Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

The Next American Dust Bowl ... and how to avert it
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/79jul/tucker.htm
by William Tucker
The Atlantic Monthly | July 1979

Modern agricultural methods have produced even larger harvests—but at a cost: 
the richest breadbasket soils of the nation are threatened by serious 
erosion. The solution may lie in a revival of the techniques of "organic 
farming," techniques that have long been associated with romantic 
back-to-landers. Now serious large-scale farmers are giving organic methods a 
try, with startling success


.....

Roman Wortman first decided to turn to organic farming one day in the spring 
of 1972, when he rode out on his tractor to spray his fields with a new 
pesticide and found that he was leaving a trail of dead birds behind him. 
"There was half a dozen of them at the edge of the field," he told me as we 
stood under a blazing Nebraska sun looking over his cornfields. "I rode back 
into the yard and there was more dead birds along the driveway where I had 
sprayed only a half hour before." He fixed his keen brown eyes on me for a 
moment. "I turned around and I said to myself, 'What the hell am I doing out 
here?' From that day to this, I've never used another pesticide, herbicide, 
or fertilizer on this farm." He waved his arm out over his fields of corn and 
alfalfa, which were shimmering with a bright, deep green. "Look what I have 
to show for it," he said.

Wortman, who started farming his father's 320-acre spread in Hartington, 
Nebraska, the day he got out of high school, told me how he went "clean" for 
two years without any problems. Then, in early 1974, he attended a 
presentation by one of the small companies promoting what is usually called 
"organic farming," but now in the Midwest frequently goes by the name of 
"eco-agriculture." "They showed a movie about the problems farmers were 
having with their soils, and how chemical pesticides and fertilizers were 
making it harder and harder to farm," he said. "I looked at that movie, and I 
realized I wasn't in this thing by myself."

Wortman signed up with the company's "four-point program," which requires him 
to follow good soil conservation practices and buy small amounts of the 
company's organic fertilizer, a pelletized mulch made from low-grade coal. He 
uses no more commercial fertilizers, but restores nutrients to his soil by 
spreading manure and by following a careful, five-year rotation in which the 
residues of nitrogen-fixing alfalfa soybeans, and clover are plowed under 
after harvesting. He does extra cultivating to get rid of weeds and relies on 
wildlife and beneficial insects to keep his pest populations down to 
manageable proportions. He does not disrupt the soil life every year by 
turning it over with a deep-cutting moldboard plow, but barely scratches the 
surface with a shallow chisel p1ow Because of the increased amounts of 
organic matter his soil has more tilth, or plowability, and the smallest 
chisel plow is sufficient for planting.

Most important, however, is Wortman's attitude toward farming, which he calls 
"promoting life." "I don't need the chemical companies selling me the 
nitrogen they pull out of the air by burning natural gas," he said. "I've got 
millions and millions of bacteria doing the same thing for me right here, and 
they're doing it for free. I don't need an irrigation system—I've got 
earthworms aerating my soil so the rainwater will soak down into it instead 
of running right off. I'm working with Nature now, instead of working against 
her."

Wortman indeed seems to be doing very well with his new method of "natural" 
farming. His crop yields have stayed at about the same levels he used to get, 
while his costs have dropped markedly. His soil has become so soft and 
workable that plowing is simple, while other farmers in the area are buying 
bigger and bigger tractors to fight hardpan conditions where the loss of 
organic matter has made their soil harden up like cement. His soil's water 
retention capacity has increased, so he needs less water than other farmers, 
and erosion is no longer a problem. He is making money, and has paid off most 
of his debts since turning to organic farming.

"I've been in this business all my life, and my father had this farm before 
me," said Wortman as we drove back to the house in his pickup, while two 
tireless farm dogs trotted alongside. "I was the first farmer in this county 
to use chemical fertilizers, and now I'm the first farmer to give them up. 
People think we're crazy for doing what we're doing out here. But I'll tell 
you this," he said, wheeling into the yard and slamming on the brakes or 
emphasis. "If I had to go back to farming the way I was doing it seven years 
ago, I'd never farm another day in my life."

The "organic" farming movement is one aspect of the vast concerns about 
ecology over the last ten years that may be about to bear fruit. Debate over 
the scientific principles is still being fiercely waged, and will probably 
continue for at least another decade. Yet the lines between the skeptics and 
the kooks are not as firmly drawn as they were a few years ago. Many 
university scientists are now admitting that some aspects of organic 
agriculture are workable. A dialogue has begun. Most important, the 
theoretical arguments are being put into practice.

