Green Options

Part 1 of this post described what you could see while riding along in the tractor on a super-sustainable farm of the near future (only text in red describes things that are not already fully available to farmers).  Our guide is Sarah, a 24 year-old intern on the Gordon family farm in Iowa.  We have already learned about the special systems employed here to improve the soil and to make it more productive and “drought proof.”

The Risk Hurdle

Sarah explains that the field we are in has been under Mark Gordon’s care for 6 years.  The first 4-5 of those years were difficult.  Until he could get the soil restored by these practices he was exposed to certain risks.  The untilled, not dark brown soil retained water better, but in a year with a cold spring that meant a soil that remained cold and wet so that there could be a challenge getting the seeds, particularly the corn seeds, germinated and growing.  After these many years of improving the soil, this field is actually suitable for planting earlier than others, but that took time. 

Transition Specialists

Mark has become somewhat of an expert on how to deal with these “transition” risks.  He specializes in converting land to this super sustainable system and that is what Sarah wants to learn to do.  The problem is that it takes 4-6 years of serious investment in time and money to improve a field to this degree.  There are very real yield risks during that time. This is why many growers that use no-till for the soybeans in their rotation go back to conventional tillage for their corn. Mark and Sarah are glad that a coalition of equipment, chemical and seed companies have pulled together to set up an insurance and technical support system to help farmers like Mark and Sarah do the hard work of transitioning conventionally farmed land into the sort of “drought-proofed” and environmentally beneficial land that is possible.

Today we will be touring a farm of the future that employs the state-of-the-art farming methods that have been developed over decades of effort by growers, academic researchers, extension agents, and technology companies. Actually most of what we will see is already possible in 2010 and only the things highlighted in red require some change to become fully available.

Our tour guide is Sarah – a 24 year-old intern who works on the Gordon family farm in North-Central Iowa.  Sarah is part of a major USDA program to encourage young people to go into farming.  None of her family has farmed for generations, but she was intrigued by the rural lifestyle and by the interesting technologies.  She switched majors to graduate with a degree in Agronomy.

Who Is Driving!?

The first thing you notice is that as we progress across a large field in early May, is that Sarah is not actually driving the tractor – no one is!  Seeing your alarm she laughs and explains that the tractor and the fertilizer/planter it is pulling are both being controlled by a sophisticated computer guidance system called Real-Time Kinetics (RTK) .  It uses satellite GPS but also signal from a tower she points to in the distance.  The path we are following is “auto-steered” to the inch so that it achieves “controlled wheel traffic.”    This means that a large percentage of this field is NEVER driven over or compressed by the weight of equipment.  The lack of overlap pays for the system, but the lack of soil compression dramatically lowers emissions of the potent, ozone destroying and greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide from this field.  The Gordon’s qualify for “carbon offset” income because of this. 

This post is going to be a “virtual tour” of a near-future farm that is truly state-of-the-art in terms of sustainability.  If you have read some of my blog posts you know that I vigorously defend the “conventional” farmers who have kept us fed. That does not mean that I am content with the status quo of agriculture. A broad coalition of researchers, farmers and technology companies have been developing new farming methods that are more environmentally friendly, more energy efficient, more water use-efficient, more productive and more climate friendly. I’d like to see farming move increasingly towards these optimum approaches.  In this hypothetical “tour” I will use red font only to designate things that are not fully available today.  The rest of this description is about farming practices that are quite possible today and actually deployed on many real farms. 

Meeting Our Guide

Our tour is in a tractor moving over a field in Iowa in May.  Our guide is Sarah, a 22-year old intern on the Gordon family farm.  She had no farming background but was intrigued by the idea of becoming a sustainable farmer.  After graduating from college with an agronomy degree she came to study with Mark Gordon as part of a USDA program to encourage young people to become farmers.

Around 1300 c.e. the Yao and Zhuang people of Guangdong Province in Southern China faced a serious problem.  In the Longsheng area there was a growing population, but their mountainous surroundings gave them very little land that could be used for farming.  They needed more food and so they turned to technology for the solution.  What they did was to terrace their mountainsides even up to slopes of 45%. I’m sure that the method was perfected over the 400 years of building.  What they were able to do is still an impressive example of civil engineering, even today.  Using stones and mud they built terrace walls that stand firm even with the torrential downpours that are common in the area.  They used bamboo piping to distribute water to each paddy - some so narrow that they only have room for two rows of rice.  This production system has remained productive for centuries when many other contemporary farming societies around the world simply depleted one area and moved on to the next.  These terraces are called Longji, or the ”Dragon’s Spine” and they now extend over 66 square kilometers.  They are both beautiful and inspiring.

