Bringing Farms Back to Nature

Sporting a mechanic’s navy jumpsuit and a swipe of engine grease on his upper lip, farmer Fred Kirschenmann stops tinkering with the fan belt on his green-and-yellow John Deere tractor and strides toward a visitor, thrusting forward a paw the size of a catcher’s glove.

After a few quick pleasantries, the erstwhile theology professor launches into a fervid, if well-practiced, lecture about the perils of mainstream farming--with its heavy emphasis on harsh chemicals--and the promise of a gentler agriculture.

He talks of “ecological neighborhoods” and “tilth” and the intricate links among earthworms, yellow-blossom sweet clover and yellow-headed blackbirds on his central North Dakota farm.

He expounds on the need for urbanites to understand that food doesn’t really grow on trees--even though much of it does, of course.

And he pleads for farmers to cooperate with nature, rather than attempt to dominate it.

What he advocates is “sustainable agriculture”--a farming approach that resists the usual reliance on man-made fertilizers and weed killers. Rather, it favors techniques that preserve the environment and people’s health while providing the nation’s dwindling ranks of family farmers with a decent living and a reason to plow on instead of relinquishing their fields to agribusiness giants or housing developers.

Kirschenmann--strapping and square-shouldered at 62--is the very embodiment of this seemingly revolutionary yet old-fashioned approach.

Once a fringe notion espoused primarily by back-to-nature longhairs in Birkenstocks, the sustainable movement is entering the agricultural mainstream, endorsed by big vintners in California, corn growers in Wisconsin and truck farmers in Maine.

The reason: a spreading realization that the abundance resulting from the post-World War II push toward high-yield industrial agriculture has produced enormous consequences--in tainted ground water, depleted soil and shrinking farm towns.

“Before the chemical era, everything was sustainable,” said Aref A. Abdul-Baki, a rare researcher on sustainability at the federal Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Md. “But the conventional agrichemical system put more chemicals into the environment than it could handle. Something has got to be done.”

With the passion of revolutionaries, proponents promote reduced dependence on chemicals and fuel, lessened reliance on bank loans and government subsidies, and greater adaptation to nature. Anathema to their philosophy are the mega-operations that account for most U.S. food production. For farming to be ecological, Kirschenmann argues, it must be run by people who know the land intimately--not corporate managers in some faraway office.

He points to Chris and Marcie Baugher, who farm 120 acres of organic almonds in Artois, north of Sacramento. To minimize tractor use, they enlist draft horses.

“I would quit farming before I’d go back to using chemicals,” said Chris Baugher, who split off from his family to begin using sustainable techniques. “I feel too good about what I’m doing.”

Nationwide the movement has given rise to hundreds of groups large and small, such as the World Sustainable Agriculture Assn. in West Hollywood and the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program at UC Davis.

Slowly, some conventional farmers are getting on board. The approach is “gaining respectability,” said George Bird, a professor at Michigan State University, who speculates that 5% of U.S. farming uses sustainable practices to discourage problem bugs, preserve soil and improve crops. Among them: the California vineyards owned by the huge E&J; Gallo Winery.

But, Bird notes, most of those on the nation’s 2 million farms can recount a litany of reasons--age, tradition, fear, market pressures--why they won’t attempt it.

Sustainable agriculture seeks to go beyond organic growers’ focus on how farms produce food. It means figuring out how to keep farm families solvent, rural communities alive and the environment intact for decades to come.

In many ways, the movement has been propelled by Kirschenmann. His innovations have won over many a reluctant ag advisor, researcher and farmer.

“Fred is a real leader and a visionary,” said Chuck Hassebrook, program director with the Center for Rural Affairs, a think tank in Walthill, Neb. “There is not a better person to represent what this is all about.”

A Push for Foods Produced Locally

Bouncing along rutted gravel roads in his sturdy 1982 Ford pickup, Kirschenmann talks about the importance of “food security.” Communities, he said, must learn how to survive on foods that, to the extent possible, can be grown and/or processed locally. That could help stem the precipitous loss of small and medium-size farms, which in this country are failing at the rate of 500 a week.

“Our first priority should be to raise food from our ecological neighborhoods, for people in our ecological neighborhoods and in a way that keeps ecological neighborhoods healthy,” he said. “The ultimate solution is for farmers and consumers to have much more direct connections.