While organic farming has been mainly associated with environmentalists and 
hippie communes on the east and west coasts, it is now a viable commercial 
alternative in the Midwest. Its greatest exponents may be the small groups of 
traveling salesmen who are selling "organic" fertilizers and crop-rotation 
systems. The result could change the face of American agriculture.

M uch of America's exemplary record for food production has been achieved at 
the expense of America's soils. Early farmers cleared the forests and grew 
the same crops until the land was exhausted; sometimes they hung on until the 
rising price of land made it profitable to sell. There was little worry over 
soil erosion, and it was only when the Department of Agriculture was set up 
in 1862 that such problems received national attention. Even then, it took 
the Dust Bowl disaster of the 1930s to make basic conservation practices such 
as contour plowing a nationwide policy.

The other major concern in agriculture is soil fertility. For centuries, 
grains were rotated with leguminous vegetables, and manure was spread on the 
fields to maintain fertility, although no one had any clear understanding of 
why it worked. Then, in the 1840s, Baron Justus von Liebig, a German chemist, 
analyzed bird droppings and found that nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium 
formed the three major components. The "N-P-K" theory of fertilization was 
born. Experiments in England quickly confirmed that plants produced 
unprecedented yields when treated with N-P-K fertilizer, and soon clipper 
ships were plying the oceans, carrying huge quantities of these minerals to 
agricultural countries. In the early twentieth century, two other German 
scientists, Fritz Haber and Karl Bosch, showed that atmospheric nitrogen 
(roughly 80 percent of the air) could be "fixed" into an accessible ammonia 
form by burning it with natural gas. This "nitrogen fixation" process is 
essentially the same chemical reaction performed by the bacteria that fix 
nitrogen on the roots of leguminous plants. It takes enormous amounts of 
energy to perform with chemicals, and about 2 percent of the country's annual 
production of natural gas is used in making nitrogen fertilizers. It is 
estimated that one quarter of the total annual nitrogen fixation for the 
entire planet is now done through the Haber process.

There was always an element of doubt about the use of "artificial manures," 
however. First, it was never entirely certain that nitrogen, phosphorus, and 
potassium were the only important plant foods. As chemical techniques 
improved, it became clear that dozens of trace elements, including such 
obscure substances as cobalt, zinc, and molybdenum, played key roles in plant 
nutrition. Second, "artificial manures" were tied to mineral deposits, and 
later to fossil fuels, that exist in finite amounts.

As early as 1908, a University of Wisconsin professor named F. H. King, who 
had served for eight years as chief of the soil management division of the U. 
S. Department of Agriculture, started exploring alternative methods. King 
took a trip to the Orient to investigate how China and Japan were able to 
feed their formidable populations by farming land that had been under 
continuous cultivation for nearly 4000 years. He wrote a book called Farmers 
of Forty Centuries, describing the Oriental countries' intense practices of 
recycling food wastes, crop residues, canal and river silts, and human and 
animal manures.

King's work influenced another maverick scientist, Sir Albert Howard, a 
British microbiologist who became chief agricultural adviser to the Crown 
Colony Administration in India in 1915. Sir Albert postulated the essential 
role of mycorrhiza, the symbiotic association of long, thin, filamentous 
fungi with plant roots, in which the fungi pull nutrients out of the soil, 
feeding them to the plant. Sir Albert argued that the addition of organic 
matter gave mycorrhiza a favorable environment in which to flourish, while 
chemical fertilizers stunted the fungi's growth. Current agricultural 
research has tentatively affirmed many of Sir Albert's observations, although 
the workings of mycorrhiza are still very much a mystery.

Sir Albert's work probably would have gone unnoticed in America if it were 
not for Irving Cohen, who grew up on the East Side of New York but dreamed of 
living on a farm. In 1938, while working in Pittsburgh as an Internal Revenue 
auditor, Cohen read an article about Sir Albert's methods, and inspiration 
struck. Three years later he moved to Emmaus, Pennsylvania, bought an 
abandoned farm, and started using organic methods. A few years earlier he had 
adopted his mother's name and started calling himself "J. I. Rodale." It is 
with Rodale that any story of organic farming in the United States must begin.

R odale had already made several marginally successful publishing ventures 
and was working with his brother's electrical contracting firm when he 
arrived in Emmaus in 1941 and persuaded the nearby city of Allentown to send 
over its leaves every autumn so that he could make compost. He quickly built 
up a flourishing eighty-acre agricultural enterprise, and in 1942 published 
his first issue of Organic Gardening and Farming. Farmers weren't much 
interested, but the magazine immediately found an audience with home 
gardeners, and Rodale was launched on a business career that would make him a 
millionaire and earn him the title of the prophet of American organic 
agriculture.

