After I heard the Cedar Point farmers, I went off to Wes’ farm a few miles south of Salina. He cut his home, like a dugout, into the earth on a bank high above the Smoky Hill River and near The Land Institute, a teaching and experimental farm he and his wife, Dana, founded in 1976. He has a doctorate in genetics, and now, seeing the danger in homogenized agriculture given over wholly to annual one-crop fields with depleted genetic stocks, he and others at “The Land” are out to build a domestic prairie. They combine plant breeding with ecological studies of never-plowed prairie in hopes of developing herbaceous, perennial, seed-producing mixtures as substitutes for annual monocultures on erodible sloping ground. Jackson wants to reduce significantly our reliance on cultivation, fertilization, pesticides, herbicides, and fossil fuels. In one experiment, his colleague Peter Kulakow has crossed and backcrossed two non-indigenous species, milo and Johnson grass (a noxious weed to Kansas farmers), in an attempt to produce a plant with the strong rhizomes of a perennial and the abundant seedhead of an annual.
Wes wants to mimic the prairie to feed people without also endangering them and eroding and poisoning the earth. One of the crops that might grow someday in that Cedar Point field, if it becomes domestic prairie, could be a descendant of that “milograss.” Before I left The Land, I pulled a few seeds from the new plant: they were crunchy and sweet, nearly as palatable as some breakfast cereals.
Great-grandfather Jackson rode with John Brown, and Wes, born in 1936, is a first cousin once removed to Dwight Eisenhower (who grew up half an hour away in Abilene). Wes recently brought out another book, Altars of Unhewn Stone, and, the week I visited, Life magazine had just selected him as one of eighteen Americans who are likely to be recognized in a century as “wavemakers.”
Not so much a man of answers but of ideas, he’s a geneticist trying to turn concepts into solutions, but he’s wary of technological fixes, especially those using genetic engineering: he once said, The philosophy that got us into trouble is not the philosophy that is going to get us out of trouble. He comes from a family of farmers who took religion seriously, and Wes still speaks of plows and sinful pride in the same sentence: he is a practitioner of both a new agricultural and social order. A fellow of some size—people comment on his Lincolnesque hands—he seems even bigger. Someone once described his features as rough as Cottonwood Limestone, a suitable phrase because there is something architectural, if not monumental, about him. Since our first meeting in the Wagon Wheel, he’d grown a beard and now he looked more like Lincoln’s cousin than Ike’s—especially when he delivered one of his Lincoln-like aphorisms: We’re not called to success but to obedience to our visions.
Twice in his life physicians have told him he had cancer: once leukemia, the other time non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The doctors were wrong. The first proved to be mononucleosis. During the second scare Jackson, with the help of the pathologist, was able (from his long experience of preparing slides) to see how faulty laboratory techniques led to an incorrect diagnosis. What he had was only a fatty tumor. To use his word, his discovering a future in doom is a paradigm of his work today. He said that tumor pushed him close to a personal doomsday and served to concentrate his attention. In that, there is also a paradigm.
Wes is a fine talker, a discourser really, who sends an idea aloft like a pennant, then cuts out another of complementary fabric and hoists it, then a third, until finally he has half a dozen streamers airborne, a panoply of parti-color banners that he then brings together into a union. He will say, Now, put that on hold for a moment, and off he goes again. He was crunching into a hard pear when I saw him, and he said, I’d offer you one, but they aren’t ripe. Another paradigm.
It was a warm September morning: we sat near the oak-lined bank of the Smoky Hill River (which he uses as an Alice-in-Wonderland barometer that forecasts far ahead by looking backward: clear water means clear weather yesterday, but water clouded by runaway topsoil reveals not only a storm the day before but also a depletion to come). We talked—he talked—and the whole time dozens upon dozens of blackbirds in the branches above us were doing their autumnal yak-yak, and twice I had to ask him to repeat a sentence, the birds so poured it down on us. In the two hours we sat there, the population of the earth grew by twenty-two thousand, more than seven Chase counties.
Wes began by talking about thermodynamics. He said, Let me ramble, and sat quietly, organized thoughts, and then, There are farmers running around here in Saline County who believe the oil companies have a pill the size of an aspirin that can be dropped into a few gallons of water to produce as much energy as a tank of gasoline. There’s so much ignorance about energy. Hold on to that for a moment. If you take the U.S. Geological Survey data seriously, the world has left about a thirty-three-year supply of oil at the current rate of use. If we use only proven American reserves, we have just a few months more than a four-year supply plus what the USGS estimates to be twenty years of unproven reserves. As we get closer to running dry, we may begin stretching petroleum out, but nevertheless the end of cheap fossil fuel is near. Look at the incredible infrastructure built on portable liquid fuels and you’ll realize that there’s a lot of dislocation coming.
Bear in mind that even though electricity is an energy form in which a hundred percent of it is available for work, given our current infrastructure and irrational settlement patterns it’s simply not ready to become a substitute for portable liquid fuels. We have two alternatives. If we choose nuclear, we have to remember Chernobyl and the twenty-seven towns and villages that people should never go home to. Can we ever have safe nuclear power? I understand there’s a principle in engineering which holds that, essentially, all major achievements come from failures rather than successes. If you want to cross a bridge, don’t go over one that’s a prototype—use one that’s a derivative of lots of failed bridges. So the question becomes: how many Chernobyl accidents will we have to have in order to achieve safe nuclear power? Can we afford even one per century?
If we say no to nukes, then we’ve got to go with solar. Photovol-taics can produce electricity, but remember the infrastructure and our social arrangements built on portable liquid fuel. Now the news gets really bad. Several years ago, farmers came to us here at The Land and said they wanted to tell OPEC to go to hell. They wanted to turn their grain into alcohol just to run tractors and combines. At that time America had four hundred million cultivated acres, seventy million in corn, our major carbohydrate producer. All we wanted was to meet the one percent of our energy used to move machinery around fields.
It turned out that it would take not seventy million acres of corn to meet on-farm traction needs but one hundred seventeen million acres, and that would leave nothing for livestock, nothing for people. What we found, even assuming the ideal, is that we would need more than a quarter of the total agricultural acres of the richest farm country in the world just to produce and move food out the farm gate.
Can we put alcohol into our tanks to run cars and trucks at anything close to the current level? You’d better forget it. The era of cheap, portable fuel is over and we’re going to live in a very different world from now on. All right, put that on the back burner.
Sun-powered systems have a kind of optimum ratio between the photosynthesizer and the concentrator. Imagine a field of coin as a photosynthesizer and a farmstead as a concentrator, where people, machinery, and buildings are the agents of concentration. Concentrators can work efficiently only over an area so large before expansion produces diminishing returns. When we moved from farming with draft animals to tractors (fossil fuels) the number of farms declined. The ratio became distorted beyond what we can support.
I have two stories to illustrate: George Borgstrom, the Swedish nutritionist, once spoke of the origin of cheese making in Europe: he said in a sun-powered culture, if you’re using the legs of hoses or people, you don’t haul all that water to town when you sell your cheese. You transport only solids that count nutritionally. Had humans evolved with the level o
f fossil-fuel energy we have now, European cheese making might never have happened.
There’s another story: Wendell Berry’s farm has a steep hill going up to Port Royal, Kentucky. An old neighbor told him the tiredest his daddy ever got was the time he carried fifty rabbits and a possum up that hill. Wendell asked him, “Why didn’t you use a horse?” and the neighbor said, “We only had two horses, and we tried to spare them every way we could.” In other words, across the landscape, a sun-powered culture will have more carefully thought out arrangements than we have now.
By and large, agriculture is an extractive enterprise. Often, when farmers improve their land, a closer look reveals they have engaged in a kind of theft: they go somewhere else to bring fertility into their fields; whether it’s a neighbor’s manure or nutrients from the city, they close the loop some way. So the question becomes: what is acceptable theft?
I asked whether the motive force for change would have to be the specter of running out of oil, and he said, That and the problems with nukes, even though you can see that we’re going to try to substitute nukes for oil.
