A Better Way to Farm
It's been almost a year since I took a couple of cross country road trips to assist a University of South Carolina professor, Dr. Buz Kloot, in filming a USDA video series on cover crops and no till farming:
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail//?cid=STELPRDB1244662
http://dirtdiaries.com/vlog/
The first leg took us up north through the Shenandoah Valley to State College, PA and the second leg took us through the great midwest cornbelt - Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. This journey really opened my eyes to the immense amount of land in this country dedicated solely to the production of two crops: corn and soybeans. The intensity of agricultural productivity in this region was clearly demonstrated by NASA satellite images released in March of measured fluorescence, showing that the midwest has the highest photosynthesis activity of any spot on earth:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-097
The highest intensity fluorescence areas coincide perfectly with the dense and ubiquitous factory farm corn - soybean monoculture areas that I saw first hand on our road trip. While this was greeted by many as an approbation for agrobusiness in the US, recent headlines highlight the environmental problems created by current agricultural practices pervasive in the US and especially concentrated in the midwest. The poisoning of the water supply for almost half a million people in Toledo due to a toxin produced by an algae bloom in Lake Erie is a prime example of this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/lifting-ban-toledo-says-its-water-is-safe-to-drink-again.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/science/cyanobacteria-are-far-from-just-toledos-problem.html?_r=0
Excess nitrogen and phosphorus from the massive amounts of fertilizer these factory farms have become dependent upon are washed into streams and rivers and eventually find their way to the final receiving water bodies, large lakes, and the ocean. There, these nutrients fertilize the algae they were never intended for, resulting in these blooms that are increasingly frequent and damaging to us and our lakes and oceans. Aside form the toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie headlines today include a large dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, another in Chesapeake Bay, and a large "red tide" bloom of dinoflagellates off the coast of west Florida.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/05/tech/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/06/24/dead-zone-forecast-gulf-of-mexico-chesapeake-bay/11319633/
http://start1.org/red-tide/
All of these are at least partially attributable to the large amount of nutrients that the fertilizer industry has convinced farmers are necessary to sustain their profits.
Nutrient pollution is just one of the major environmental problems associated with our factory farm monoculture ag practices. Rampant utilization of herbicides and pesticides introduce chemicals with unknown ecological effects into our air, soil, and water, and there is evidence that some of these as well as widespread use of genetically engineered crops may play a role in bee colony collapse disorder.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmcwilliams/2013/12/13/health-concerns-over-gmos-distract-consumers-from-the-real-problem-of-monoculture/
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/01/01/bees-dying-from-chemical-agriculture.aspx
Perhaps one of the least talked about but most insidious effects of converting much of our nation's (and others as well) farmland into factory farm monoculture is its impact on biodiversity. As a trained conservation biologist, alarm bells resounded in my mind when I saw the statistics and then saw first hand the endless fields of a single plant species, planted fence line to fence line without even a narrow strip left for a scant few native, or even non-native weeds. Biodiversity is a key component of ecological success, nature's secret of survival and evolution, the whole one thing connected to everything else noted by John Muir so many years ago. There can be no ecological benefit to this vast myopic conversion of land, and unless we change these practices long term we will see that the negative environmental events that can be linked to factory farm monoculture will only increase, and the impacts to our health and environment will increase as well, all things connected. I find it interesting that even "primitive" societies understood the value of intercropping, or mixing plant species in agriculture as evidenced with various crops for thousands of years in China, and by the famous "3 sisters" crops: squash, beans, and corn, utilized by native Americans.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/11/29/166156242/cornstalks-everywhere-but-nothing-else-not-even-a-bee
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/03/01/173167125/wild-bees-are-good-for-crops-but-crops-are-bad-for-bees
I'll admit that when Dr. Kloot first proposed to me the idea of not turning over the soil in my garden I thought I misunderstood, so ingrained is the idea of "tilling the soil" in human culture. When he proposed the idea of planting not necessarily harvestable crops just to cover the soil I thought he was crazy. I have maintained a vegetable garden for most of my life whenever I could and had long ago given up fertilizers, pesticides, and chemicals in my garden. I thought I was very inventive by collecting neighborhood leaves in the fall and digging them into the soil in winter to decompose and provide nutrients (something I have since found out is similar to a practice called "hugulkultur"). This was a lot of work, and I did wonder each year that despite all my effort the surface of my garden's soil seemed hard, dry and desert like within a month of completing this work, but Dr. Kloot's ideas just seemed like a counter-intuitive leap of faith. It was only after reading Masanobu Fukuoka's treatise on natural farming, per Dr. Kloot's recommendation, that things clicked for me. It made perfect sense. If you disturb soil with tilling, you are allowing a sudden burst of microbial growth to occur from exposure to oxygen that quickly devours nutrients and carbon and leaves behind a starved wasteland. The unprotected and exposed soil is also very susceptible to erosion, and first to get washed away are any lighter organic particles that are beneficial to soil. But perhaps most importantly is that healthy soil contains an ecosystem, full of myriad insects, earthworms, microbes and others that, left undisturbed, perform varied and valuable functions that plants require. As an ecologist this should have been obvious to me, and this just demonstrates to me how deeply embeded are some of our ideas about agriculture. It's hard to think of the farm without the plough.