“It means buying local food. Once people see what’s fresh, then they’re sold. You begin to realize that variety in food is not having kiwi fruit from New Zealand in January in North Dakota but instead having 100 different kinds of root vegetables we can grow in North Dakota to provide our dietary needs.”

By extension, that suggests it’s better for a North Dakotan to eat locally canned fruits and vegetables in winter rather than fresh produce from California--even as the government and nutritionists are touting the health advantages of fresh produce.

Under the vast azure sky, where cotton-puff clouds skitter by, Kirschenmann surveys part of the patchwork of noncontiguous plots that make up the 3,100 acres of Kirschenmann Family Farms Inc. Here, he and his wife, Carolyn Raffensperger, raise a bevy of organic crops.

Even after weeks without rain, his fields feel spongy and crumbly underfoot, unlike the compacted, powder-fine soil found on many conventional farms. He scoops up a handful of dirt, pointing with a calloused finger to an earthworm that had been obligingly aerating the soil inches below the surface.

This soil is alive, dark and rich-looking, with a fertility that is palpable. Bugs, birds, bees and bacteria thrive on his farm in a complex ecosystem. Years of using a rotary hoe to turn cover crops back into the soil plus frequent applications of tons of composted cow manure have enhanced the “tilth”--the soil’s structure, nutrients and ability to hold moisture.

Of his acreage, nearly one-third remains as unplowed prairie used for grazing cattle. The rest is for crops--including wheat, flax, buckwheat and millet--planted in a meticulous rotation to prevent pests, weeds and disease from taking hold and to take best advantage of potential markets.

Each year, a few hundred acres are planted in yellow-blossom sweet clover. The deep-rooted legume builds a vital nutrient--nitrogen--and provides carbon, which holds the nitrogen in the ground. No need to apply man-made fertilizer before a cash crop is planted.

The clover also serves as a habitat for beneficial bugs that eat destructive pests, thus ruling out insecticides. And, when worked back down into the soil, it impedes the growth of weeds, staving off the call for chemical herbicides once the cash crop goes in. In dry years like this one, when the alfalfa is stunted, the clover also provides backup feed for 184 head of beef cattle. They provide the manure.

Conventional farmers, Kirschenmann said, tend to take a black-or-white view. “Bad” species get annihilated with chemicals. Such arrogance, he added, puts mankind at odds with nature.

“You can get away with that for awhile,” Kirschenmann noted. “But you have to ask, what else are you affecting?”

Plenty. In recent years, Iowa communities have had to dig deeper wells because ground water has become contaminated with nitrates from synthetic fertilizers. Throughout the Midwest, Kirschenmann said, soil is so battered that the phenomenal gains in corn and soybean yields of years past have leveled off or harvests have actually started to decline.

In parts of Nebraska, farmers must irrigate continuously at tremendous cost because runoff occurs after half an inch of water. And in California, growers of strawberries and other crops continue to use the fumigant methyl bromide, despite the nasty risks it poses to laborers and consumers.

From harsh experience, Kirschenmann has learned to adapt. He points to a flock of yellow-headed blackbirds swooping down beyond a corrugated steel shed. Eleven months of the year, these birds are the farmer’s friends, consuming troublesome bugs. But come August they can pick a sunflower field practically clean.

A few years back, when somebody proposed killing off the blackbirds with malathion, Kirschenmann took another path.

“The birds are habitual, with specific flight patterns,” he said. They gravitated toward sunflower fields between the wetland cattails where they nested and the trees where they roosted. “In our rotation, we try to avoid those fields. If we can’t, blackbirds also like millet. [So we] plant a millet field adjacent to the sunflowers.”

With careful monitoring--and a few fanciful bird-scare balloons--Kirschenmann holds the birds’ portion of his sunflower seeds to 5%, and “we owe them that for the good they do the rest of the year.”

Agriculture used to be more like this, he said. His own farming roots reach deeply.

Kirschenmann’s German forebears farmed in Russia, where roving outlaws made it necessary to plow with the reins in one hand and a weapon in the other. They fled to the Great Plains rather than be drafted to fight Communist revolutionaries.

In 1930, Theo “Ted” Kirschenmann, Fred’s father, began accumulating fields as homesteaders vacated. Many of them were driven away in the 1930s by the Dust Bowl, a devastating combination of drought and windstorms that whirled away hundreds of millions of tons of rich topsoil.

Soil, he came to realize, is the equivalent of money in the bank; to do it harm is a travesty. When man-made fertilizers came into vogue, a wary Ted Kirschenmann consulted with the county agent, who assured him that the new chemicals would be a boon. Sure enough, yields rose, and he became a believer.