I visited the Rodale organization and experimental farm for three days last 
July. The publishing headquarters sits next to the railroad tracks, in a 
small group of one-story structures with the look of an elementary school. 
The roof of the newest addition is slanted for solar collectors which were 
never installed because Rodale Press found they would not pay for themselves 
for eighty-eight years.

Administration of Rodale's far-flung enterprise has passed easily into the 
hands of Robert Rodale, J. I.'s only son, who took over as president in 1954 
and became chairman of the board in 1971. Robert Rodale is a slight, trim man 
of forty-eight with a full head of gray hair, and a calm, rather shy manner. 
He greeted me in his office and in no time had piled in front of me four 
books that, he said, would tell me everything I wanted to know about Rodale 
Press and organic farming.

"The thing people don't realize," he said, "is that organic farming, 
composting, and all those things are not the basis of the Rodale philosophy. 
Our basic belief is that people should learn to be self-sufficient. We think 
they should be able to fend for themselves, grow their own food, make their 
own utensils, supply their own energy, without having to depend on other 
people the way they do when they start congregating in cities.

"Many people have the impression that we're advocating a wholesale switch to 
organic farming, but that is definitely not true. We think that the arguments 
that organic farming can be done on a large scale are highly exaggerated and 
based on a very selective choice of facts. Our methods of composting and 
cultivation are not suitable for large corporation farms, and probably 
couldn't be done on a large scale. We see our basic constituency as people 
who are in the homesteading and back-to-the-land movement."

But the Rodale enterprise is very large, and not all research its aimed at 
"homesteaders" and the "back-to-the-land" movement. Since J. I.'s death, 
Robert Rodale has personally supervised the development of a new, 300-acre 
organic farm which is fast becoming an outstanding research facility. Dr. 
Richard Harwood, who worked for ten years with the International Rice 
Research Institute and is considered one of the outstanding agronomists in 
the country, heads the research operation. Harwood is a tall, husky man of 
forty-two with clear blue eyes and a face that has been permanently reddened 
by the tropical sun. The day after I saw Robert Rodale, Harwood and I spent 
an hour talking under the shade of a huge apple tree at the Rodale Research 
Farm.

"I told Bob Rodale when he offered me the job," he said, "that I didn't put 
much stock in this organic business. He said he didn't want me to believe in 
anything, he just wanted me to come and do research. I must admit, though, 
that there's more to this organic stuff than people realize.

"Right now we're looking at a Chinese system called 'intercropping,' where 
you plant a field with alternating rows of two different crops that don't 
compete for the same nutrients. There's also a feeling that you may be able 
to keep down insect problems this way, since you're limiting the 
monocultures, which are always an attraction to insects. People here usually 
talk in terms of small-scale farming, but large corporation farmers could 
probably use these methods just as easily."

One of Rodale Press's most promising experiments is with amaranth, or 
pigweed, a nuisance plant that grows worldwide and has now been discovered to 
be higher in protein content than almost any other known crop. The National 
Academy of Sciences announced the discovery of amaranth's high protein 
content in 1975 and put out a call for university research to develop it as a 
crop. None of the agricultural schools volunteered, however, since no 
research money was offered. Rodale Press came to the rescue by agreeing to do 
all the work at its own expense. The company immediately appealed to the 1.3 
million readers of Organic Gardening and Farming, and in no time had 
collected 330 different local varieties of amaranth for crossbreeding and 
genetic studies. "Our readership can do in two months what it would take a 
university two years and $20,000 to do," said Harwood. "It's probably the 
most formidable experimental resource in the country." The Rodale work has 
attracted worldwide attention, and the week I was there the chief agronomist 
of Nepal's Department of Agriculture had just arrived to offer his amaranth 
varieties. "We expect it will be a staple crop both here and abroad within 
ten years," said Harwood.

