To Vogtians, by contrast, agriculture is about maintaining a set of communities, ecological and human, which have cradled human life since the first of Gause’s inflection points, ten-thousand-plus years ago. It can be drudgery, but it is also work that reinforces the human connection to the earth. The two arguments are like skew lines, not on the same plane.
Wait a minute, Wizards in effect say. Calories per acre is the fundamental measure! People need food before they need anything else! To feed the world of 10 billion, ordinary agriculture maize will not be enough. Industrial operations—farms like the Heinberg spread—are pre-adapted for change. Swap out the old seeds for the new, add some machinery, and they are ready to go. Fears about ecological consequences are mistaken—new technology can fix or avoid them. Worries about community and connection are secondary. (Bertolt Brecht, succinctly, in The Threepenny Opera: “First comes food, then comes right from wrong.”)
Prophets insist that this is not true: Howard-style agriculture can respond to these pressures. Organic farmers, too, have radical alternatives: domesticating new cereal species, hybridizing ordinary crops and their wild relatives, or even switching to entirely new crops.
Wheat, rice, maize, oats, barley, rye, and the other common cereals are annual crops, planted anew every year. By contrast, the wild grasses that used to fill the prairies of the Midwest, Australia, and central Eurasia are perennial: plants that come back summer after summer, for as much as a decade. Because perennial grasses build up root systems that reach deep into the ground, they better hold on to the soil and are less dependent on surface rainwater and nutrients than annual grasses. Not needing to build up new roots in the spring, perennials emerge from the soil earlier and faster than annuals. And because they don’t die in the winter, they keep photosynthesizing in the fall, when annuals stop. Effectively, they have a longer growing season. At the same time, perennials have drawbacks. Because they devote more photosynthetic energy to building up their roots, they expend less on reproduction: their seeds are few and small. Annual crops, by contrast, expend less energy on roots and focus on grain—exactly what farmers want.
After rinsing the dirt from its roots, Land Institute researcher Jerry Glover holds an intermediate wheatgrass plant (A), demonstrating the power of perennial plants to hold the soil. By contrast, the root network of the adjacent bread wheat (B) is much less extensive. Credit 45
In an echo of the Rockefeller Foundation program’s initial collection of wheat varieties, the Rodale Institute, the research arm of the Rodale imperium, gathered three hundred samples of intermediate wheatgrass (Thinopyrum intermedium) from around North America in the early 1980s. A perennial cousin to bread wheat, wheatgrass is native to central Eurasia. It was introduced to the Western Hemisphere in the 1920s as fodder for farm animals. Working with U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers, Rodale’s Peggy Wagoner planted the samples, measured their yields, and crossed the best performers with each other. The work was slow; because wheatgrass is a perennial, it must be evaluated over years, rather than a single season—shuttle breeding is not an option. Rodale and Wagoner passed the baton in 2002 to the Land Institute, in Salina, Kansas, a nonprofit agricultural-research center dedicated to replacing conventional agriculture with processes that mimic natural ecosystems. The Land Institute, collaborating with other researchers, has been working on wheatgrass ever since. A trade name emerged for the new crop: Kernza.
Like engineering C4 rice, domesticating wheatgrass is a decades-long quest that may not fulfill its originators’ hopes. As of now, the tools of molecular biology would be of little help even if wanted—the task is too complicated. Wheatgrass, as one Land Institute researcher put it to me, “is irredeemably old-school.” Wheatgrass kernels are a quarter the size of wheat kernels, sometimes less, and have a thicker layer of bran. Unlike wheat, wheatgrass grows into a dark, dense mass of foliage that covers the field; the thick layer of vegetation protects the soil and keeps out weeds, but it also reduces productivity. To make wheatgrass useful to farmers, breeders will have to increase seed size and alter the architecture of the plant. As they do, they will also have to avoid its penchant for lodging. (Wild plants, used to fighting for every scrap of sun, tend to lodge in the bright light of a farmer’s field.) The Land Institute hopes to have field-ready wheatgrass with kernels that are half the size of wheat in the 2020s, but nothing is guaranteed.