Synthetic chemicals made it possible to specialize in one or two crops. That led to efficiency, which in turn yielded greater production and profits--just as in auto and other manufacturing. As in industry, the new farm system tended to favor big corporate operations over smaller family businesses.

Meanwhile, an Iowa-born agronomist named Norman Borlaug had begun using plant-breeding technologies to ensure bigger harvests of cereal crops. His theories, dependent on the use of man-made fertilizers, gave rise to a global Green Revolution--and a 1970 Nobel Prize for Borlaug--with its promise of feeding developing nations and setting them on the path to progress.

As Borlaug was spurring chemical use, Fred was off studying theology. In 1970, while a college teacher and administrator, he was struck by a student’s research showing the steady deterioration of soil farmed with heavy doses of nitrogen fertilizer. Conventional farming created a chemical treadmill: Farmers would use a pesticide, then find the next year that bugs had grown resistant, forcing them to resort to newer, more expensive products. By this time, too, Rachel Carson in “Silent Spring” had exposed the health hazards of DDT.

Ted acknowledged the decline of his own soil. But, close to 70, he felt it was too late to change. After his father suffered a heart attack in 1976, Fred offered to move back to the farm--if he could run it organically.

The family land here in Medina and in Windsor, 25 miles northeast, lies in prairie pothole country, so called for the glacier-scoured depressions and sloughs that dot the landscape. Here, the younger Kirschenmann began experimenting with crop rotations, seeking an ideal alternating mix of cash grain crops and soil-building legumes.

It hasn’t been easy.

“When we first started, the feedback [from neighbors] was, ‘They’re going to lose their shirts,’ ” Kirschenmann said. “In farming, when you make mistakes, they’re out there for people to see.”

By the early ‘80s, though, other farmers were taking notice. Lately, some neighbors have told him that what he is doing is probably the right thing. However, they contend, the declining prices for some grains and the rising costs of farming make chemicals necessary to keep boosting yields. Besides, how could they fill the farmer’s vaunted role of feeding the world if they switched methods?

Darold Lang, a soybean, wheat and cattle man in Steele, N.D., west of where Kirschenmann farms, illustrates the dilemma. “I hate working with the chemicals, and, yes, I’m worried about ground water,” he said, downing a gravy-soaked pork sandwich and mashed potatoes at the Cafe in Dawson, a down-at-heels farm town off Interstate 94.

Lang suspects that farm chemicals exacerbate his respiratory problems. But the big drawback is that he believes his land isn’t suited to rotation.

Does he consider Kirschenmann and other sustainable proponents to be misguided?

“No, not really,” said Lang, 57, a widower whose two grown children want nothing to do with farming. “They used to farm that way. People got pushed into using fertilizers and chemicals to raise more. But it’s not pleasant.”

Still Far From Sustainable

As good a steward of the land as Kirschenmann strives to be, he freely acknowledges that his own operation is far from sustainable. His trucks and tractors consume immense amounts of diesel fuel, and the nearest organic grain processing plant is 250 miles away. The U.S. buyer of much of his wheat ships it overseas, undermining the push for local consumption.

All this troubles Raffensperger, a longtime environmental activist. “We have gone for stability in markets,” she said. “But we are very conscious of how much we export and . . . the energy used.”

The couple have taken steps to participate in regional companies such as AgGrow Oils in nearby Carrington, N.D., a fledgling operation that will process 431 North Dakota growers’ oil seeds for niche markets. And Raffensperger is urging bread makers to use more buckwheat and millet.

In their Windsor garden, she tends potatoes, parsnips, beets, sweet corn and tomatoes. Nearby, other farmers grow chokecherries, wild plums, raspberries, strawberries and rhubarb--products that can be preserved for wintry months. Such foods, she said, could satisfy residents’ need for Vitamin C, yet most depend on fruits and vegetables shipped in from California. The key, she added, is educating America’s food customers.

Kirschenmann and other advocates recognize that the United States won’t become a nation of sustainable farmers overnight. Not with chemical companies investing billions of dollars in research and development. And not with the resistance to alternatives that pervades farming.

But he sees cause for hope.

“Farmers all over . . . are making the transition,” he said. “Conventional farming is so energy-intensive. If energy costs go up, as they almost certainly will, farmers will have to look for other options. And the ecological approach is one that works.”