By practicing any form of agriculture, the chances are humans will invert what nature is doing well. I want to learn how to invert nature less. If we are to get serious about an ecological agriculture, where nature is the standard and native prairie serves as our analogy, then we have to think about the basic unit of our study: the community—a diversity of species living together. We destroyed most of the original relationship we had with nature as we exponded our gardens and plots into fields. I think that was our downfall. We began inverting over larger areas what nature does well until we turned agriculture into a fundamentally extractive enterprise. Now we have something called agro-ecology trying to correct that error, which is our current brand of agriculture. That’s why it’s fitting to introduce agro-ecology into economics. A native prairie or a deciduous forest is a sacred economic system. I believe it’s worthwhile to compare natural systems—natural communities—with human ones. Nature engages in barter, and so do we, but we symbol makers have gone beyond and invented a metrical device called money to represent our transfer of energy and nutrients.
Capitalism arose and expanded to its highest level on a young and abundant North American continent. But capitalism is a pump, an extractive system that bases its strength on eventual exhaustion. We consume and throw away. A natural system depends on recycled materials, while an industrial one employs extraction. The late John Fischer, editor of Harper’s, wrote an autobiography called From the High Plains. In there, he said one way to understand the plains is as a place of mining economies: Indians dug flint, then came white hide-hunters, then buffalo-bone miners, then the cattlemen grass miners, then the agricultural sod miners, then wildcatters after gas and oil, and now water miners drilling into the Ogalala Aquifer. We European descendants have gone from one mining or extractive economy to another. Put that on hold.
George Wald, the Harvard biologist and Nobel laureate, once said—let me get his words straight—“We living things are a late outgrowth of the metabolism of our galaxy. The carbon that enters into our composition was cooked in the remote past in a dying star. . . . The waters of ancient seas set the pattern of ions in our blood. The ancient atmospheres molded our metabolism.” Keep that in mind. If we look at the Paleolithic era, that 750,000 years of human evolution, and especially the last 150,000 with the big brain, we see that humans have had agriculture for only about ten thousand years—no more than eight percent of our more recent evolutionary history. This implies that our Paleolithic predispositions—our nerve endings, endocrine system, what we are biologically—the old inclinations must still be in us. In a certain sense, we’re a species out of context, and that’s probably one reason we don’t manage agriculture very well. I think it was Nigel Calder who said, “If we were meant to be farmers we’d have longer arms.” We certainly weren’t designed biologically to have this much fossil energy at our fingertips. We just can’t use it wisely.
So, doesn’t it make sense to try to find ways to use those Paleolithic predispositions to our benefit? To look at how tribes survived? Community is civilization’s upscaling of the tribe, and it works primarily because it draws upon those Paleolithic longings that sustained the tribe. They are somehow embedded in patterns of human behavior. I think we once again have to take advantage of those old inclinations.
For Paleolithic people, the tribe was a more fundamental unit than the nuclear family. Now, I’m not saying the family doesn’t have an important role, but let’s think about the possibilities of a coherent new community by looking at the Amish. We have a number of them near us here. They’ve managed to stay economically solvent during this most recent agricultural crisis. Community doesn’t simply derive from aggregations of people: the Amish create theirs through an organizing principle—the control of the sm of pride. They believe if you curb pride, then you get leverage on all the other sins, and they know that an individual acting alone cannot control pride—a person needs help from the community.
A century ago, the Amish didn’t appear much different from other farm cultures around them, but with the coming of industrial agriculture, we non-Amish thoughtlessly became dependent upon fossil fuels and went about buying whatever was new, while they continued to assess technology against a moral standard. For us, a thing once ^possessed can’t be done without. The Amish seem to have embraced a Paleolithic reality. I’m talking about patterns as old as our species that we’ve obscured by laying a technological veneer over them. But if we will reestablish the conditions which make community possible, most of our old predilections will come back as gifts arriving from we won’t know where.
