FATAL HARVEST

THE TRAGEDY OF INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE

EDITED BY ANDREW KIMBRELL

ISLAND PRESS                   2002

FOUNDATION FOR DEEP ECOLOGY

PART II

 

PART ONE

FARMING AS IF NATURE MATTERED: BREAKING THE INDUSTRIAL PARADIGM

The Whole Horse: The Preservation of the Agrarian Mind by Wendell Berry

Global Monoculture: The Worldwide Destruction of Diversity by Helena Norberg-Hodge

Machine Logic: Industrializing Nature and Agriculture by Jerry Mander

Industrial Agriculture’s War Against Nature by Ron Kroese

Had Times for Diversity by David Ehrenfeld

The Impossible Race: Population Growth and the Fallacies of Agricultural Hope by Hugh H. Iltis

 

Farming in Nature’s Image: Natural Systems Agriculture by Wes Jackson

 

For 10,000 years till agriculture has been a disaster for the natural world. Topsoil and biodiversity have been agriculture’s most frequent casualties. Current “techno-fixes” like fertilizers and pesticides only make things worse. As a result, nearly one-third of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion, and in the United Sates we have lost three-quarters of all our agricultural biodiversity over the last 100 years. To reverse our course and find a truly sustainable agriculture, we need to develop a “Natural Systems Agriculture” which features nature’s wisdom over human cleverness and brings rewards to the farmer and the land.

• The appropriateness of till agriculture is firmly implanted in all civilized peoples. At the United Nations there is a huge statue of a man full of purpose and muscle bent to the task of beating a sword, which does evil of course, into a plowshare, which everyone knows will do good.
• Yet the plowshare may well have destroyed more of the natural world and more options for future generations than the sword.
• So destructive has the agricultural revolution been that, geologically speaking it surely stands as among the most significant and explosive event to appear on the face of the earth.
• Agriculture has come on to the global scene so rapidly that the life-support system has not had time to adjust to the changing circumstances.

 

The problem of agriculture historically

Greece features a landscape famous for its cultural achievements, from classical times to the present. Here were the landscape and a people that both sponsored and still display the brilliance that has defined much of Western civilization. Here is a land where the impact of agriculture is everywhere, a land where episodes of deforestation and soil erosion have gone on for 8,000 years. History tells us that the ancient Greeks considered themselves careful stewards of the land, people who felt guided by their gods and goddesses in this endeavor. Even so, those early Greeks and their gods, like essentially all agricultural civilizations, failed to hold the topsoil. The recent archeological evidence of soil erosion in ancient Greece due to agriculture is now well documented. The story begins with farmers who first settled Greece when the landscape was pristine. But archeological investigations of ancient eco-systems using soils and fossil pollen along with human relics and artifacts reveal that when hill slopes lose their soil, people move; when usable soils reform thousands of years later, people return to farm. This is no surprise, for here is where both Plato and Aristotle witnessed firsthand land degradation and its consequences. Plato, in one of his dialogues, has Critias proclaim: “What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man, with all the fat and soft earth having wasted away and only the bare framework remaining… The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea.”

• As with Greece, Rome relied on the natural fertility and the benign climate of its local geography.
• Their experience with erosion also mirrored the Greek’s experience: topsoil was lost and fertility declined.
• The Romans had unbounded faith in human ingenuity, and many believed that intervention on a large scale would pull them through their agriculture woes.
• As would be repeated throughout the centuries in so many cultures, the Roman’s interventions were no match for the laws of nature, and their agriculture went into a steep decline.
• Egypt fared better. The Nile received silt from the volcanic highlands of Ethiopia. Egypt prospered at Ethiopia’s expense.
• Downstream these fresh nutrients and organic matter so combined to spill over a layer one millimeter thick each year, to be turned into crops for Egyptian farmers and Pharaohs.
• In the New World, the story of till agriculture on sloping ground is much the same as that of the Greeks and Romans.
• The central Mexican highlands experienced devastating soil erosion 3,500 years before Cortez.
• Most recently, extensive erosion from the hillsides coincided with deforestation.