It is amazing to me now that Masanobu Fukuoka spent a lifetime demonstrating the value and efficacy of farming in harmony with the ecology of a region and that this lesson has been so effectively buried by the agriculture corporations and pesticide and fertilizer manufacturers, or neglected by our own hubris. There are better and less damaging ways to provide for our food needs. Please look up "One Straw Revolution".
http://idc-america.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/One_Straw_Farming_Fukuoka.pdf
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail//?cid=STELPRDB1244662
http://dirtdiaries.com/vlog/
The first leg took us up north through the Shenandoah Valley to State College, PA and the second leg took us through the great midwest cornbelt - Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. This journey really opened my eyes to the immense amount of land in this country dedicated solely to the production of two crops: corn and soybeans. The intensity of agricultural productivity in this region was clearly demonstrated by NASA satellite images released in March of measured fluorescence, showing that the midwest has the highest photosynthesis activity of any spot on earth:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-097
The highest intensity fluorescence areas coincide perfectly with the dense and ubiquitous factory farm corn - soybean monoculture areas that I saw first hand on our road trip. While this was greeted by many as an approbation for agrobusiness in the US, recent headlines highlight the environmental problems created by current agricultural practices pervasive in the US and especially concentrated in the midwest. The poisoning of the water supply for almost half a million people in Toledo due to a toxin produced by an algae bloom in Lake Erie is a prime example of this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/lifting-ban-toledo-says-its-water-is-safe-to-drink-again.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/07/science/cyanobacteria-are-far-from-just-toledos-problem.html?_r=0
Excess nitrogen and phosphorus from the massive amounts of fertilizer these factory farms have become dependent upon are washed into streams and rivers and eventually find their way to the final receiving water bodies, large lakes, and the ocean. There, these nutrients fertilize the algae they were never intended for, resulting in these blooms that are increasingly frequent and damaging to us and our lakes and oceans. Aside form the toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie headlines today include a large dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, another in Chesapeake Bay, and a large "red tide" bloom of dinoflagellates off the coast of west Florida.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/05/tech/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/06/24/dead-zone-forecast-gulf-of-mexico-chesapeake-bay/11319633/
http://start1.org/red-tide/
All of these are at least partially attributable to the large amount of nutrients that the fertilizer industry has convinced farmers are necessary to sustain their profits.
Nutrient pollution is just one of the major environmental problems associated with our factory farm monoculture ag practices. Rampant utilization of herbicides and pesticides introduce chemicals with unknown ecological effects into our air, soil, and water, and there is evidence that some of these as well as widespread use of genetically engineered crops may play a role in bee colony collapse disorder.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmcwilliams/2013/12/13/health-concerns-over-gmos-distract-consumers-from-the-real-problem-of-monoculture/
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/01/01/bees-dying-from-chemical-agriculture.aspx
Perhaps one of the least talked about but most insidious effects of converting much of our nation's (and others as well) farmland into factory farm monoculture is its impact on biodiversity. As a trained conservation biologist, alarm bells resounded in my mind when I saw the statistics and then saw first hand the endless fields of a single plant species, planted fence line to fence line without even a narrow strip left for a scant few native, or even non-native weeds. Biodiversity is a key component of ecological success, nature's secret of survival and evolution, the whole one thing connected to everything else noted by John Muir so many years ago. There can be no ecological benefit to this vast myopic conversion of land, and unless we change these practices long term we will see that the negative environmental events that can be linked to factory farm monoculture will only increase, and the impacts to our health and environment will increase as well, all things connected. I find it interesting that even "primitive" societies understood the value of intercropping, or mixing plant species in agriculture as evidenced with various crops for thousands of years in China, and by the famous "3 sisters" crops: squash, beans, and corn, utilized by native Americans.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/11/29/166156242/cornstalks-everywhere-but-nothing-else-not-even-a-bee
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/03/01/173167125/wild-bees-are-good-for-crops-but-crops-are-bad-for-bees
I'll admit that when Dr. Kloot first proposed to me the idea of not turning over the soil in my garden I thought I misunderstood, so ingrained is the idea of "tilling the soil" in human culture. When he proposed the idea of planting not necessarily harvestable crops just to cover the soil I thought he was crazy. I have maintained a vegetable garden for most of my life whenever I could and had long ago given up fertilizers, pesticides, and chemicals in my garden. I thought I was very inventive by collecting neighborhood leaves in the fall and digging them into the soil in winter to decompose and provide nutrients (something I have since found out is similar to a practice called "hugulkultur"). This was a lot of work, and I did wonder each year that despite all my effort the surface of my garden's soil seemed hard, dry and desert like within a month of completing this work, but Dr. Kloot's ideas just seemed like a counter-intuitive leap of faith. It was only after reading Masanobu Fukuoka's treatise on natural farming, per Dr. Kloot's recommendation, that things clicked for me. It made perfect sense. If you disturb soil with tilling, you are allowing a sudden burst of microbial growth to occur from exposure to oxygen that quickly devours nutrients and carbon and leaves behind a starved wasteland. The unprotected and exposed soil is also very susceptible to erosion, and first to get washed away are any lighter organic particles that are beneficial to soil. But perhaps most importantly is that healthy soil contains an ecosystem, full of myriad insects, earthworms, microbes and others that, left undisturbed, perform varied and valuable functions that plants require. As an ecologist this should have been obvious to me, and this just demonstrates to me how deeply embeded are some of our ideas about agriculture. It's hard to think of the farm without the plough.
It is amazing to me now that Masanobu Fukuoka spent a lifetime demonstrating the value and efficacy of farming in harmony with the ecology of a region and that this lesson has been so effectively buried by the agriculture corporations and pesticide and fertilizer manufacturers, or neglected by our own hubris. There are better and less damaging ways to provide for our food needs. Please look up "One Straw Revolution".
http://idc-america.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/One_Straw_Farming_Fukuoka.pdf
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