Perhaps it is not surprising that, after so many years of being regarded as a 
fringe group, the Rodale organization is now inclined to settle back into the 
role that one Rodale staffer described as "the General Motors of the organic 
movement." Sitting among the comfortable hills of the Lehigh Valley, watching 
a far-off harvester move silently across a rolling, ten-acre field, I found 
it easy to think of farming in terms of homesteading, self-sufficiency, and 
"going back to the land." But while the gentle, sloping farms of the eastern 
states may offer such enticing possibilities, the breadbasket of this country 
still lies within the huge Middle Border, the great tier of states along the 
valleys of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers. And so, within another 
week, I headed for Omaha, Nebraska, to a land where the sun blazes overhead 
in a daily procession across cloudless skies, where huge, dark thunderstorms 
occasionally swell on the horizon, warning of tornadoes, and where the 
endless plains of corn, wheat, and sorghum stretch everywhere like green and 
gold ripples on a calm ocean. If organic methods are ever going to find a 
toehold in American agriculture, it will have to happen in the Midwest.

I n the month that I spent traveling around Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and 
Missouri, the newscasts consisted almost entirely of price quotations on the 
Chicago commodities market. Farmers could tell you the exact amount of rain 
that had fallen on their fields over the past two months, to the last tenth 
of an inch. Even on city radio stations, the commercials dealt mostly with 
feed additives and hybrid seed varieties. President Carter's decision to 
relax beef import restrictions was treated as a major foreign policy crisis, 
and the grasshopper hordes moving east from Colorado were looked upon as an 
invading army whose artillery was just audible over the horizon. One radio 
station had a favorite song—actually a patriotic hymn—in which a litany of 
the farmer's trials and satisfactions was recited while a heavenly chorus 
chimed in the background.

The vast majority of farmers in the Midwest are now practicing continuous 
cropping—"corn-corn-corn" as it is called in Nebraska and Iowa. This means 
that the, highest-paying crop is planted without interruption year after 
year. Some farmers now rotate with soybeans since their price has risen over 
the past fifteen years, but others rotate only with corn/wheat or corn/milo, 
which is not a true rotation since none of them fix nitrogen. Yields are 
maintained at spectacularly high levels—200 bushels of corn per acre in some 
instances—through ample use of fertilizers and with the help of pesticides 
and herbicides, which fight the insects and weeds that ordinarily thrive on 
the endless repetition of the same crop.

When drought struck in the early 1970s, the Department of Agriculture and the 
machinery companies responded with "center-pivot" irrigation, actually a 
lawn-sprinkling system raised to the level of a national agricultural policy. 
Huge, quarter-mile-long scaffoldings now "walk" around a farmer's field, 
spraying water from a central well. Although enormously expensive and already 
running up against groundwater limitations, center-pivot agriculture has 
created another quantum leap in production figures. A further trend has been 
the movement of cattle off the farms and into the huge feedlots that now dot 
the countryside, holding up to 250,000 head of cattle apiece. The change has 
turned most farmers into corn-suppliers to the feedlots, but has given them 
much more leisure time since they no longer have to tend their own livestock.

The increased efficiency and greater division of labor have left the farmers 
facing only a few major problems (besides their normal difficulties with the 
weather): continuing overproduction; the rising cost of fertilizers, 
pesticides, and herbicides (all fossil-fuel based products); and the gradual 
depletion of organic matter in the soil, which has led to increased hardpan 
and erosion. Some areas of Kansas and Nebraska have reported hardpan ground 
almost two feet deep. The agricultural machinery companies have responded by 
building bigger tractors to pull the plows, but the heavy tractors are 
causing even greater compaction. Where hardpan occurs, rainwater no longer 
soaks into the ground but runs directly off the land, taking large quantities 
of soil with it. Some soil scientists now estimate that the topsoil from the 
equivalent of a 100-acre farm ends up at the bottom of the Mississippi River 
every day because of erosion.

In the midst of this, there are a few organic farmers. They are not running 
communes, nor are they concerned with growing tomatoes that will taste better 
than the "chemical" varieties. The concept of "going back to the land" means 
very little to them, since they have already spent all of their lives on the 
land.

M arvin Kurpgewiet farms a 500-acre spread in Madison, Nebraska, about 250 
miles northwest of Omaha. He inherited it from his father, and has been 
farming organically for the past six years. When I pulled up behind his 
hillside farmhouse, his wife, a sunburnt redhead, greeted me and said I could 
find him back in the fields. "He's waiting for you," she called out as I 
started to negotiate my borrowed car through freshly cut alfalfa. I drove 
across the damp fields, then stood on a little hilltop looking over a 
motionless landscape until I realized that a tiny yellow threshing machine at 
the end of one long field had turned around and was now facing me. I walked 
for a long time, seeing only the ghostly reflection of sky in the cab window, 
until finally I stood beside it. A smiling face peered out almost fifteen 
feet above my head. "Come on up," shouted Kurpgewiet, but communication was 
almost impossible over the roar of the motor. I rode with him to the end of a 
row of cut oats before we climbed down and he began showing me around his 
fields. A stocky, Germanic looking man of medium height, with thin, blond 
hair and a stubby, suntanned nose, he talked in the deliberate manner of a 
person who is used to thinking things through for himself.

