Ecology and Agriculture: A Marriage That Must Be Made on Earth : Farming: When half Iowa’s topsoil is lost in 150 years, reliance on man-made chemicals had better yield to nature’s principles.
Once it was the O-word--organic farming--an idea associated with kooks and branded by chemical companies as a sure route to starvation.
Now it goes by many names--sustainable agriculture, alternative agriculture, low-input, regenerative, ecological agriculture. To the surprise of nearly everyone, those are now buzzwords in Washington among the committees preparing the 1990 farm bill. We may be on our way toward kinder, gentler farming.
In September, the National Research Council concluded a four-year study of America’s organic agriculture. In summary, Committee Chairman John Pesek of Iowa State University said: “Our committee is convinced that such methods do work, that they would produce an ample food supply if widely adopted, and that our nation’s environmental problems and health concerns due to pesticide residues would be reduced. The potential benefits of alternative agriculture are too attractive to continue to lie fallow.”
Agricultural and environmental experts assembled a month later in Salina, Kan., to celebrate what geneticist Wes Jackson, co-director of Salina’s Land Institute and convener of the meeting, called the marriage--or maybe the engagement, or at least the courtship--of ecology and agriculture.
Prof. David Pimentel of the College of Agriculture at Cornell opened the ceremonies with a zinging testimony on why this marriage is badly needed. American agriculture may look successful, he said, but it can’t last. Not economically, not environmentally. It is unsustainable.
Preventable soil erosion costs the nation $44 billion a year in fertilizers carried off fields, in decreased crop production and in eroded soil piling up behind dams, silting up canals and polluting waters. To put that number in perspective, the food and fiber sectors account for about $700 billion a year of the U.S. gross national product. Of that amount, roughly $30 billion is farmers’ net income, which is supplemented with another $25 billion in government price supports.
Soil loss from erosion is, on average, 16 times the rate of soil formation. Half the topsoil in Iowa has disappeared in just 150 years of farming. About 100 million acres of U.S. cropland have been so severely degraded that they have been abandoned.
The only reason this soil loss has not yet shown up as enormous drops in yield is that farmers have been able to disguise it with purchased fertilizers made from fossil fuels. They are substituting oil for soil, a non-renewable resource for a renewable one, a practice that can last only as long as oil is cheap.
Between 1945 and 1975, the nation blacktopped an area of prime agricultural land the size of Ohio and Pennsylvania combined. As land has been lost to pavement, it has been gained from wetlands. Half the nation’s wetlands have been drained for agricultural use, with an immeasurable loss in wildlife, ground water recharge and flood control.
The government spends $4 billion a year subsidizing irrigation, causing farmers to waste artificially cheap water. Irrigation districts are, on average, mining aquifers 25% faster than the ground waters are being recharged. In the Texas Gulf area, the overdraft is 77%.
Livestock in the United States eat 10 times more grain than the human population. Their manure contains five times more soil nutrients than farmers buy in fertilizer, but only a fifth of that nutrient is used effectively. The rest is a massive pollution problem.
Farmers spray a billion pounds of poison on the land each year to kill pests. They lose 37% of crops to pests, anyway. The loss rate is slowly increasing, though pesticide use is also increasing. Why? Because pesticides allow farmers--for awhile--to plant huge swaths of a single crop, a standing attraction to pests. Because pesticides wipe out pest-eating predators. Because 25% to 50% of air-sprayed pesticide doesn’t hit the intended field, and 98% doesn’t hit the pest. Because the more pesticides are used, the more pests evolve to become resistant to them.
One price we pay for the pesticide habit is 45,000 human poisonings a year. Those are only diagnosed and reported incidents of acute poisonings--not the cancers that may come years later. Another price is $1.2 billion for monitoring wells, inadequately, for pesticide residues. (The pesticides themselves cost $4.1 billion a year.) The cost of poisons working through ecosystems--affecting birds, fish and the microbial populations of soils--is uncountable.
Pimentel calculates that pesticide use in this country could be reduced by 50% with no decrease in yield, and with a food-price increase of only 0.6%.
Our unsustainable, unecological agriculture cannot--and should not--continue. The good news, reported by many speakers at the celebration in Salina, is that it doesn’t have to. Where ecology and agriculture have gotten together, the partnership works. Quietly, with little help from science or government, thousands of American farmers have been pioneering a new form of modern, high-yield agriculture using industry much less and the nutrient-cycling, pest-controlling principles of nature much more.
About 5% of American farms are now “low-input” (but not low-output)--in total, about 100,000 farms, in all parts of the country, of all sizes, raising all types of crops. The National Research Council study profiles 11 of them, including a 720-acre mixed farm in Ohio, a 1,280-acre vineyard in California, a 284,000-acre cattle ranch in Colorado. They use no commercial fertilizers and few or no manufactured pesticides; they build and protect their soils; they keep down weeds with cultivation and cleverness. They fight pests with natural enemies and by breaking up monocultures and rotating crops. They do not drench their animals with drugs or hormones.
Their yields are comparable to those of their high-input neighbors. Their production costs are much lower; their selling prices are often, because of an “organic premium,” higher. They are doing right well.
The relationship between ecology and agriculture has come as far as it has against strong parental opposition, not only from chemical companies, but also, most of the time, from government and agriculture schools.
Except at the edges of a few enlightened experiment stations, like the University of Nebraska, and at private facilities, like the Rodale Research Center, there has been, until recently, little serious research on alternative agriculture. A network of 280 low-input farmers calling themselves Practical Farmers of Iowa did its own experimenting and teaching, until it finally got an extension agent at Iowa State. In Nebraska, 359 alternative farmers created their own on-farm demonstration system. Each farm is open to visitors, with a sign labeling it and a special mailbox stuffed with one-page sheets written by the farmer describing what cover crops are used, how erosion is reduced, how soil fertility is restored, pests are kept in balance, weeds are controlled.
Even in the face of disapproval and ridicule, with no help and no official blessing, the romance between ecology and agriculture has been thriving. Garth Youngberg of the Institute for Alternative Agriculture contrasted where organic farming is now, compared with 10 years ago.
The number of farms under low-input practices has roughly tripled. In 1979, only three states had legislation stipulating rules for certifying organic produce. Now 20 states do, and many more are working on it. Most land-grant universities are now instituting research on low-input management. Major grocery chains, in response to consumer pressure, are finally providing a significant market for foods raised without troublesome chemicals.
For the last three years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided funding for Low Input Sustainable Agriculture research, at the level last year of $4.5 million. Rumors are that the 1990 farm bill will increase that to $6 million, maybe even to $10 million.
You can see that as amazing progress, or you can see it, as some of the speakers in Salina did, as only a vapor in the bucket. Of the 800 research proposals received by the sustainable-agriculture research program in the past two years, only 74 could be funded. Even at $10 million, the program would be barely visible in the government’s $600-million budget for agricultural research.
But it’s visible enough to upset the chemical companies. Some industry spokesmen are labeling alternative agriculture as “unilateral disarmament.” Others, however, are acknowledging the problems of high-chemical agriculture and coming up with their own Washington buzzwords, “Best Management Practices.” That means using plenty of chemicals, but using them less wastefully--not spraying until pests actually appear, for instance, and doing soil tests instead of automatically pouring on a nitrogen-rich fertilizer.
Marriage is, above all, a state of mind, a commitment. The agricultural Establishment in Washington may already be committed--to industry, money and power. But there’s hope that the next farm bill will provide some help to those 100,000 or more farmers out on the land who are committed to the health of the soils, the waters, the plants, the animals, the farmer--and the consumer.
