Deeply Rooted

OVER THE WINTER of 1974, David set out to prove organic agriculture wrong. He had been hearing about it in the media and what he heard disturbed him, because it ran counter to everything his high school teachers and his community had told him about how agriculture should be. David has a penchant for thoroughness that borders on obsessiveness, so when he says he spent the snowy months reading anything and everything he could find on the topic, I imagine the towers of books, magazines, and newspaper clippings that must have passed through his hands. Instead of finding holes, though, he inadvertently proved organics right in his own mind. As soon as he took over the farm from his father, he converted the entire operation.

Before I met David, someone told me: “I hear he’s kind of intense.” While that proved to be true, he is not unpleasant, just raw. Pleasantries and trivia don’t make it onto his radar; when he’s done with a sit-down conversation he will often stand up and leave without a word. His mind seems to be constantly focused on the Big Picture, at times tortured by it. His deep, almost Biblical sense of morality exempts nothing, least of all himself and the farm. “I’ve always had to feel some sort of moral and ethical purpose in what I do,” he once told me. “I couldn’t just do something to make money. There had to be some higher value.”

When he converted to organic farming he didn’t know what he was doing, nor was there anyone around to help him—he didn’t know another person in North Dakota doing it. But the greatest obstacle wasn’t learning how to rotate crops or build the soil. It was the psychological barrier. “Every time you listened to the farm news on the TV or radio, or looked at the paper, there was some assault on organic farming, just sheer ridicule,” he said. “I mean, imagine, a person has farmed the same way all of his career, then someone comes in and shows him a different way, one that might confront or invalidate what he’s done? That’s a powerful psychological confrontation. So there was a backlash against us—it was like the early Christians being fed to the lions. When us organic farmers finally found each other, we’d sit around the table and tell our stories like we were at AA.”

Things have changed since those early days. Organic food has become mainstream and organic farming methods have been proven in many people’s eyes. American agribusiness has replaced its bullying with a strategy of disdain and dismissal rooted in the certainty that organic farming cannot feed the world the way it does. In 2007, the Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Collin Peterson, reflected the new attitude: “For whatever reason, people are willing to pay two or three times as much for something that says ‘organic’ or ‘local,’” he told the Financial Times. “Far be it from me to understand what that’s about, but that’s reality. And if people are dumb enough to pay that much then hallelujah.”

As the rest of the world has changed its relationships to organic farming, so has David changed his relationship to the world. He no longer cares what people say. Nothing could sway his conviction that the concepts behind organic farming are right. Instead now what he deals with is the tradeoff for having enlightened himself. Every day he is acutely aware of how tragically shortsighted the conventional system is.

“Sure, if you take it from the standpoint of human labor efficiency, there is nothing more efficient than American agriculture,” David once explained, his voice rising as he spoke. “Just imagine driving one of these massive combines! There’s how many bushel-a-minute of corn coming into the hopper? It’s like gold coming out of the tube. You can combine a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of corn in a day—one person can! Holy smokes! It is a marvel, an absolute marvel of science that this can be done. When it comes to human labor, it is the most efficient agriculture the world has ever seen, by far. But from the standpoint of energy, there is nothing more inefficient. It is completely and absolutely, irrevocably unsustainable. It cannot endure past the oil age.”

When David describes the agricultural system he is working to create as an alternative, he doesn’t use the word organic. Nor does he use its sequel sustainable, a word he thinks is both overused and misapplied. The word he prefers is enduring. He would like to build a kind of farming that will last beyond the next season, beyond the next House Ag Committee appointments—beyond his own lifetime.

Midsummer morning, blue skies above. As the sun climbs higher it brings on the heat, but nobody complains. Sun means dry, and dry means the brothers can get the grain out of the field and into the bin. A few days ago they cut down the crop on the north side of the farm and laid it on the field in swathes to dry out, and ever since then they have been watching the weather radar and praying it doesn’t show rain on the way.

From the air this crop could be taken for wheat, but from the road, it’s clearly something different. As pickup trucks pass by, the drivers will often slow down to see, something that seems to happen with every field on this farm. In the midst of this landscape sung in the three flat notes of corn, soy, and wheat, here there will be a field of minty green buckwheat or an expanse of proso millet the color of celery. In the dark afternoons of last fall, when the black soil everywhere held nothing but ragged brown corn stalks, this field on the north side shone like a green lightbulb, lush with slender blades of triticale.

