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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] A 50-Year Farm Bill
  • Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:48:57 -0700


Published on Monday, January 5, 2009 by The New York Times
A 50-Year Farm Bill
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/05-5
by Wes Jackson & Wendell Berry

The extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in
the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even
worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall - by the
little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded
cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures
and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.

Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far
more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute -
and no powerful friends in the halls of government.

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of
soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and
roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by
destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed,
has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure
of the agriculture we now practice.

To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added
pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and
streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed
method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on
fossil fuels and, by substituting technological "solutions" for human work
and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as
they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming
neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our
food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our
agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our
rural communities.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have
money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses
against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will
decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of
our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing
hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in
the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of
doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and
grazing animals.

But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and
preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia,
China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that
perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and
sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the
use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil
and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic
pollution.

Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil
nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use
of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment
opportunities in agriculture - provided, of course, that farmers would be
paid justly for their work and their goods.

Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many
necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need
a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We
need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil
loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the
destruction of rural communities.

This is a political issue, certainly, but it far transcends the farm
politics we are used to. It is an issue as close to every one of us as our
own stomachs.

© 2009 The New York Times
Wes Jackson is a plant geneticist and president of The Land Institute in
Salina, Kan. Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer in Port Royal, Ky.





  • [Livingontheland] A 50-Year Farm Bill, Tradingpost, 01/05/2009

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