Domesticating wheatgrass is the long game. Others have been trying for a shortcut: creating a hybrid of wheatgrass and bread wheat, hoping to mix the former’s large, plentiful grain and the latter’s perenniality and disease resistance. The two species produce viable offspring just often enough that Soviet-era biologists tried for decades to breed useful hybrids. They eventually gave up in the 1960s; smaller programs in North America and Germany also failed. Bolstered by new developments in biology, researchers at the Land Institute, Australia, and the Pacific Northwest began anew at the beginning of this century. When I visited Stephen S. Jones, of Washington State University, he and his colleagues had just suggested a scientific name for the new hybrid: Tritipyrum aaseae (the species name honors the pioneering cereal geneticist Hannah Aase). Much work remains; Jones told me that he hoped bread from T. aaseae would be ready for my daughter’s children. “The problem isn’t going away,” he said. The world was moving, slowly but implacably, toward a demographic cliff. Jones and his colleagues were working with imperfect tools to build a safety net.
African and Latin American researchers scratch their heads in bafflement when they hear about these projects—some of them, anyway. Perennial grains are the hard way to do this, Edwige Botoni told me. Botoni is a researcher at the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel, in Burkina Faso. Traveling through the edge of the Sahara, she had given a lot of thought to the problem of feeding people on marginal land. One part of the answer, she told me, would be to emulate the tropical places like Nigeria and Brazil. Whereas farmers in the temperate zone focus on cereals, tropical agriculture is centered on tubers and trees, both often more productive than cereals.
Consider cassava, the big tuber also known as manioc, mogo, and yuca. The tenth-most-important crop in the world, it is grown in wide swathes of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Nigeria is the world’s biggest producer. Because cassava is a tuber, not a cereal, the edible part grows underground; no matter how big the tuber, the plant will never lodge. On a per-acre basis, cassava harvests far outstrip those of wheat and other cereals. In optimal conditions, cassava farmers have pulled 160,000 pounds per acre from the ground—more than fifty times the average for wheat. The comparison is unfair, because cassava tubers contain more water than wheat kernels. But even when this is taken into account, cassava produces many more calories per acre than wheat. “I don’t know why this alternative is not considered,” Botoni said. “It seems easier than breeding entirely new species.”*11
Much the same is true for tree crops. Nichols grows more than a hundred different types of apple. A mature McIntosh apple tree can grow between 350 and 550 pounds of apples per year. Orchard growers commonly plant 200 to 250 trees per acre. In good years this can work out to 35 to 65 tons of fruit per acre. The equivalent figure for wheat, by contrast, is about a ton and a half. Again, apples contain more water than wheat—but not that much more water. Papaya is even more productive. So are some nuts.
Am I arguing that farmers around the world should replace their plots of wheat, rice, and maize with fields of cassava, potato, and sweet potato and orchards of bananas, apples, and chestnuts? No. The argument is rather that Vogtians have multiple ways to meet tomorrow’s needs. These alternative paths are difficult, but so is the Borlaugian path exemplified in C4 rice. The greatest obstacle for Vogtians is something else: labor. Lloyd Nichols’s operation requires a lot of workers, and so does every farm like it.
Heinberg, Nichols’s neighbor, was able to take advantage of a host of incentives and subsidies provided by the state of Illinois and the federal gov
ernment: land-tax incentives, depreciation allowances, crop subsidies, and so on. Nichols couldn’t, because almost everything he planted was not on the official state list of eligible crops. And he didn’t devote sufficient acreage to those on the list that he did plant to qualify as a grower. On the official, regulatory level, it was as if his farm didn’t exist. “I’ve never got a subsidy check in forty years of doing this,” he said to me. As he pointed out, many of the supports were intended to promote the acquisition of machinery, rather than labor. He might get a special low-interest loan to buy a combine, but not to hire a human being.
