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  • From: "E. E. Mitchamore Jr" <emitch@att.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Lessons from the Land Institute
  • Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:31:31 -0600

Spooky that you would send this just as I was reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, where he describes how "we" got into this mess.  A very interesting juxtaposition.
 
E. E. "Mitch" Mitchamore
www.hillcountrynatives.biz
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2007 9:46 AM
Subject: [Livingontheland] Lessons from the Land Institute

Lessons from the Land Institute
http://magazine.audubon.org/landinstitute.html
Text by Scott Russell Sanders

 Could the prairie, which runs on sunlight and rain, be a model for the
perfect farm? Wes Jackson thinks so.

In Salina, Kansas, first thing in the morning on the last day of October,
not much is stirring except pickup trucks and rain. Pumpkins on porch
railings gleam in the streetlights. Scarecrows and skeletons loom outside
low frame houses. Tonight the children of Salina will troop from door to
door in costumes, begging candy. But this morning, only a few of their
grandparents cruise the wet streets, in search of breakfast.

In the diner where I come to rest, the talk is mainly about family and
politics and prices. Beef sells for less than the cost of raising it.
There's a glut of wheat. More local farmers have gone bankrupt. An older
woman bustles in from the street, tugs a scarf from her helmet of white
curls, and demands gaily, "Who says it can't rain in Kansas?" Another woman
answers, "Oh, it rains every once in a while-and when it does, look out!"

Here in the heart of Kansas, where tallgrass prairie gives way to
mid-grass, about 29 inches of water fall every year, enough to keep the
pastures thick and lure farmers into planting row crops. Like farmers
elsewhere, they spray pesticides and herbicides, spread artificial
fertilizer, and irrigate in dry weather. They plow and plant and harvest
with machinery that runs on petroleum. They do everything the land grant
colleges and agribusinesses tell them to do, and still many of them go
broke. And every year, from every plowed acre in Kansas, an average of two
to eight tons of topsoil wash away. The streams near Salina carry rich dirt
and troubling chemicals into the Missouri River, then to the Mississippi,
and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. Industrial agriculture puts food on
our tables and those of much of the rest of the world. But the land and the
farmers pay a terrible price, and so do all the species that depend on the
land, including us.

I've come to Salina to speak with a man who's seeking a radical remedy for
all of that-literally radical, as in going back to the roots, both of
plants and of agriculture. Wes Jackson and his then-wife, Dana, founded the
Land Institute in 1976 to seek ways of providing food, shelter, and energy
without degrading the planet. Wes won a MacArthur fellowship in 1992 for
his efforts, and he has begun to win support in the scientific community
for a revolutionary approach to farming that he calls perennial
polyculture-crops intermingled in a field that is never plowed, because the
plants grow back on their own every year. The goal of his grand experiment:
a form of agriculture that, like a prairie, runs entirely on sunlight and
rain.

To reach the Land Institute, I drive past grain silos bound side to side
like the columns of a great cathedral, past filling stations where gas
sells for 85 cents a gallon, then onto a gravel road. The windshield wipers
can't keep up with the rain. After the road crosses the Smoky Hill River,
it leaves the flat bottomland, where bright-green shoots of alfalfa and
winter wheat sprout from dirt the color of bittersweet chocolate, and
climbs up onto a rolling prairie, where the Land Institute occupies 370
acres. Wes Jackson meets me in the yellow-brick house that serves as an
office. It's easy to believe he played football at Kansas Wesleyan, because
he's a burly man, with a broad, outdoor face leathered by sun and a full
head of steel-gray hair. Although he'll soon be able to collect Social
Security, he looks a decade younger. He holds a Ph.D. in genetics, and in
the middle of a conversation he'll draw genomes and cells on whatever's
handy-a notepad, a napkin, or thin air. For a man who thinks we've been
farming the wrong way for about 10,000 years, he laughs often and delights
in much. He also talks readily and well, with a prairie drawl acquired
while growing up on a farm in the Kansas River valley, over near Topeka.

Where our ancestors went wrong, he believes, was in choosing to cultivate
annual crops, which have to be planted each year in newly turned soil. The
choice is understandable, since annual plants take hold more quickly and
bear more abundantly than perennials do, and since our ancestors had no way
of measuring the long-term consequences of all that digging and tilling.
But what's the alternative? Jackson takes me outside to look at the
radically different model for agriculture that he's been studying for 22
years: the native prairie. Because the rain hasn't let up, we drive a short
distance along the road in his battered Toyota pickup, then pass through a
gate and go jouncing onto an 80-acre stretch of prairie that's never been
plowed. The rusty, swaying stalks of big bluestem wave higher than the
windshield. The shorter stalks of little bluestem, Indian grass, and
switchgrass brush against the fenders. We stop on the highest ridge and
roll down the windows so rain blows on our faces, and we gaze across a
rippling, sensuous landscape, all rounded flanks and shadowy crevices.