"I got into organic farming six years ago," he said as we headed for a 
neighboring cornfield. "My wife and I went to a presentation given by one of 
these organic fertilizer companies and we liked it. We knew we were getting 
into trouble with our soil—it was getting harder and harder to plow every 
year They told us to stop using fertilizers and pesticides, and to start 
building up our soil again by using manures and their trace-mineral 
fertilizer. We use a five-year rotation to get nitrogen and organic matter 
back in the soil. We grow corn, soybeans, corn again, then alfalfa, and 
finally oats and clover. The alfalfa hay, oats, and some of the corn go to 
feed the livestock. We've got forty head of cattle and about 350 hogs right 
now. The clover stays right on the field when the oats are harvested, and 
then gets completely plowed under for nitrogen. We buy a little of the 
trace-mineral fertilizer from them every year, but it's not expensive and you 
use it only about eight to ten years, until your soil gets built up again. 
Then you discontinue it almost completely. The whole thing is very 
inexpensive. The company occasionally brings people around to see our farm, 
but they don't bother us.

"My yields haven't been off much at all, and I'm actually getting better 
crops on some of my high ground, where things never used to grow well because 
of the water runoff. I'm getting about 90 to 110 bushels of corn an acre, and 
my ground is getting so soft and spongy that the rain soaks down instead of 
sitting on top or- running right off. Two years ago, during the drought here, 
I still got sixty bushels an acre while some of these farmers didn't even 
bother to go out and harvest a crop. The next year they all went into debt 
for $65,000 to buy center-pivot irrigation systems. Some of these farmers 
around here are so far in debt that they have to make 150 to 200 bushels of 
corn every year just to meet their interest payments. They're spending $75 an 
acre on fertilizers and pesticides, plus another $25 an acre to pump water 
out of the ground. Corn is $2 a bushel, so that puts them 50 bushels in the 
hole just to start. I'm only spending about $5 an acre and my yields are just 
about as high." A genuine note of perplexity had entered his voice, and he 
gave me a long, slow shake of the head. "Somebody's just not thinking," he 
said.

I asked him what he was doing about insects and weeds, and what he would do 
if a horde of grasshoppers started marching toward his field. "Weeds are not 
that much of a problem once you get your soil right," he said. "The company 
told us that weeds do best in poor soil, and they seem to be pretty much 
right about it. The weed has a longer root structure and can reach down 
further in the soil for nutrients. That's why you start getting a lot of 
weeds when your soil gets exhausted. The weed can also use the chemical 
fertilizer just as easily as the plant, and once you put that chemical 
nitrogen in the soil, the race is on. Herbicides will work for you for a 
while, but all you usually end up doing is breeding a tougher strain of weed. 
Then the chemical companies sell you a different herbicide, and the same 
thing starts over again. I've had fewer problems with weeds than I ever had 
since I started building up my soil.

"Pretty much the same thing is true for insects. A lot of your bugs, like 
corn rootworm, don't come until you start growing the same crop year after 
year. Then the insect has the chance to establish itself and multiply. A lot 
of the spraying that goes on around here comes when a farmer sees a few bugs 
on his crop and decides to spray the whole field just to be sure. I just 
haven't had that much problem with insects since I started this system. I 
guess if a whole army of grasshoppers ate through here I wouldn't expect them 
to pass by my cornfields, but fortunately that hasn't happened yet."

Sitting in the kitchen later, while I ate a fresh raspberry sundae his wife 
had prepared, Kurpgewiet told me he is planning to increase his livestock in 
order to get maximum advantage from the system. "It isn't necessary to feed 
cattle on corn because they're ruminants and can eat all the hay and other 
things we can't eat," he said. "Hay and oats don't bring much of a price on 
the market because the feedlots don't use them anymore, but once I start 
running my hay and oats through cattle and putting the manure back on the 
field, I won't be losing anything anywhere in the system. I won't have to buy 
any fertilizers, and all I'll have to put into it is my labor. Everything 
that leaves this farm will be on four hooves and bringing a premium price, I 
hope. I've already been able to pay off most of my mortgage just from the 
money I've been making the last few years. Once I get my herds built up, 
every dollar I get from selling a pig or a cow is going to go right here," he 
said, patting his wallet for emphasis.

T he granddaddy of the small organic fertilizer companies is the Wonderlife 
Corporation of Des Moines, Iowa, founded in 1968 by Eric Jasperson, a former 
automobile dealer. About 3000 farmers across the country, from Pennsylvania 
to Wyoming, are now following the Wonderlife system. When Barry Commoner's 
group at Washington University in St. Louis did its 1974 study showing that 
organic farmers were competing successfully with their conventional 
neighbors, fourteen of the sixteen organic farmers in the study were 
Wonderlife farmers. In addition, Wonderlife has spawned about forty-eight 
similar companies, many of them formed by Wonderlife salespeople who learned 
the system.

I spoke with Jasperson in Wonderlife's modest, five room office. He is a man 
of medium height with steel-gray hair and he was wearing a flashy necktie. 
"We're selling a product that is a lignite coal with a bacterial additive, 
but the fertilizer is only a small part of the Wonderlife system. What we're 
really selling is an educational program. You have to convince the farm to 
follow the rotations and take care of his soil, otherwise nothing will work. 
If it's not properly understood the organic system can become as big a ripoff 
as the chemical system. The universities were very cautious at first, but now 
they've become much more interested. We're much more accepted now than we 
were even two years ago. The state agricultural departments also harassed us 
for a while, but now it looks as if they' going to accept us. Basically, I 
think the experts don't like the idea of a lay person coming up with these 
ideas. That's supposed to be their department. But now people are getting 
more interested. Last week the USDA sent someone out here to see what we were 
doing."

Wonderlife and its progeny have gotten into trouble because they have tried 
to call their products "fertilizers" while they do not have enough N-P-K 
nutrients to meet the standard definition. The companies say that sufficient 
N-P-K elements are added through rotation and manuring. The problem now seems 
to be solved, in that state departments are allowing the products to be 
called "trace-element fertilizers." Some large companies are also starting to 
manufacture trace-element fertilizers. One is being marketed by Dow Chemical 
Company. The larger companies do not recommend the rotational practices, 
however.

"We've tried to create a framework where we can show the farmer that it pays 
to be honest with his soil," Jasperson told me. "You can't fight the greatest 
power there is, which is life, Nature, God—whatever you want to call it. We 
think it's the business of the farmer to get on Nature's side, rather than 
against it. It's always exciting when a farmer comes back to you and tells 
you he's finally realized that's what farming is all about."

A cres, U.S.A.—"A Voice for Eco-Agriculture"—is a monthly newspaper put out 
by Charles Walters, a former newspaperman who began publishing it in his 
basement in Kansas City in1971. With a circulation of 12,000, Acres, U.S.A. 
has become a focal point of the organic movement in the Midwest. The 
newspaper has sponsored an "Eco-Agricu1tural Conference" in Kansas City each 
summer for the last four years.

I was at last year's conference for three days before someone summed up my 
exact feelings about it. At the breakfast table I was sitting across from the 
president of a small organic fertilizer company in Omaha when he leaned over 
to me and said, "Let me tell you something about these conferences. The first 
time you come to one of these, you look around at all the kooks and you say 
to yourself, 'What the hell am I doing here? Am I crazy? Somebody's going to 
put me in a nuthouse for doing this.' But after a while, if you hang on, you 
realize that most of these people are saying at least something that makes at 
least a little bit of sense."

It does take a certain suspension of disbelief to attend a conference on 
organic farming. Last year's meeting opened with a spirited defense of 
laetrile as a cure for cancer, and ended with another rousing diatribe 
claiming that government attempts to manipulate the weather have been 
responsible for devastating floods in the Midwest in recent years. In 
between, the podium was pounded by a procession of salesmen giving stump 
speeches for their particular brands of organic products. "Scientists have 
analyzed seaweed and have found that there is one percent of its chemical 
content that they cannot identify," shouted one seaweed-fertilizer salesman 
from the stage. "Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you that that one percent 
is life itself!"

Dr. Robert Pettit, a microbiologist at Texas A & M, gave a presentation 
showing that Wonderlife's system of rotations and organic fertilizer works 
successfully in raising corn. As it happens, much of Dr. Pettit's research is 
sponsored by Wonderlife, yet there was a kind of rough justice to it all. For 
decades, the chemical companies have been sponsoring research at the 
agricultural schools and scientists have generally reported when their 
products worked. Now that some of the organic fertilizer companies have grown 
rich enough to sponsor their own research, the scientists are starting to 
prove that their products work as well.