The industrial agriculture of recent years has accelerated erosion at an almost inconceivable pace. In the last 40 years, nearly one-third of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion and continues to be lost at a rate of more than 10 million hectares per year. 90% of U.S. cropland is losing soil above replacement rates. Loss is 17 times faster than formation on average. At this rate, during the next 20 years, the potential yield of good land without fertilizer or irrigation is estimated to drop 20%. Once all soil costs are calculated for the United States, the bottom line is $44 billion in direct damage to agricultural lands and indirect damage to waterways, infrastructure and health in the United States, and nearly $400 billion in damage worldwide. It has been estimated that to bring soil erosion under control in the United States would require an annual outlay of $8.4 billion.

The ravages of the agricultural disease include not only topsoil loss but also the loss of biodiversity. This age-old problem has become ever more acute. Many crops now altered to conform to industrial farming have been genetically narrowed in the extreme. Nearly a third of the American maize crop comes from four inbred lines. Even in Mexico, farmers abandon the more diverse, locally adapted varieties in favor of genetically narrow, high-yielding strains. In the United States we have lost three-quarters of all our agricultural biodiversity over the past 100 years.

Digging the hole deeper as natural fertility declines

Throughout history many have argued that the solution for saving topsoil and biodiversity is more technology. Over the last many decades they have further argued that a new revolution in farming technology will make a higher production possible without sacrificing environmental quality. Even a cursory examination of two relatively recent “revolutions” in agriculture demonstrates the folly of this “quick fix” mind-set.

• Industrial agriculture has offset much of the age-old soil erosion problem with the use of fossil fuels.
• This “fossil-carbon” agriculture is startlingly inefficient in terms of materials and energy usage.
• U.S. agriculture requires 10 fossil fuel calories to produce a single food calorie.
• This last-gasp effort to substitute petroleum-based fertilizers for lost topsoil is doomed to failure.
• The fossil-carbon answer clearly cannot be a long-term fix for erosion.
• Many see the chemical industry as a panacea for our agricultural woes. But nitrate from fertilizers, linked to blue baby syndrome and cancer in test animals, is increasingly a problem as it seeps into ground water supplies.
• Soils that are naturally most productive are alive with earthworms and microorganisms – creatures that build, till, and nourish the soil. Herbicides and insecticides applied to crops kill huge quantities of this life that would contribute to soil health.
• Nitrogen fertilizers, combined with frequent tillage, “burn up” soil organic matter, thus destroying soil structure.
• At best 1% of applied pesticides reach their intended targets; the rest cause unintended damage both on and off site.
• A summary of cancer risks among farmers cites “significant excesses for Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma, leukemia, skin melanomas, and cancers of the lip, stomach, and prostate” due to pest control chemicals.
• The study of farm chemicals and their clear role in disrupting the human endocrine system is a fast-growing field.
• Numerous pesticides can reduce the immune system’s ability to deal with infectious agents.

As the Romans learned a couple of millennia ago, human technical ingenuity is no match for nature’s laws. Industrial agriculture’s temporary techno-fixes are no panacea for our agricultural woes and never will be. They only exacerbate the problem. But there is a way to escape the current crisis in topsoil and biodiversity loss, a path toward a sustainable agriculture. Once explained the answer may seem obvious, but it is one that humanity has pretty much ignored since the dawn of agriculture.

Looking to nature as the standard to solve the problem of agriculture

Thinking on the history of agriculture’s abuse of the earth, and especially the recent dependency on fossil fuels, chemicals, and the genetic narrowing of our major crops, it becomes increasingly clear that the problem of agriculture cannot be solved within our current conventions of thought and action. These agricultural practices are based on the idea that nature is to be subdued or ignored.

