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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.
----- 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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