A cross between durum wheat and rye, triticale is actually a not-so-distant cousin of the wheat that grows all over this area. In the field, though, the two plants have entirely different habits. While the triticale is seven, even eight feet tall in places, the wheats grown around here are mostly semi-dwarf varieties that stand less than three feet. Being compact, dwarf wheat spends a lesser percentage of its energy making leaves and stalks and roots—plant material that you can’t sell—and thus more energy making the part that you can. Smaller plants also mean a combine can harvest the crop in one fell swoop, no need to cut the crop down into swaths and wait for it to dry while watching for rain clouds.

If being tall and bushy makes triticale a nuisance to harvest and a problem if it rains, in David’s eyes the inconvenience is worth it. He focuses not on the crop, but the whole farm system. The more abundant a plant’s foliage is, the better it can shade out weeds that compete for nutrition and water. This triticale crushed the opposition, good not just for the crop itself, but for reducing the weed population on the farm as a whole. Big plants like this also grow commensurately big root systems, which means that during a drought they might find water while the neighbor’s dwarf wheats and their small root systems dried up and died. Finally, all that plant matter above and below is crucial to building the soil. After harvest, it’s disked back into the earth, where it feeds microorganisms and helps the soil retain water.

None of this matters much to the guys growing dwarf wheat. They don’t need the plant to shade out weeds because they have herbicides. They don’t need biomass for the soil because they have fertilizers. In fact, the dwarf varieties are desirable specifically because they can take up vast quantities of fertilizer, which increases yields; given the same fertilizers, the triticale would grow unmanageably tall and fall over. David once called their farm an oasis in the “biological desert” of conventional farmland; judging from the two different crops, it’s as if they are actually a parallel universe.

This morning David is harvesting the swaths of triticale in concentric circles, from the field’s outside border in. From far away he appears like any other farmer who is driving a slightly older, smaller combine, but as he gets closer to where I’m standing it’s clear something is different. He looks like a minister behind the wheel, his thin torso stiff and straight, his brow hardened with thought. Closer, and I can see that his eyes are fixed straight ahead—on the crop before him, on the machine lifting and rolling it, but seemingly also on an additional dimension in which meaning and consequence are visible, like all the roots of the earth exposed aboveground.

In the middle of the field is a truck, which will transport the grain from field to bin. David pauses the combine beside it, moves some levers, and the grain in the hopper comes streaming out the top spout and into the back of the truck. As the grain downloads, I climb up the ladder on the side of the cab, open the door, and seat myself as well as I can on the metal ridge next to the driver’s seat. David says nothing, keeps his eyes fixed on the stream of brown kernels. When the hopper is empty, he shifts the gears and starts moving again, eyes forward. In time, he begins to talk. Or rather, because the combine is loud and he is wearing earplugs, David shouts.

Listening to him is like looking through someone else’s eyeglasses and finding the lenses turn the world to fractals. Any familiar topic regarding the environmental impact of modern agriculture unleashes from his brain a flood of facts and figures that fill the cab like a swarm of bees. I already know that modern agricultural machinery compacts the soil; he cites engineering studies from the University of Indiana, talking out mathematic equations of gross vehicle weight and the pounds of pressure per inch applied to the soil’s surface, explaining how the earth feels this heavy footprint four feet down. He shouts about how he read that some Japanese farmers wear moccasins in their rice paddies, even go barefoot. He motions to his brown boots and says, “It’s because they figure shit-kickers like these will damage the land! My God! Here we are driving eighty-thousand-pound machines all over the ground, and the Japanese farmers are worried about clod-hopper shoes?” Any other farmer I have met who drives a combine would dismiss the comparison as irrelevant; the American economy simply does not allow for that scale of production. David is anguished by the idea.

Of course, while few farmers think about these issues as constantly as David does, on some level everyone involved in agriculture is aware of the harm. It’s well-known that the natural world that agriculture relies on is exhaustible, especially when not cared for, but there is simply no place for that concern within the economic equation. Conventional agriculture works like any other capitalist system: it succeeds only if it grows. As such, it depends on what Wendell Berry has called “the doctrine of limitlessness,” the delusion that the resources necessary for that growth are infinite.

“Every person, I believe, possesses in their soul an inherent moral code.” They are delicate words, but because David must shout them over the engine they turn heavy and blunt like rocks. As his voice strains, the message pares down to elemental truth. “We know deep down what’s right and what’s wrong, but to judge between the two we have to stop and think about it. Instead, most people just accept things. Well, I don’t just accept things. I’ve got to stop and think about them. And when I do, I realize how much in our society is just based entirely on a money economy, with no thought for a moral or ethical response to what we’re doing.”

As we chug slowly around the field, scooping up grain, David tells me a story. It’s from an era that predates his organic awakening. During these years he was in high school ag class happily being trained for his future role as a conventional commodity farmer. Even then he sensed that something was going wrong. Up to that point, people had been content with what they had. “They didn’t want more land, they didn’t need more land,” he says. “Then all of a sudden, they had to have more land—it was like a fever.”