Sir Albert Howard published An Agriculture Testament in 1940. Howard thought that we should farm like the forest, for nature is “the supreme farmer.” He wrote: “Mother earth never attempts to farm without livestock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the process of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease.”

At the Land Institute we have carried on this idea of agriculture in nature’s image through an effort we call Natural Systems Agriculture (NSA). We began with the goal of relying on the ecological benefits of natural ecosystems with no or minimal sacrifice in food production. We look to the never-plowed native prairie to be our teacher. Nature’s prairie features a diversity of species, nearly all of which are perennial. Because their roots do not die as annual roots do, they hold soil through all seasons, even when drenched by rain. Moreover, perennial roots build soil. This ecosystem thus maintains its own health, runs on the sun’s energy, and recycles nutrients, and at no expense to the planet or people.

• Four functional groups are featured: warm-season grasses; cool-season grasses; legumes; and composites.
• Different species fill different roles. Some thrive in dry years, others in wet ones.
• Some provide fertility by fixing atmospheric nitrogen. Some tolerate shade, others require direct sunlight. Some repel predators. Some do better on poor, rocky soils while others need rich, deep soil.
• Diversity provides the system with built-in resilience to changes and cycles in climate, water, insects and pests, grazers, and other natural disturbances.
• The challenge is to feature species diversity and perennialism. We must also try to have all four functional groups represented in our mixture or polyculture, and it must produce harvestable edible grain for direct human consumption.
• Properly designed, the system itself should virtually eliminate the ecological degradation characteristics of conventional agriculture and minimize the need for human intervention.
• We have published our work in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The implications and potential impact of this work are global.

 

Conclusion: healthier agriculture

Natural Systems Agriculture is predicated on the assumption that to be successful in agriculture we need to know what nature will require of us – a more sophisticated and desirable way of asking, “What can we get away with?”

When we put together several plant species to provide a rough structural analog of the prairie, that prairie we are imitating is a complex polyculture. In our domestic prairies, which will feature grain, we had best not treat these polycultures as wheat or corn fields have been treated. Our plots are more like a whole person that includes a heart. Some medical statisticians are still tempted to take all hearts of a certain age and gender, say, and place them under the likelihood of a heart attack. The problem with regarding hearts as existing in “hearthood,” like wheat plants in a field, is that all hearts are not interacting with other hearts in a simplifiable way as an individual wheat plant is with other wheat plants in monoculture. The heart has to interact with all the other organs of the person’s body and respond to the pressures in his or her life, as well as to the history of those pressures, and finally with the hearts of others. The wheat field also has interactions we have chosen to ignore. It is heavily dependent on an economy that is extractive and polluting. On sloping ground it will cause soil erosion. We need ways of thinking about agriculture that are as complex as necessary, meaning an exercise in judgment as to what constitutes “good enough.”

We should commit to the journey now to solve the 10,000-year-old problem. It may be an ideal never to be achieved in an absolute sense, just as justice and sustainability are unlikely to ever be ideally achieved. Even so, to commit to this journey would put an end to ratcheting up what Sir Francis Bacon proposed four centuries ago: to torture nature to get truth out of her even as King James had tortured witches to gain truth. Students of Bacon’s writings know this was no slip of the tongue on his part, for he also advocated “the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effect of all things possible.”

And so we are calling for the opposite – emphasizing Nature’s wisdom over human cleverness. Agriculture is the best place to begin, for if we don’t get sustainability in agriculture first, it is not going to happen. Agriculture has evolutionary biology and ecology as Siamese twins standing behind it. The industrial or materials sector has no such discipline. As progress is made, we can begin to reconfigure human economies, since success in Natural Systems Agriculture will mean that the primary reward will run to the farmer and the landscape, not to the suppliers of inputs. I see no reason why forestry and fisheries thinking and research could not run in concert on this different path for agriculture. Perhaps eventually we can mold all such economies to nature’s image, letting her be our ultimate teacher. 

 

PART TWO

CORPORATE LIES: BUSTING THE MYTHS OF INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE

Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture