Where is agriculture headed?

You’d have to be really out of touch not to have heard of the microbiome, the community of microorganisms that share our body space.  The microbiome is composed of a very large number of microbial species, the vast majority of which live in our digestive systems.  In recent times we’ve come to appreciate the importance of these little fellows to our well-being. We’ve learned to pay attention to them, to feed them good stuff, such as prebiotics and yogurts. We’ve come to understand that the relationship of diet to wellness lies in the interaction of the microbiome with everything we consume.

It occurred to me recently that the human-microbiome relationship is similar to that between plants and the soil in which they grow.  The quality of soil from the standpoint of its capacity to sustain plant life very much depends on what’s in it.  Healthy soil isn’t just dirt—it contains a complex system of interconnected soil organisms that are essential to the capacity of soil to function as a home for plants, just as our intestinal microbiome is essential to our capacity to ingest food in maintaining whole body health. Soil organisms assist with the digestion of needed nutrients for a plant, keep nutrients in place, provide structural support and water management, and many other functions.

Industrial agriculture has been premised on the notion that we humans can sustainably provide just about everything a crop plant needs. In their model, it’s not necessary to preserve an abundant, deeply rooted community of diverse organisms that support the growing of food crops.  Industrial agriculture works on the assumption that it’s OK to continually plow up the soil, virtually stripping it of life other than the annual plantings.  Thus, the soil of industrially farmed land lacks organisms that exude sticky carbon substances that hold soil particles together, imparting to healthy soil a crumbly texture.  The structure of healthy soil has pore sizes that allow it to drain when it’s wet, and store water that would otherwise run off in heavy rains. The pores also bring air to the roots. Healthy soil is a complex ecosystem, an interconnected web of organisms and their physical environment.  

By contrast, industrial agriculture has made the soil into a lifeless structure that merely holds the plants. Big agribusiness supplies all the heavy machinery needed to plow and weed the fields, and of course, major nutrients for the plants, pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified seeds, designed to compensate for the lack of a diverse and richly varied soil, with its abundant population of insects, fungi and the like that serve to protect plants.

Most farming operations in the US today buy into the framework supplied by industrial agriculture. There is a never-ending succession of fixes to invasions of insects, infestations of infections, massive runoffs and crop losses from flooding in heavy rains, and losses in dry spells because the soil has no capacity to retain water. The so-called green revolution has succeeded only by virtue of robbing the land of riches that must be preserved if agriculture is to be sustainable. 

Back in the 1960s, Kansas farmers found that a huge aquifer lay beneath the land they were farming. The Ogallala, located beneath the Great Plains in the United States, is, or was, one of the world’s largest aquifers.  It underlies an area of approximately 174,000 sq mi in portions of eight states: South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. Anyone who has flown over the plains states in years past is familiar with the sight of center-pivot irrigators — the rigs that created circles of lush cropland by pumping water from the Ogallala onto the fields. Today, in many parts of the Great Plains those rigs are no longer running. They remain as mute reminders that plundering the world’s natural resources for short-term gain is ultimately a loser’s game. In many parts of the Ogallala aquifer, the water levels have fallen so far that it is no longer feasible to pump from it.  The irony is that all that water would not have been needed if the land been farmed regeneratively.

Meanwhile, in March of this year, the state of Nebraska was in a state of emergency due to heavy rainfall. A massive so-called "bomb cyclone" battered the central United States with heavy snow, howling winds and several tornadoes. Flooding forced evacuations in adjoining states as well. Conventional industrial agriculture leaves fields prone to massive runoffs following heavy rainstorms, with the result that stormwater washes fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, and animal waste off the farmland (and, incidentally, off lawns and golf courses). Aside from the ruinous loss of crops, runoff carries pollutants into lakes and rivers used for drinking water supplies. When the runoff ends up in reservoirs, it promotes algal blooms which can become toxic. 

But it doesn’t need to be the way the agribusiness giants would have it.  We know that the plants and soils of a natural prairie absorb much, if not all, of the rain during a thunderstorm. Why can’t agricultural practices build on what we know works in nature?  It may seem counter-intuitive to look to pre-industrial practices, but it’s nothing of the kind, as has been demonstrated all over the world. I’ll mention here just a few examples. They all fit under the general heading of regenerative agriculture.