Dr. Pettit and I took a stroll along the midway of carnival booths in a rear 
auditorium, where dozens of salespeople were hawking products with names such 
as "Wondergrow," "Agroserum," "Wonderhumus," and "Naturgrow." "I could go 
through here and punch a hole in every one of these ideas right now," said 
Dr. Pettit, a tall, youngish man with graying hair who talks with a Texas 
twang at the pace of a New York City cabdriver. "You don't need seaweed or 
lignite coal or any of these special kinds of organic material to make an 
organic system work. All these claims that organically grown food is 
different or tastes better than chemically grown food are just nonsense. 
There's absolutely nothing sacred about having organic matter and humus in 
your soil. You can grow the same plants in water if you want to add enough 
chemical fertilizers. There's only one advantage to organic farming, and that 
is that it's cheaper. And it's going to get cheaper still as the price of 
natural gas goes up. Plus organic farming is easier on your soils and keeps 
them healthy, and that's really going to make the difference in the long, 
long run."

Even among the most enthusiastic organic farmers, however, there was a 
healthy skepticism about the movement. Carsten Pank, a German-born biodynamic 
farmer from upstate New York, startled the crowd of 300 enthusiasts by 
saying, "I get particularly annoyed at these people who insist on doing 
everything according to this word 'organic.' What these people don't want to 
admit is that the chemicals used in most herbicides and pesticides are 
organic chemicals."

I caught Pank in his motel room after his speech, and he expanded a little 
bit on his comment. "You know the statement of this man Earl Butz [the former 
secretary of agriculture] that 50 million people would starve if we all tried 
to switch to organic farming this minute?" (Butz's remark, made in 1971, is 
still anathema among organic enthusiasts.) "Well, let me tell you something," 
he said. "This man is absolutely right. Switching to organics is something 
that has to be done very slowly and carefully over a long period of time. 
It's foolish to tell farmers to jump into something they don't understand 
completely. If it isn't done carefully, you can ruin a farmer overnight."

I heard the same sort of skepticism three days later, when I visited Jean 
Poirot, a southwest Missouri farmer who has become a darling of the east and 
west coast organic enthusiasts. (One group has made a movie about his farm, 
and hundreds of college students visit him every year.) Poirot became famous 
when he decided to solve his insect problem in the 1930s by turning his farm 
into a haven for wildlife. He re-established prairie chickens, left dozens of 
hedgerows and tree groves for birds, and has not used a pesticide since. Yet, 
when I visited him, I found that he fertilizes with anhydrous ammonia (which 
is condemned by most organicists because it kills worms and microbial life), 
and avoids plowing by spraying his weeds each spring with paraquat, the 
herbicide of marijuana fame. "People come down here expecting to find some 
kind nature farm, and they're always disappointed," said Poirot, a crusty old 
badger of about seventy.

Poirot has solved the problem of tending livestock by turning his cattle 
loose in the pasture and letting them fend for themselves year-round. He has 
no barn and doesn't even bale hay for them. "The buffallo survived out on 
these prairies for centuries before the farmer ever arrived," he told me. 
"They didn't have barns out here, they didn't have veterinarians, and they 
didn't have the farmer to put hay out for them. We've had calves born out 
here in the middle of snowstorms and 10-degree weather, and they made it," he 
said. "Their ears and their tails may have frozen off, but goddamn it, they 
survived."

By the time I was through, I think I had heard almost every conceivable shade 
of opinion on pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, plowing, and livestock 
raising from people who all claimed to be a part of the organic "movement." 
Like most other movements, this one contains its share of heresies.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] think it is possible, 
although risky, to draw a few conclusions from what is now known about 
organic farming.

1. The fundamental issue that divides "organic" farmers from their orthodox 
"chemical" counterparts is not the welter of concerns about "natural" food's 
better taste, "vital" forces, pesticide residues, or nutritional differences. 
It is whether the farmer should be primarily concerned with feeding his 
plants or his soil. According to orthodox agriculture (orthodox over the last 
fifty years, at least), as long as the farmer gets nutrients into the plant, 
it doesn't matter too much what happens to the organic content of his soil. 
So scientists in the agricultural schools are now taking extreme positions 
and arguing that "the soil is there simply to hold up the plant while the 
farmer feeds nutrients." The organic position, on the other hand, is that if 
a farmer keeps his soil in good condition, the plants will pretty much take 
care of themselves. Even conventional scientists are willing to admit that we 
still know almost nothing about what happens when nutrients pass from soil to 
plant, but we do know that the decline in organic matter in American soils is 
already having an obvious effect in their loss of tilth and increasing 
hardpan conditions. There seems to be no need for the organic movement to go 
any further in making its case that soil conditions should be a primary 
concern—if not the primary concern—of the American farmer. In this respect, 
the organic position seems justified.

