When things go awry, something must change.

Wow, what a holiday season this has been! I've run across so much distressing news I can hardly process it. I should give myself a break from this computer. But here's one I have to write about. Read these three statements, which I grabbed off a website pertaining to dairy farming in Wisconsin:

Amish dairy farmers at risk of losing their living and way of life as their buyers drop their milk.

Wisconsin loses 14 percent of Grade B dairy herds in last year.

USDA program overwhelms Quad City-area food banks with milk.

These statements suggest that we have an overabundance of dairy farms in the land, especially in Wisconsin. But as with all changes in the economic world, it's tough for people to acknowledge that they should change their way of life. It's understandable, one can sympathize, but if people are permitted to continue with programs that have to be heavily subsidized, we all bear the burdens of their choices. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes not. In the case of dairy farming, there is the obvious financial burden of subsidizing activities that produce unwanted excess, But there's more to the story, as the following little tale illustrates: 

The body of water known as Green Bay, which juts out from Lake Michigan on its west side, is becoming overcome with algal growths that stem from excess nutrients in the water.  A story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel describes dead zones in the waters as a result of nutrient-laden runoff from dairy farms along the western shore of the bay.

When I was a kid, we lived in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In the 1930s, my family often went to a beach on the bay, just on the edge of town. Later, when I had small kids of my own, we couldn't take them to that beach. It was closed because of pollution from the paper mills into the Fox River and thence into the bay. We went further north into Door County to find shoreline that was reasonably clean. Later the paper mills had to clean up their act, and the beach outside town could reopen. Now the more sinister pollution problem is agricultural runoff. I say "sinister" because the pollution from farmlands is spread over a large area, and it's likely to get worse as the Trump Administration rolls back environmental safeguards. The farming community seems to be totally in support of the rollbacks, in spite of their damaging effects on the environment.

There are solutions, but dairy farmers, on the whole, do not seem interested in changing their way of life, including practices with respect to the ways they use the land. We need fewer dairy cattle, which could come from the conversion of land to grow food crops using ecologically (and economically) sound regenerative agricultural practices. There is no mystery about how to do this. Regenerative agriculture is practiced very successfully in the Midwest in many situations. Watch Gabe Brown’s TEDx talk to learn more.  We can reduce greenhouse gases and thus mitigate global warming by reducing our reliance on animal-based food, and moving to ecologically sound methods of farming, such as regenerative agriculture and permaculture. We can also make a renewed commitment to the proper use of the world’s soils.  Change doesn't come easily when we're locked into traditional ways of doing things, but adapting to change is inherent in maintaining a viable social structure. 

This topic strikes close to home for me. My grandparents on both sides were farmers.  My maternal grandparents, Michael and Mary Kedinger, emigrated to the United States from Germany. They farmed for some years on 60 acres they owned in Kewaunee County, then owned a farm near Algoma not far from Green Bay.  My mother was born there.  I assume they sold that farm, but in any event, the records show them owning a farm near Cimarron, Oklahoma before returning to Wisconsin. They then bought a farm in Oconto County, which borders on Green Bay.  Eventually, Michael and Mary left farming and moved to Green Bay.  My paternal grandparents, Sam and Estelle Brown, along with my great-grandfather, also farmed.  They owned land west of Green Bay, near Mill Center. 

I don't know the details of my ancestors'  struggles to make a living,  Both couples had large families, nine children that grew to adulthood.  Eventually, they left farming, and none of their children stayed on the farms.  As a child growing up in my maternal grandparent's house in Green Bay during the depression years, I was aware of our somewhat straightened economic circumstances.  Coping with change must have been difficult then, as it is today. But they found the strength to meet it head-on. I suspect that in the process they learned something I found in a quote from  Stephen King: "The scariest moment is just when you start".

Regenerative Agriculture

Regenerative soil practice

I’m very heartened by what I’m picking up on the web regarding activity related to regeneration of soil.  This might seem to the uninitiated as a very ho-hum subject, but it’s not.  Regeneration of soils that have been degraded over time by agricultural practices and restoration of prairies that have lain fallow and unproductive of plant growth, has the capacity to sequester huge quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  The soil C pool (I’ll use C to indicate carbon sequestered in the soil, directly equivalent to atmospheric CO₂) is estimated to be about 3.3 times the CO₂ in the atmosphere.  In pre-agricultural times the organic carbon sequestered in soil was much greater than it is today.  It’s estimated that conversion of natural to agricultural ecosystems has caused depletion of the stored carbon in soils by as much as 60% in the temperate regions and 75% in cultivated tropical soils.  Worldwide, these losses have translated into a substantial enrichment of atmospheric CO₂.  One way to reverse this process would be to transfer CO₂ into long-lived pools of organic plant matter, by judicious use of arable land and environmentally sound maintenance of plant ecosystems generally.  In other words, we need to return soil to something like its pre-human conditions.  How can this be done?  A great place to start learning about this subject is an article entitled “Can Dirt Save the Earth?” in a recent issue of the Sunday New York Times.  In general, the restoration of the soil carbon pool includes woodland regeneration, no-till farming (see the figure at top), use of cover crops, nutrient management, agroforestry practices, and growing energy crops on spare lands. The largest potential for applying regenerative soil methods is in conventional agriculture.  Ben Dobson has a nice YouTube presentation on how this works. 

Regenerative agriculture practices can be scaled up, but it will mean changing the mindsets of big agricultural interests.  In  the book Drawdown, which I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog, regenerative agriculture is 11^th out of the 100 individual initiatives in terms of the total amount of CO₂ each can remove or potentially avoid.  The economics estimates by the Drawdown team, thoroughly reviewed by a large and distinguished Advisory Board, are impressive.  It would cost on the order of $57 billion net to convert 1 billion acres of land to regenerative agriculture by 2050.  That’s relatively little to spend over 30+ years period.  On the other hand, the savings would be on the order of $ 1.9 Trillion!  There is space here for me only to suggest where those savings come from—less water, reduced use of insecticides, pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, less utilization of heavy machinery; the list goes on.

In the transition to agricultural societies about 10,000 years ago, human dependence on soils became more direct.  Cultivation of virgin soils exposed them to loss of topsoil during seasonal rains The loess plateau of north China, for example, began to erode more quickly under human management, earning the Yellow River its name. We humans have had a long history of despoiling land, breaking the sods of steppes and prairies.   We have come to the point where we must retrace our steps, and not just because of rising CO₂ levels.  We are once again coming to a hard won realization that nature is a deeply connected web of existence.  Grossly disturb one part of an important ecosystem, and see the effects ripple outward.  Planet Earth is becoming increasingly crowded.  Land available for producing food will become increasingly dear. It never was a good idea to allow topsoil to blow away in dust storms or wash down streams and rivers into the oceans, losses caused largely by repeated tilling.  We will have to work our way back to something resembling the natural state of the land, with the complexity of life forms able to sequester CO₂, produce needed nitrogen, and sustain a vigorous agriculture.