I recently read a fine book, Call of the Reed Warbler, by Charles Massy.  The author is Australian, with a long career in dealing with the tough challenges that Australia presents for conventional agriculture.  When Europeans came to settle, they brought with them strong opinions on how to farm successfully.   But most of Australia presented conditions they didn’t know how to deal with, particularly in the low amounts of rainfall, as well as its erratic nature, and soil types that they failed to understand.  Many attempts to farm ended in failures and abandonment of the land. But a few pioneers went against the conventional wisdom regarding water management. They found ways to conserve water and protect the soil with cover crops, proper rotations of grazing pastures and other methods.

Massy also refers to the work of pioneers in other places, especially Africa, where desertification has left so much land unproductive.  Allan Savory is one of the great pioneers in regenerative agriculture.  A native of Zimbabwe, he has concentrated his efforts in the restoration of land that has been desertified over time through human activities. His aim is to convert such lands to productive grassland through managing the land in concert with the grazing of livestock. His work is controversial in some circles, in part, I think because many would like to see less use of animals in human diets.  But for many of the people of Africa whose livelihood and diet have for generations depended on grazing animals, Savory’s methods, referred to as holistic management, have resulted in greening of huge tracts of formerly unproductive land.  Holistic management is far less of a threat to global warming than the industrial model of producing meat. The lush grasslands soak up CO₂, thus helping to draw down the levels of the most important contributor to global warming. I recommend that you watch Savory’s TED presentation.  As TED's founder, Chris Anderson commented, it’s astonishing.

I’m a vegetarian, and I’ve long believed that an important step we could take to ward off global warming would be to shift the human diet from animal-based to plant-based.  I'm convinced that a plant-based diet is superior from a health perspective, but Savory has shown that warding off global warming does not require that we entirely abandon eating meats.  We must, however, cease industrial meat production, which comes at a high cost to our health and the quality of the environment. As recounted in The Guardian in 2017, in America food animal production has caused massive pollution of water.  Vast areas in the Gulf of Mexico, have turned into dead zones because of pollution flowing into the Mississippi River and thence into the gulf.  Industrial pig farming is a particularly egregious form of CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation).  CAFOs store swine waste in giant vats referred to as lagoons, which often contain pathogens—salmonella, antibiotics and antimicrobials that have been fed to the animals—as well as nutrient pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorus. If the water from these lagoons leaches out into the soil and trickles down into the water table beneath, the surrounding communities suffer. Conditions have grown worse as climate change has brought on powerful storms that cause flooding of lagoons, and hurricanes that can wipe out the lagoons. There is really no satisfactory solution to the environmental deterioration caused by these industrial-scale operations that the corporations would be willing to invest in. Smithfield Foods, a huge corporation that operates pig farms in North Carolina has been cited numerous times for creating living conditions unbearable for anyone living anywhere near one of their operations.  The injurious effects on affected communities are a form of environmental injustice—most of the people affected have no relationship with the corporations.  But “big ag” is very big business indeed; it has tremendous pull with state and federal legislators. The Center for American Progress recently floated a novel idea to counter the effects of a rapidly consolidating agriculture industry: an independent task force at USDA charged with maintaining competitive markets and protecting farmers from the harms of consolidation. In a related vein, a bill from Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. Mark Pocan would temporarily ban future ag mergers while Congress rewrites antitrust laws to strengthen enforcement against anti-competitive deals.

Farmer Gabe Brown provides another example of how regenerative agriculture can rewrite the rules for ecologically and economically successful farming. Brown and his family have employed regenerative agricultural practices on several thousand acres in North Dakota to produce healthy and highly productive soil without the need for fertilization, pesticides or herbicides. Their soil soaks up tremendous amounts of CO₂, holds it long-term, and absorbs large quantities of rainfall without runoff. To learn more about how Gabe does it, and the background science, check out this video. Gabe is a really entertaining guy!  I was impressed with the sense of wholeness in the efforts around the globe to restore soils to their legacy conditions.  Gabe rotates animals on his holdings in a similar way to Allen Savory.  Half a world apart and with vastly different cultural underpinnings these two and many others are treading on common ground—healthy soil.

After learning about the work of these pioneers, I’m left feeling that I need to investigate further.  I don’t see how the use of grazing animals on farmland can, or even should be, scaled to the production of food across large areas such as America’s plains states. It seems clear that benefits accrue from the grazing.  There should be ways to simulate the beneficial effects of grazing animals on large tracts of croplands. In any case, it's certainly past time for industrial agriculture to adopt new practices if we’re to save the planet from environmental degradation and global warming while providing food for a rising global population.