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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Sustainable, no-till, ag practices worked very well for Iroquois 500 years ago
  • Date: Tue, 10 May 2011 11:59:19 -0600


Sustainable, no-till, ag practices worked very well for Iroquois 500 years ago
http://www.farmandranchguide.com/news/regional/sustainable-no-till-ag-practices-worked-very-well-for-iroquois/article_4ac0ef9c-7a52-11e0-a7cf-001cc4c002e0.html

FARGO, N.D. – As the adoption of sustainable agriculture practices become
more commonplace today in American agriculture, some of those methods now
being adopted are similar to those practiced four centuries ago by the
Iroquois nation in what is now New York.

That became apparent during a presentation by Jane Mt. Pleasant, an associate
professor in the Horticulture Department at Cornell University and also
director of the American Indian Program at the school.

Mt. Pleasant spoke at the recent Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture
Winter Conference in Fargo, with her speech focusing on indigenous
agriculture and its links to contemporary agricultural sustainability. She
used her expertise in Iroquois agriculture to support that contention.

According to Mt. Pleasant, records dating as far back as 1687 for areas in
the Iroquois nation, which was located in the area which is now New York
State, indicated some very high yields for crops grown by the Indian group.

These yields, according to Mt. Pleasant, were actually higher than the
results being experienced by European farmers growing wheat and other small
grains at the time. In fact, she termed the wheat yields in Europe as
“miserable” with a kernel of wheat seed often yielding only 10 kernels at
harvest time. These conditions didn’t start improving until the European
farmer started to include forage crops in their planting rotation.

Despite that, the farming industry in the U.S. was actually patterned after
the system developed in Europe, which included using the plow and teams of
animals to till the soil. Lacking the draft animals and plows, the Iroquois
actually used a basic no-till system, once the trees in the forest area were
cleared and the planting mounds established.

Though many hail the moldboard plow as the tool that helped agriculture the
most, Mt. Pleasant isn’t convinced. In fact, she contends the plow caused
more problems than it solved.

“If you keep plowing soils continuously there is no attempt to increase soil
organic matter and they eventually reach a pretty stable level of about two
percent,” she said. “As a result, very little nitrogen is added to the soil.
We now know that plowing is the single, largest threat to soil organic matter
to everyone involved in agriculture.

“Soils with less than two percent organic matter, not only suffer from low
fertility rates, but also many other problems such as soil structure, its
ability to hold water and increased erosion factors.”

However, during this time of scarce wheat and other small grain crops in
Europe, the Iroquois nation, making use of no-till agricultural methods were
raising good crops of maize (corn) as was documented on several occasions in
journals kept by various individuals.

In the 1600s, when Britain and France were fighting over the control of what
is now the northeastern part of the U.S., the English made a pact with the
Iroquois to supply their troops with food, and the French were constantly
sending scouting parties south from present day Canada to destroy those food
supplies.

On one such expedition, which was headed by Denonville, a French businessman
headquartered in Canada, his patrol reported destroying over 1.5 million
bushels of corn in his nine-day sweep through Iroguois ag production area,
according to Mt. Pleasant.

“It was an incredible amount of corn,” she noted, “and Denonville spent a
good amount of his time destroying as much of it as he could.”

Almost a hundred years later, John Sullivan, a general with George
Washington, had the assignment of going into Seneca (the Iroquois ag region)
and destroying their agriculture ability, since they were still supplying the
British with food. Several soldiers in that campaign wrote in their diaries
of the agriculture they encountered while conducting their “slash and burn
campaign.” Those diary entries told of fields of over a mile in length and
exceeding 200 acres in size, covered with heavy crops of corn, squash and
pumpkin, with top corn yields in excess of 75 bushels per acre.

“What explains this level of productivity,” she asked, “particularly when the
wheat farmers of Europe were not experiencing good yields?

“First, the Iroquois were farming fertile soils, but they maintained high
levels of soil organic matter because they weren’t plowing,” she said. “They
were also lucky that they were working with maize, which is uniquely suited
to no-till conditions and they were also fortunate that maize is usually more
productive than wheat.”

After clearing forested areas, the Iroquois formed mounds of earth about
three feet across with hand tools and then planted in those mounds. These
areas were kept weed free by pulling the weeds. When they came back the next
year, according to Mt. Pleasant, they reshaped those same mounds and planted
in them again.

This type of farming is starting to take hold in the farming community today
as we see an increase of cover crops and less tillage, which is resulting in
healthier soils and improved production. All things our forefathers in
agriculture learned several centuries ago under different cultures in
different parts of the world.







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