These policies are not accidental. Beginning with the end of the Second World War, most national governments have intentionally directed labor away from the land (Communist China was long an exception). Farmwork was seen as “stagnant” and “unproductive.” The goal was to consolidate and mechanize farms, which would increase harvests and reduce costs, especially labor costs. Farmworkers, no longer needed, would migrate to the cities, where they could get better-paying work in factories. Ideally, both the remaining farm owners and the factory workers would earn more, the former by growing more and better crops, the latter by obtaining better-paying jobs in industry. The nation as a whole would benefit: increased exports from industry and agriculture, cheaper food in the cities, a plentiful labor supply.
There were downsides—cities in developing nations acquired entire slums full of displaced families. But in many places, including most of the developed world, the countryside was emptied. In the United States, for example, the proportion of the workforce employed in agriculture went from 21.5 percent in 1930 to 1.9 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, the number of farms fell by almost two-thirds. The average size of the surviving farms increased to match; their owners increasingly focused on exports to the world market. Because the rules that encourage large-scale, industrial production for export remain in effect, farmers like Lloyd Nichols are swimming against the tide.
To Vogtians, the best agriculture takes care of the soil first and foremost, a goal that is difficult to accomplish when growing large swathes of a single crop. But tending multiple crops, as Nichols does, unavoidably requires more human attention. Nichols pays for the labor by selling his food to affluent foodies. Truly extending this type of agriculture would require bringing back at least some of the people whose parents and grandparents left the countryside. Providing these workers with a decent living would further drive up costs. Some labor-sparing mechanization is possible, but no small farmer whom I have spoken with thinks that it would be possible to shrink the labor force to the level seen in big industrial operations. The whole system can grow only with some kind of wall-to-wall rewrite of the legal system that encourages the use of labor. Such large shifts in social arrangements are not easily accomplished.
Even then, everything could be thrown off by water.
* * *
*1 Liebig sought to profit from his ideas by launching a fertilizer company. His celebrity attracted backers and they set up a factory in 1845. Bizarrely, he initially refused to put nitrogen in its products, maintaining that plants received plenty of nitrogen in the form of ammonia (NH3) released by decaying roots and leaves in the soil. Supposedly that ammonia rose up into the air as a gas, dissolved into rainwater, and fell back plentifully to Earth. For nitrogen, Liebig said, manure and other traditional fertilizers were “unnecessary” and “superfluous”; instead they supplied different limiting nutrients: potassium and phosphorus. Alas, Liebig’s refusal to put nitrogen in his products meant that they were ineffective; his cocksure refusal to test them meant that he didn’t discover their ineffectiveness until after his customers did. By the time he admitted that nitrogen was the key factor, he and his backers had lost a lot of money. Tempers can’t have been improved by his subsequent claim that he had always promoted nitrogen’s central role.
*2 Confusingly, nitrous oxide (N2O) is not one of the nitrous oxides (NOx). Because the extra nitrogen in N2O makes it behave differently than NOx, chemists place it in a separate category.
*3 “Manure” is commonly thought of as animal excrement, usually from cows, horses, or humans. But there are actually two forms: brown manure (animal feces) and green manure (crop remains or cover crops that are plowed back into the land). When I use the term, I refer to both.
*4 Parallel to the Howard-inspired soil movements in North America and Europe was a second, independent soil movement in Germany. Its central figure was Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), an Austrian philosopher/social reformer/Christian mystic who founded a movement known as anthroposophy. One component of anthroposophy was a spiritually driven form of soil restoration, separately derived but strikingly similar to Howard’s. Steiner’s movement spread across the world but in the end had little deep influence over the organic movement outside of Germany.
*5 Many researchers viewed the idea of gene migration with skepticism until it was directly observed in tobacco in 2003. In the furious shuttling of DNA that creates tobacco pollen, about one out of every sixteen thousand pollen grains ends up with bits of chloroplast DNA mixed into its nuclear DNA. Usually the snippet of chloroplast DNA doesn’t contain an entire gene, but sometimes it does, and when that occurs there is a good chance the offspring created from the pollen will have that gene in their nuclear DNA. By comparing modern cyanobacteria DNA to the DNA in the cell nuclei of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a team of German researchers concluded in 2002 that about one-fifth of the Arabidopsis nuclear genome originated in its chloroplasts.