Let me take some pots off all those back burners. We have to confront the end of the fossil-fuel epoch; disastrous soil erosion; chemical contamination of our food, air, and water; the development of an ozone hole as big as the United States; global warming. Keep naming them. We have to find, as the Amish have, a way to assess our technology against a standard that controls the sin of pride, the desire to possess more power and goods than are justly ours.
Hold that for a moment. We need to ask two questions: what will nature require of us? and what was here before we came? Wendell Berry suggests a third: what will nature help us do! About sixty years ago, a student in Iowa examined a tall prairie growing next to a wheat field. He learned that native grassland seemed designed to absorb water and allocate it according to need, whereas the wheat field tended to throw it off. The prairie had less erosion, lower soil temperatures generally, and so on. One of the natural integrities of grassland is its efficient capture and release of water. In his “Epistle to Burlington,” Alexander Pope advised gardeners: “In all, let Nature never be forgot” and “Consult the Genius of the Place in all.”
I’ve looked at Chase County as the ideal place to develop a prototype of a new agricultural community, one not based on petro-traction and petro-fertility. The county has about eighty-five percent grassland and fifteen percent tilled land, a good ratio for our new purposes. A railroad runs through, providing highly efficient transportation. Because Chase County hasn’t had a swelling of population or any real industrial development, it offers an opportunity to make the transition. I imagine keeping the grassland intact, planting bottomland to a greater diversity of species, and farming it in somewhat different ways to try to be much less extractive and to reduce the distance human concentrators must travel to harvest the photosynthesizers.
I’ve been telling college audiences that the most exciting field for the next century will be accounting. It always gets a laugh, but it points out that nature lives off interest and most of humanity off principal. Imagine that we put up a mental rope around Chase County and say this is where our tribe, our community, will live (and not just reside). Maybe we can even wear caps with our own tribal logo instead of ones with the corporate overlord’s. First of all, we’ll want to pay attention to ways we allow ourselves to participate in the extractive econom
y—and we will have to participate, especially in the early stages. We’ll need to ship both plant and animal material out of our valleys, but then we’ll have to watch the recharge rate carefully to see that we restock nutrients taken away. Sustainability means that we balance the nutrient budget.
This new Chase will need more people on the land, maybe about triple the present population, about the number there in 1900. While the industrial farmer relies on a sufficiency of capital, we, like the Amish, will require a sufficiency of people. Labor—not fossil by-products and machinery—will be our biggest expense. We’ll assume that people come to this new economic order because they’ve perceived the need for it and found it’s to their economic advantage to join others.
In the first phase of transition we’ll begin to free our agriculture—and our entire culture—from the petrochemical industry. Agribusiness, relying on a heavy fossil-fuel subsidy, sells packages of information because agribusiness works by homogenizing landscapes. We’ll have to stop doing that and follow Pope’s words—or those of the alternative agricultural biologist John Todd, of the New Alchemy Institute: “Elegant solutions will be predicated upon the uniqueness of place.” Present agribusiness is incredibly simple and simplifying but its high energy destroys biological and cultural information and patterns. Historically, agribusiness has used our farms and landscapes, in Maury Telleen’s words, as “a quarry to be mined.”
I told Wes I’d read the other day that a farmer said, Children who haven’t walked yet have a right to the productivity of the land, but corporate America doesn’t often agree. I reminded him of his advice to young farmers preparing to deal with agribusiness: Study Faust. Then I asked him for details of the new Chase.
At first, we can probably continue to grow most of the crops that are there now, but we’ll have to change the way we grow them. I see nothing wrong with introducing draft animals back into Chase County, where people are accustomed to using horses to work stock. A horse or mule runs on sunlight, and four legs running on carbohydrates is more efficient ultimately than a tractor using alcohol. We’ll have to use creatures that utilize solar energy rather than buying finite sources of sunlight from a fossil source: solar power stored briefly in muscle rather than in a five-hundred-million-year-old oil cavern. Our traction animals could feed on the surrounding grasslands so that hillside sunlight sponsors agriculture in the valleys. Maybe there’ll be a little less room in the pastures for beef if we’re feeding traction animals, but we’re eating too much meat anyway.