows on 300 acres of land, compared with those resulting from 10,000 cows on a few acres with all the feed and manure management contracted out. A wide distribution of economic units and diversity of plant and animal life are both important margins of safety, margins that agriculture honors and agribusiness does not.

There are other margins. For instance, our farm, a much smaller than average hog and cattle production enterprise, keeps the cattle grazing or being fed on the land year around, purposefully avoiding the piling up of manure anywhere as much as possible. The hogs are raised on straw; their manures and urine are mixed with the straw or corn stover carbon source and are stockpiled if they cannot be spread immediately. Plans are always to place these piles where they are surrounded by growing plants, such as a pasture, so that the sod will hold the more liquid parts in suspension and out of the ground water. We have no pressing need to haul this manure out at any given time. We applied no manure late last season. We can always make the pile bigger, or start another, at least within logical limits, to hold the manure longer if needed. This too is a margin. The dairy factory must pump that lagoon every year or it will not hold the daily accumulations.

It is not that a diverse and widely spread agriculture does not make mistakes, or do things in a dangerous manner. But the risk is less because the enterprises are smaller. And the farmer, if he is conscientious, has more margin as he gets the necessary work done. A settled and permanent agriculture always tries to create margins on and around the farm. An agribusiness will regard margins as an inefficiency and a nuisance.

It is our choice. We make it by whose food we buy and who we elect to government.

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, June 1, 2019

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