Widen the lens

           from Graze 

This is on all of us, from those with some control of land who ignore their impacts on soil; to those nonfarm people who can’t be bothered to think about their food beyond that it be cheap; to those, like me, who are pleased to think we are going in the right direction, but probably haven’t pushed hard enough and have been too willing to rest on our laurels.

The fleeting chance we had to make a future on this land for ourselves and our progeny is fast disappearing. And though we may not have thought it, the same holds true for every human on Earth.

There have been warning bells — the Dust Bowl, for instance. More recently there was 1988, the dry year, when I witnessed some of the neighbors hiring payloaders to go into the road ditches bordering their fields to buck the drifting soil back onto their property.

They changed the locations of a few yards of drifted soil without changing their farming practices. Failure was evident from the beginning, and this spring my hometown, population 1,500, shows lawns nearly halfway in from the northwest corner completely covered with a fine layer of black dirt.

Talk of residue and its management has been going on as long as I have been aware. What is changing now is that we see that an entire question of soil quality requires study. Our former happy ignorance no longer suffices.

Managing residue armor on the soil is one of the five principles of soil health. The other principles lead us to think about why soil blows here now, even when it is not nearly as dry as it was in 1988 — things like reducing disturbance and keeping living roots in the soil, for instance.

Our soil here in the northern Corn Belt is deader now than it was in 1988. That is why it blows so easily. As I point out in the comments accompanying the video, the wind that day was perhaps 20 miles per hour, where in 1988 it seldom got that quiet.

The soil here today resembles a pile of inert mineral matter. Since that mineral matter is clay in nature, it consists of very fine particles that move easily. Under a kindlier use, where it is mixed with a goodly supply of carbon in various stages of change that eventually result in organic matter, it would be more apt to stay in place, even if left bare.

Part of the farming religion in my community has always been that if at all possible, every acre should be plowed every fall. My own father drilled this into my head.

The reasons are simple. Our soil is heavy and fertile, mostly poorly drained, inclined to be wet and slow to warm up in spring. Black soil showing under the sun speeds warmup. Under a scheme of growing only full-season crops such as corn, soybeans and sugar beets, slow-to-warm soil in spring is a recipe for poor yields.

I came to the realization in the 1990s that the only way to change things in a real way was to figure a way around the fall plowing imperative. That meant a different cropping scheme so that some of the springtime “first in the field” pressure was relieved.

We started with hay and pasture. Seeding down the wettest of our soils provided some relief from the spring rush, as did the hay.

We needed more livestock to use the hay in winter. We increased the sheep flock and then added dairy heifers on the grazing acres. We fed hay to the sow herd.

We seeded more pasture. The owner of the heifers wanted to go organic, so we spent four or five years in the early aughts transitioning the farm by means of the hay seeding and the pastures. Going organic really fattened up the price we could get for the corn.

We found we needed to rotate the hay seeding to control weeds in the organic crops, so the hay was put into a regular rotation. Each year we destroyed some acres and seeded new ones.

We started grazing the final hay cutting. We began seeding complex cover crops as part of the crop rotation, and grazing and haying them, too. This helped us rest the permanent pastures, which otherwise would have been a bit overstocked.

The hay rotation, plus the early final cutting of the cover crops, provided room for us to fall-seed new rye varieties that yield so much better than the older ones. We are working on including rye in the hog feed rations.

It is vital to note that while all of this was happening on the farm, we were learning to do our own marketing of the pork from our hog herd, bringing more of the resulting money home for the support of our families. This helped put the farm on to a firmer footing, and allowed us to think about what we were doing, rather than merely reacting to circumstance. It is good not to minmize this change. The marketing and extra burden on the hog business due to the need to supply hogs weekly on a schedule doubled the work load, at a minimum.

The dairy heifers are gone now, replaced by beef cows and their calves, which are grassfed and marketed by us.

We have accomplished our first goal, which was to destroy the fall plowing imperative. We no longer till anything in fall except the hay land that is going back to cropping use.

Since we have reduced the corn planting, the tilled (chisel and disc) hay ground, always drier than the rest of the farm, provides the early spring start that fall plowing did formerly. With the haying and hay/winter grain seeding, we have moved our heavy fieldwork commitments from early spring and late fall to early and midsummer.

It amuses me to think that we made some progress on the soil health principles pretty much by accident on our way to making a farm that would work without much fall tillage, and no plowing whatsoever. We now have one-third of our acreage in permanent pasture. Another third is in hay cropped and grazed on two- to three-year rotations, and a third is in grain and corn cropping.

We have not yet succeeded in getting a cover crop established in standing corn, or figured our way around heavy tillage to destroy a hay seeding in our organic rotation.

We have increased the presence of living roots in our soil, which is armored or covered most of the time. We have much reduced our tillage disturbance, and have increased our crop diversity. And livestock are active across the entire farm.

We have come far, but have far to go. The gold standard is a food product produced exclusively from ruminant animals on permanent perennial pastures. We are not there, and I can’t see far enough into the future to know anything about pork produced on perennial plants.

The real difficulty with change in agriculture is that the social/economic system has worked for years, if not centuries, to send innovators and imagination into the cities. Each year, farmers become more conservative and more cautious.

Meanwhile, the government/industry/education complex drives full speed ahead to make the situation worse. Hogs have been collectivized and housed under huge roofs. Now dairy is in the same place. Nitrous oxide pours skyward from all of it.

A modern plantation agriculture crowds out our farming communities, communities that once supported and surrounded us. They steadily diminish, dwindling with every farmland sale and every new confinement shed, Poultry disappeared from farms years ago, now to reappear as small farm flocks to serve the people fed up with watery store eggs. For now, independent farmers are left with beef, plus those chickens and sheep in a country that doesn’t want to eat lamb.

How do we foster livestock on the land, what with 80 or 90 percent of the livestock tied up in corporate confinement? How do we achieve diversity in the root systems of plants when the elevator price boards, which listed as many as six or eight grains when I was a boy, now generally sport no more than two?

It has been a difficult road for us. But honestly, also a pretty satisfying one.

How many other farmers would, or could, do this is open to question. Some — a few — have.

But some of the real questions that hover over this are:

When are the rest of the American people going to step up and help bring to fruition that clean countryside and clean food so many say they want?

When is the federal checkbook going to quit sponsoring soil erosion?

When are ag economists going to grasp the idea that they need to think a new thought?

And how will we attract the kind of creative and thinking people we so much need to stay here, or come back here to involve themselves with an agriculture that seems driven by a death wish?

#first published in the April 2021 issue of Graze. Check out grazeonline for subscription info.