*6 The gene variants (“alleles,” in the jargon) that produce short-strawed plants in Green Revolution rice and wheat are related. A recessive mutation in a rice gene causes the plants to produce lower-than-normal levels of the key growth hormone gibberellin. A dominant mutation in wheat leads the plants to respond less to gibberellin, even though they produce it at normal levels. In both cases, the plant is always slamming on the brakes—constantly repressing growth.
*7 I am oversimplifying here—there’s a third alternative. On a global level, a quarter or more of the food produced for human consumption is lost or squandered—left in the field, ruined by poor storage, wrecked in packaging, spoiled in transport, rejected in markets, or simply thrown away by consumers. The exact amount depends on the definition of “waste,” which varies dramatically in different studies, and how it is measured, which also varies. In wealthy places, most of the waste comes from people not eating food they have bought. By contrast, the losses in poor nations are concentrated in the field, storage, and transport. Cutting waste obviously would reduce the need to increase harvests. Unfortunately, it will not be easy. In poor nations it would require significant improvements to agricultural infrastructure—costly investments that are difficult for cash-strapped nations to make. Reducing losses in rich nations would involve changing the behavior of huge numbers of busy people, an equally challenging endeavor. Both should be attempted, but progress is likely to be slow and modest.
*8 The release of oxygen in the first stage is a necessary part of photosynthesis. It is not the oxygen release due to rubisco grabbing the wrong molecule, which occurs later.
*9 An academic note: In its madcap way, evolution has created a second rubisco work-around, called crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), which splits light and dark reactions in a different way. CAM occurs mainly in dryland plants like cacti and pineapple and is of little import here.
*10 There may even be other ways of improving photosynthesis. Plants protect themselves from intense sunlight by dissipating some of the excess energy as heat, which means that energy is lost to photosynthesis. Plants switch off the dissipating mechanism when the light is dimmed by clouds, dusk, or shade, including the shade cast on one plant leaf by another, or on one crop by its neighbor. But the adjustment is slow enough and occurs frequently enough to reduce the total photosynthesis in wheat by about a fifth; maize may lose as much as a tenth. In 2016, a research team based at the University of Illinois demonstrated that it is possible in pr
inciple to speed up the reaction, possibly making up for some of the loss.
*11 Potato is a northern equivalent. The average 2016 U.S. potato yield was 43,700 pounds per acre, more than ten times the equivalent figure for wheat.
[ FIVE ]
Water: Freshwater
Tomatoes
In the early 1980s an editor took a chance on an inexperienced writer and gave me an assignment to write an article about the tomato-processing industry. I knew nothing about the subject but neglected to emphasize this to the editor. About nine-tenths of the processed-tomato acreage in the United States was in California. I went there and met up with a photographer named Peter Menzel. Lucky for me, Peter knew quite a bit about the tomato industry. We drove his truck to the Central Valley, an agricultural wonderland that I had never seen or maybe even heard of before the magazine called.
The editor had it in mind that the humble tomato had become the subject of a gigantic technological enterprise. He was correct. We saw vast storage and processing facilities in which layers of crisscrossing conveyor belts carried red rivers of tomatoes past advanced sensors. A manager demonstrated how breeders had created tomatoes with extra-thick, machinery-proof skins by dropping one from chest height onto a concrete floor. Another manager took us to high-tech laboratories in which masked women tested tomato juice and loud salsa music played. All the workers are illegals from Mexico, the manager said, explaining the music. In the fields Peter and I gawped at great combines like swaying ships that sucked up tomatoes as they passed. Conveyor belts ran down each side and teams of men and women picked through the tomatoes as they coursed through the mechanism. At one point a small plane flew overhead and the workers abruptly abandoned the combines and fled into the cover of some nearby trees. They’re afraid it’s the immigration police, a supervisor said. Labor is a big issue here.