To food safety advocates, CAFO is a four-letter word.  The acronym stands for Concentrated Animal Feed Operations.  They came into being as industrialized farming methods took hold largely as a result of the demand for food worldwide and the decreasing amount of land upon which to grow it.  Author/journalist/activist Michael Pollan is among many others who have reported damage done to animals, the environment, and food itself with the advent of CAFOs that house cattle in large buildings with rows of narrow stanchions.  The cows eat feed from lower-quality surplus corn – not locally grown non-chemical feed corn raised in traditional fashion — and shipped in trucks traveling long distances that create local road congestion and burn precious fossil fuels.

The World Agroforestry Centre has recently released a paper titled ” Trees on Farm: Analysis of Global Extent and Geographical Patterns of Agroforestry.” The researchers used five global geodata sets to estimate the percent tree cover on 22 million square kilometers of agricultural land around the world.  They were surprised to find that nearly half of that land had 10% or more tree cover (which is considered “significant” from an agroforestry point of view).  The area involved is vast - as large as the Amazon basin.

Even for North America, the percentages were surprisingly high (39% over 10% cover, 17% over 30%).  Values in Europe were similar. The highest levels are in central America (98% above 10% cover), South America (81%), and Southeast Asia (82%).  Overall, the lowest tree cover is in the most arid areas, but even there >20% of the farmland has 10% tree cover.

If you picture a grain farmer out tending a field, you might imagine someone sitting on the metal seat of a tractor like the one in the picture above, moving slowly across a field - perhaps the farmer has a straw hat.  That image seems attractive as long as you are not the farmer.  Fortunately, this isn’t the real situation in the developed world or we wouldn’t get anyone in our rapidly aging population to do full-time farming on the multiple thousand-acre farms that are typical of a modern, Midwestern family farm.

Today, a progressive farmer will typically be working in an enclosed, air-conditioned cab with surround sound, a cell phone, and an internet connection for tracking commodity futures or catching up on email.  Increasingly, the tractor is driving itself by computer and GPS except for occasional intervention.  I’ve carried on a number of protracted interviews with farmers who were in just this setting.  I know one farmer that ran much of his state senate campaign from a tractor or combine.  These new, sophisticated, farm vehicles are not just about keeping the farmer comfortable and multi-tasking.  They are important tools for making farming more sustainable.

I read an article today about a major shortfall in the Kenyan wheat harvest that will drive the need for major imports to meet food needs.  There were three major factors behind this disappointing harvest.  Tight credit and high energy prices kept some growers from even planting.  The rains were not well timed to achieve good yields.  Also a new strain of a very serious wheat disease, UG99 Stem Rust, further reduced yields.

This news has nudged me to write a series of posts about wheat because as a crop, it has a lot more problems than one bad harvest in Kenya.  The Kenya example just stands as an example of the vulnerability of this extremely important world food crop-a crop that is really an “orphan” in today’s agricultural scene.

Today’s news is ablaze with stories about the recent swine flu outbreak, an outbreak that may have been fully preventable through the use of green farming practices. At the time I write this post, 50 cases of swine

flu have been reported in the US alone, with one death attributable to the mutated virus. Although most cases have been mild, the fear factor alone is leading to school closures and cancelled vacations across the world.

Got another wonderful email from Willie Nelson today . . .

I really love and appreciate the work Willie Nelson is doing with Farm Aid and the letter he wrote to our new president elect, Barack Obama, which beautifully articulates the need to pay attention to family farmers. While there are so many urgent issues looming and competing for airspace for our new president, I can’t agree with Willie more that support of family and smaller local/regional farm systems is at the heart of the solution for many of the challenges that plague our country. 

Family farms and regional farming systems help reduce the food production carbon footprint in so many ways, not the least of which is that it travels less of a distance if it is supporting a defined regional area.

If you visit your local farm stands and farmer’s markets and have ever belonged to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program, you have come to respect if not love your local farmers - and for good reason!

Thank you Willie for continuing to make noise (and great music) on this issue!

Read Willie’s letter . . .

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed how the demand for inexpensive olive oil in large quantities is causing environemental problems in some of the world’s largest olive oil producing countries including Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal.

It’s estimated that 95% of the olive oil in the country comes form the Mediterranean region. For those of us in America who are trying to incorporate more local foods into our diet, this causes a problem. The U.S. isn’t known for it’s olive oil. At least, not yet. But it seems that many regions in California are stepping up their olive growing and their olive oil producing. According to a news brief on oliveoilsource.com

Olive oil is a rapidly growing industry in California, with volume projected to increase by 1000 percent in the next five years. California also produces 99.9% of the olive oil grown in the U.S.

and recently

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law Senate Bill (SB) 634 to provide stronger support to domestic olive oil producers nationwide by giving further clarification and quality control over olive oil sold in the United States.

So it looks like there will be a lot more olive oil being produced in the U.S. and steps are being taken to ensure the quality of that oil. In fact, the article says that

the new law finally gives regulatory weight to how olive oil is labeled and marketed and substance to quality control issues that have plagued the industry involving lower-grade oils fraudulently marketed as extra virgin.