BRYAN WELCH

My neighbor Bill is a great asset to me. He understands machines. When one of my machines isn’t running and I have no idea how to fix it (pretty much every time), I can ask Bill and get a reasonable, logical and well-informed set of directions. Typically, just what I need. In his own shop he has a Farmall H tractor he’s restored, a garden tractor he built from scratch and a 2,000-pound belt-driven drill press he picked up somewhere. His place is immaculate and Bill’s just about the fittest 80-year-old you’ll ever meet.

Bill spends most of his time caring for his wife, Beverly, who has Parkinson’s Disease. I tell Bill she’s lucky to have him. He says he’s lucky to have her.

Beverly’s taken a turn for the worse since she had knee surgery recently, and the other day a for-sale sign showed up on Bill’s lawn. He told me they’re moving into a retirement home. He’s decided he needs a little more help to give Beverly the life they want for her.

He invited me over to look at some of his farm equipment and tools he won’t need any more.

“I have a lot of projects, but I guess I ran out of time,” he said.

And it occurred to me that he didn’t mean he ran out of time that day, or this week. He meant he’d run out of time. He sounded disappointed but he wasn’t maudlin. Bill seemed to figure running out of time — running out of life, as it were — is a perfectly natural state of affairs.

I guess that’s right.

PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

We haven’t traditionally assigned much value to natural productivity except when it was producing something we could eat, wear or burn for fuel. Predictably, David Tilman’s research is inspired by the hunt for new biofuels — renewable resources that might replace petroleum products. He suggests that someday our cars might run on so-called “cellulosic” ethanol created from grass. Ethanol created from cellulose could be derived from nearly any plant, so why not the plants that naturally grow more profusely, the native plants of the prairie?

Cool idea, unless your children are among the millions currently starving for lack of corn, wheat, rice or some other staple foodstuff that might be grown on that property. We’ve clearly demonstrated that we can spike grain prices with burgeoning new demand from ethanol manufacturers. Poor people around the world are straining to pay for food made expensive this year by the demand for ethanol.

On top of everything else, there’s good evidence that while our population is expanding we’re also wrecking some of the natural machinery we use to create our food. Setting aside the excesses of industrial agriculture and the short-term damage they do to farmland, we’re still tearing down important environmental assets the old-fashioned way, by burning forests and overgrazing grasslands.

 

PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

Most North American farms of the 21^st century are, comparatively speaking, biological wastelands. Plowed, fertilized and cultivated from property-line to property-line, much of the Great Plains has been stripped of its wildlife. Walk through a soybean field anywhere in the Midwest, then take the same sort of stroll through a native prairie in the same region (if you can find one). The contrast is shocking. The prairie, especially the dominant “tallgrass” prairie, is among the world’s most fecund environments. Dozens of species thrive in a thick carpet of plants growing unbelievably fast. In three months I have watched an acre of my undisturbed pasture grow six tons of grass. One acre, three months, six tons.

Ecologist David Tilman has been studying the productivity of the prairie at Minnesota’s Cedar Creek Natural History Area for more than a decade. He has compared the productivity of the land planted in a natural mixture of several species with the same land planted with only one highly useful species. In the December 2006 issue of Scientific American he reported that the diverse natural prairie produced 238 percent more “bioenergy” than the same land planted in one species. Furthermore, the diverse, natural prairie stores two-thirds of its productivity underground, making a native grassland naturally carbon-negative, no matter what the tops of the plants are used for. The soybean field produces a lot of food, but it produces comparatively little life, for what that’s worth.

 

PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

This is no chicken-little scenario. Agribusiness is not destroying the human habitat (although it probably could, given time). We need to give due credit to the architects of the first “green revolution.” The benefits of agricultural productivity are real. We have fed a lot more people than would have been possible without technology. But a lot of people believe that the world would be a better place if we re-focused agricultural priorities on local food, environmental preservation and healthy farmers.

Agriculture’s green revolution underlines in a powerful way this basic biological fact: We live at the expense of other creatures. Every living thing does. We can, through symbiotic relationships or good husbandry, cooperate with other creatures to increase biological productivity overall, but at the end of the day if we disappeared, other living things would take advantage of the resources we no longer consumed.

And because I am alive — because you are alive — a lot of other creatures never get the chance to live. 

PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

The first “green revolution” has not been an unqualified success. It’s had its downsides. Farmers have generally stopped raising their own food as production has shifted to “monocultural” crops with global market value. So, when economies decline and geopolitical structures teeter, farmers are in the same dire straits as everyone else. They have, largely, surrendered their ability to live off their land or to supply their own communities with a balanced diet. The visionary scientist Wes Jackson[1] describes modern agricultural economies as “brittle.” When an entire region depends on a single product — say corn — and an unusual weather pattern devastates the corn crop one year, the region’s economy is also devastated. Most modern farmers don’t even raise their own vegetable gardens.

Pesticides, herbicides and industrial fertilizers pollute water supplies and destroy wildlife. Even as the White House and the Ford Foundation were trumpeting industrial agriculture’s achievements, Rachel Carson was taking note of the sudden decline of wildlife around the world where pesticides were used. New health problems proliferated in farming communities around the world. According to the National Cancer Institute within the U.S. National Institutes of Health, farm workers face unusually high incidence of leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, multiple myeloma, soft tissue sarcomas, and cancers of the skin, lip, stomach, brain and prostate.[2]

The bare earth between the rows of corn or soybeans erodes in the absence of the root structures and decomposing plant matter that enrich undisturbed soils. Plant varieties are developed to maximize the nutrition derived from every square meter. As that nutrition is pulled from the soil and trucked away to feed human beings and livestock, the soil is depleted and the crops are increasingly dependent on artificial fertilizers. Those fertilizers are specifically designed to benefit the crops immediately, and have no lasting positive impact. The soil is, gradually, robbed of its natural assets.

Furthermore, there’s good evidence that, as we’ve increased the productivity of our farmland, we’ve also made our food less nutritious. Some studies suggest that up to 75 percent of the natural minerals we would expect to find in a piece of fruit or a bowl of spinach may be missing if our fruits and vegetables are grown with aggressive industrial agricultural practices. [3]

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