The grasses are like a luxurious covering of fur, tinted copper and silver
and gold. In spring or summer this place would be fiercely green and
spangled with flowers, vibrant with butterflies and songbirds. Now, in the
fall, it's thick with pheasant, quail, and wild turkey, Jackson reports. He
and his colleagues don't harvest seeds here, but they do burn the prairie
once every two or three years and let Texas longhorns graze it. Eventually
they'll replace the cattle with bison, a species better adapted to these
grasslands. From the pickup, we can see a few bison browsing on a
neighbor's land, their shaggy coats dark with rain.


In every season, the prairie is lovely beyond words. It supports a wealth
of wildlife, resists diseases and pests, holds water, recycles, fixes
nitrogen, and builds soil. And it achieves all of that while using only
sunlight, air, snow, and rain. If we hope to achieve as much in our
agriculture, Jackson argues, then we'd better study how the prairie works:
by combining four basic types of perennial plants-warm-season grasses,
cool-season grasses, legumes, and sunflowers-all growing year after year
from the same roots. The soil is never laid bare. The prairie survives
droughts and floods and insects and pathogens because the long winnowing
process of evolution has created plant communities adapted to local
conditions. "The earth is an ecolog- ical mosaic," Jackson says. "We're
only beginning to recognize the powers inherent in local adaptation."

If you wish to draw on that natural wisdom in agriculture, he tells me as
we drive toward the greenhouse, then here in Kansas you need to mimic the
structure of the prairie. It is all the more crucial a model, he figures,
because at least 70 percent of the calories that humans eat come directly
or indirectly from grains, and all our grains started as wild grasses. For
nearly a quarter-century, Jackson and his colleagues have been working to
develop perennial polyculture-as opposed to the annual monoculture of
traditional farming-by experimenting with mixtures of wild plants. Recently
they've focused on Illinois bundleflower, a nitrogen-fixing legume whose
seed is about 38 percent protein; Leymus, a mammoth wild rye; eastern
gamagrass, a bunchgrass that's related to corn but is three times as rich
in protein; and Maximilian sunflower, a plentiful source of oil.

The United States loses 2 billion tons of topsoil a year to erosion, says
the USDA, costing the nation $40 billion

In the sweet-smelling greenhouse, we find seeds from these and other plants
drying in paper bags clipped to lines with clothespins. The bags are marked
so as to identify the plots where the seeds were gathered; each plot
represents a distinct ecological community. Over the years, researchers at
the Land Institute have experimented with hundreds of combinations, seeking
to answer four fundamental questions, which Jackson recites for me in a
near-shout as rain hammers down on the greenhouse roof: Can perennial
grains, which invest so much in roots, also produce high seed yields? Can
perennial species yield more when planted in combination with other
species, as on the prairie, than when planted alone? Can a perennial
polyculture meet its own need for nitrogen? Can it adequately manage weeds
and insects and disease?

So far, Jackson believes, the researchers can offer a tentative yes to all
those questions. For example, his daughter Laura, now a professor of
biology at the University of Northern Iowa, identified a mutant strain of
eastern gamagrass whose seed production is four times greater than
normal-without any corresponding loss of root mass or vigor. "Prior to this
work, researchers believed that perennial plants had to yield less than
annuals," says Stephen Jones, a plant geneticist at Washington State
University. "But that was only because there had been so little effort at
breeding perennials." Jones is now working to develop perennial forms of
wheat suited to the dry soils of eastern Washington. He has already
achieved yields up to 70 percent as large as those of the annual varieties.

Recent experiments at the Land Institute suggest that mixtures of wild
plants not only rival monocultures in productivity but also inhibit weeds,
resist pathogens, and build fertility. Stuart Pimm, a conservation
biologist at the University of Tennessee who reported those results in
Nature, sees clear promise in a design-with-nature approach-although he
concedes that "perennial, mixed-species agriculture will probably not
replace all conventional monocultures."

But Wes Jackson argues that on highly erodible soil, it makes sense to
replace the current farming practice with the one he's working toward. The
United States loses 2 billion tons of topsoil a year to erosion, and the
cost-in lost productivity, silting of reservoirs, pollution of waterways-is
$40 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Jackson
estimates that only 50 million of the 400 million tillable acres in the
United States are flatland, and even those are susceptible to erosion. The
remaining 350 million acres-seven-eighths of the total-range from mildly to
highly erodible, and they are thus prime territory for perennial
polyculture.

More and more scientists are now testing this approach. Andrew Paterson,
director of the plant-biotechnology program at the University of Georgia,
is experimenting with perennial grains, and he draws encouragement from the
work of the Land Institute. "They are among the few U.S. research
institutions I am aware of that have a serious interest in this
possibility," he says. Outside the United States, scientists at the
International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines are working to
develop perennial strains of rice.