2. There is no question that organic methods can be competitive economically, 
and may become even more competitive as natural gas prices begin to reflect 
true replacement costs. Barry Commoner's annual studies since 1974 have shown 
that organic farmers are able to maintain the same profit levels as 
conventional chemical farmers by cutting their costs while suffering only 
slight decreases in yields. My conversations with organic farmers seemed to 
confirm this argument.

Critics often argue that we will be "starving the rest of the world" by 
turning to organic farming, but this argument does not seem justified. 
America's surpluses are not now alleviating world food problems because most 
of the countries that need the food do not have the internal transportation 
systems to distribute what they already have. In addition, dumping American 
surpluses on underdeveloped countries usually hurts the small farmers in 
those countries who are trying to bring their own goods to market. At the 
same time, there seems to be little sense in continuing our current 
large-scale overproduction when it may mean that our soils will be less able 
to produce crops at some future point. If American agriculture were made more 
efficient—by lowering energy input and reducing surplus problems—it would 
free up resources that would make the rest of the economy more efficient. We 
would then be in a position to extend aid to Third World countries in areas 
where they are capable of handling our help.

3. There is an enormous potential for dealing with a large portion of the 
country's environmental problems by recognizing that organic materials are 
actually a resource rather than "wastes." More than half the country's river 
and ocean pollution is caused by human sewage that could be composted into an 
important agricultural product. The problem of animal manures is ten times as 
great in volume, and could be treated in the same way. Several small 
companies in the Midwest are already composting feedlot manure and selling it 
back to farmers, The same thing could be done with food-processing wastes. A 
growing realization among entrepreneurs that these "wastes" are valuable 
soil-building materials could solve many environmental problems without 
costly regulation or huge public-works projects.

4. It must be recognized that there are real obstacles and dangers to making 
the changeover from heavy use of agricultural chemicals to more organically 
oriented methods. It would be particularly harmful, for instance, to start 
passing regulations banning agricultural chemicals, or making them more 
difficult to use. Nor would it make much sense to start setting up 
tax-oriented or financial incentives to push farmers into organic methods. 
The current pace of change, where the risks are being assumed by individual 
farmers by choice, seems more than sufficient. Even the most enthusiastic 
organic farmers want agricultural chemicals available if they are needed, and 
it is only the hard-core environmentalists cheering from the sidelines who 
want to see them banned. Agricultural chemicals can still play a large role 
in an organically oriented system, and some kind of healthy mixture of the 
two may eventually emerge.

5. It is important to note that organic farming does not fit very well with 
another ambition of "alternative life-style" enthusiasts, the idea of 
substituting vegetable for animal protein. Nearly all organic theories put 
heavy emphasis on the maximum use of livestock so that good rotation crops 
such as alfalfa hay, which humans cannot eat, can be fed to animals. The 
manure then maintains the closed system. There is a contradiction between the 
aims of organic farming and the notion that we should cut back to a more 
vegetarian diet.

Finally, we must remember that asking farmers to adopt organic methods means 
asking them to do more work. This is true in several respects. Because they 
do not use herbicides, organic farmers must spend more time in their fields 
cultivating. Spreading compost and manure also takes more time because they 
are bulkier than concentrated chemical fertilizers. Many organic enthusiasts 
agree that there may be an upper limit to the size of a farm that a single 
owner can work organically. But perhaps most important is the part that 
livestock plays in an organic system. They require constant feeding and 
attention, and keep the farmer tied to his job day and night. As a western 
Nebraska farmer expressed it to me at one of the conferences: "I'd love to 
have a flock of sheep on my farm and have all that manure to spread around, 
but if I had sheep to look after, I couldn't be at this conference." The 
movement of livestock off the farms and into the feedlots has given the 
farmer an enormous bonus in leisure time, which may be more valuable to him 
than a small increase in income. In fact, one of the disturbing trends in the 
organic movement is the tendency of many farmers who have become enthusiastic 
about the idea to spend more time traveling the country selling products and 
giving lectures than they do on farming.

Are there enough people in the country willing to give the time and attention 
to the soil that is required by organic farming? One of the outcomes of 
organic agriculture may be that we are forced to face our own myths about 
farming and the joys of living "back on the land."