John Reganold, a professor of soil science and colleague of Jones at
Washington State, predicts that with natural- systems agriculture, "soil
quality will significantly improve-better structure, more organic matter,
increased biological activity, and thicker topsoil." Jones himself admits
that the effort needed to bring perennial polyculture to the marketplace
will be huge. "But remember," he points out, "the amount of research going
into conventional agriculture is equally huge."

Transforming perennial polyculture from a research program into a feasible
alternative for the working farmer will require many more years of
painstaking effort. Researchers must breed high-yielding varieties of
perennial grains and discover combinations of species that rival the
productivity of the wild prairie. Engineers must design machinery for
harvesting mixed grains. Farmers must be persuaded to try the new seeds and
new practices, and consumers must be persuaded to eat unfamiliar foods.

"We don't know how this is going to turn out," admits Jackson. "The risky
thing is to keep going the way we've been going."

The training of farmers is especially close to Jackson's heart. "The
children in rural schools are one day going to be in charge of the 400
million acres of tillable land in this country," he says. "They'll have the
greatest ecological impact of any group." To help inform those schools-and
help resettle the small towns in which many of those children will grow
up-the Land Institute has created a Rural Community Studies Center in
Matfield Green, a tiny settlement in the Flint Hills about 100 miles
southeast of Salina. "We want to bring the message of ecology to bear on
the curriculum of rural schools," Jackson says. "I want those young people
to go to Kansas State, Ohio State, all the ag schools, and ask questions
that push beyond the existing paradigm."

One question is how well annual monoculture would perform if it weren't
subsidized by inputs of petroleum and groundwater, and if it weren't able
to write off the ecological costs of pesticides and herbicides and erosion.
To answer that question, the Land Institute has devoted 150 acres to the
Sunshine Farm, a 10-year project for growing livestock and conventional
crops without fossil fuels, chemicals, or irrigation. The Sunshine Farm is
where we go next, and the arrival of our truck wakes three dappled-gray
Percheron draft horses from their rainy drowse in a paddock beside the
barn. There's also a tractor, for the heaviest work; it runs on biodiesel
fuel made from soybeans and sunflower seeds. The farmhouse is heated with
wood, and all the buildings are lit by batteries charged by a bank of
photovoltaic cells.

Six years into the study, data from the Sunshine Farm are providing a truer
measure of how much conventional farming costs. Marty Bender, who manages
the farm, explains, "We look at the energy content of all the crops and
livestock that we produce, and we look at the inputs-fuels, feeds, stock,
seeds, tools, labor. If you divide our outputs by our inputs, the ratio is
comparable to what you see on Amish farms. And that tells me we're on the
right track."


Back in the yellow-brick office, jackson unrolls onto a table what he calls
the Big Chart, which lays out a 25-year research plan. The boxes on the
chart frame problems to be solved, and the arrows all point toward the
vision of a sustainable agriculture that will overturn the mistaken
practices of the past 10 millennia. It's a bold scheme, and Jackson
calculates that it will cost $5 to $7 million a year-up from the Land
Institute's current annual budget of $850,000. To secure that level of
funding, Jackson will need backing from the U.S. Department of Agriculture
and even from agribusiness firms. "So far," he admits, "we've hit a brick
wall at USDA." He realizes how difficult it will be to pry money from
institutions whose philosophy of farming he so squarely opposes, but he
relishes the challenge.

"In America," he tells me, "we've got mostly two kinds of scientists-the
ones who get us in trouble, and the ones who tell us what the troubles
are-but very few who are looking for solutions. Here at the Land Institute,
we're looking for solutions."

Before I go, I can't help asking him to explain how a Kansas farm boy grew
up to be a visionary who's trying to revolutionize farming. He can't say
for sure. His family's been in Kansas since 1854 (the year that Walden was
published); his grandchildren are the sixth generation to live here. So he
feels committed to this place for the long haul, and he wants it to be a
beautiful and fertile place well after he's gone. "It seems like, no matter
what else I tried, I just kept thinking about the source-soil, water,
photosynthesis, the things that sustain us." Is he hopeful that a
sustainable form of agriculture will be found in time to feed the earth's
swelling population? "We don't know how this is all going to turn out," he
admits. "But the risky thing is to do nothing, to keep going the way we've
been going. No matter how dark the times, it's still worthwhile to do good
work."

The next morning, as I drive east toward my home in Indiana, the radio
carries reports of brimming rivers and flooded roads across Kansas. The
plowed fields I pass are gouged by rivulets, and the roadside ditches run
black with dirt. But where grass covers the land, there's no sign of
runoff, for the prairie keeps doing what it's learned how to do over
thousands of years: holding water, building soil, waiting for spring.


Scott Russell Sanders is the author of numerous books, most recently
Hunting for Hope, published last fall by Beacon Press. He lived and worked
on farms as a boy in Ohio.


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