Throughout the country, agriculture was rapidly consolidating into fewer and larger farms. As David saw it, his neighbors were embracing a sort of personal Manifest Destiny, whereby their need to grow trumped preexisting values like community and cooperation. The only way to get more land was to take it from someone. Covetousness, once a sin, became a survival skill.

David was in the high school’s Future Farmers of America club at the time. When they held a speech contest he took it as a chance to speak his mind about the shift. “I gave what I thought was a pretty damn good presentation slamming the greed that I saw growing in the community. It was difficult for me to understand the feeling of greed, and that’s the way I described it—I didn’t mince words.” The contest’s judge was the school’s English teacher, a woman married to one of the farmers who was leading the charge to get big—a man who “expressed his greed very overtly,” David says.

“So here I was saying all this, and I can imagine her thinking, This kid is describing my husband, and I don’t like what I hear.” David gives one of the first laughs I’ve ever heard from him, a high, loud ha ha ha! As would be expected, he didn’t even place in the contest. But that didn’t faze him. The following year, as salutatorian of his senior class, he gave nearly the same speech at graduation.

The swaths of triticale before us now are thick, which forces David to pause so the combine can process the clump. Silently we watch the teeth spin stalks and leaves and grain, drawing the mass into the machine’s inner chambers where it is digested—the grains stored in the hopper above, and the rest spit out the back. A rabbit springs forth and dashes off through the swaths.

David refers to the farming that the money economy requires as “brute-force agriculture.” It is in direct contrast to the artfulness he values, instead a sort of farming-by-numbers by which a person plants, sprays, and harvests according to a predetermined schedule.

“It’s telling that farmers have grown rather girthy,” he shouts over the noise of the engine. “Farmers today with the big machinery go from one half-section to another without ever getting out of the cab, without ever smelling or feeling the soil, or even getting it on their boots. They sit in their tractor cabs, they have their little refrigerators—they don’t even have to steer because they have global positioning. Just have to put in the coordinates and off they go.”

“To some extent, yeah. I try not to be very brutish, or as little as possible, but it’s unavoidable when you’re out here with big machinery.” He says it easily, willing to convict himself. “You’re not touching the soil, you’re not connected to it. If we’d had a lot of rain and this low spot here was wet, and I knew I wasn’t gonna get stuck, of course I’d roll right through it, knowing full well that in doing so I’d compact the soil. I mean, you have to do it for convenience sake, because of the economic pressures of the age. You just have to make those decisions . . .”

Until a few years ago David had been driving the same combine since 1969, a red Versatil machine with an open cab, no windshield, nothing to protect a person from the sun and the cold, the chaff and the dust. As he put it, “You just hoped the wind was blowing in your favor.” It was miserable at times, but David was deeply reluctant to put any more separation between himself and the land.

In 2003, he upgraded to the current machine, which has a fully enclosed cab and offers the relative silence that allows the person driving to listen to the radio on headphones. This new combine is smaller and lighter than anything in the county—most people around here are working thirty-foot headers, double the size of this one. Even so, the switch seems to have come with a certain resignation. I ask why he upgraded and he shrugs his shoulders. “I guess you just get to be so old and you can’t help it.”

David tells another story. This one is from the Bible, but David tells it almost like he’s recounting something that happened to a guy he knew. The city of Nineveh is going to hell because its residents are so bad and immoral. God tells Jonah to warn the people to change their ways, but Jonah resists and instead gets on ship, is thrown overboard, eaten by a whale, rescued by some miracle of God, etc. Then, even after all that, he’s still not sure he wants to be a prophet of God. He does go back to Nineveh, reluctantly, but he tells himself, and he tells God, It’s not going to work. The people are beyond help. And besides, they’re not going to listen to me—who the hell am I?But he goes ahead and preaches, walks from one end of the city to the other preaching—and this is the largest city in the ancient world, so it takes him days. When he’s done with his mission, he sits down outside the city under a shady tree and says, Aw, these people are going to hell anyway, the city’s going to be destroyed, just like God said. And then lo and behold, the people take his message. They reform their ways, and God does not visit fire upon the city.

At this point David starts to chuckle—he had introduced this to me as a funny story. When Jonah sees that Nineveh is spared he’s pissed off. He was just waiting for God to destroy the city, he wanted to see it happen—he wanted to prove God wrong. But then when it didn’t happen he was pissed. “PISSED OFF!” David says, laughing. “God, you were supposed to destroy Nineveh!Aw, that’s some pretty hilarious stuff.”

Neither of us has to acknowledge the metaphor, Nineveh so close to home, the doctrine of limitlessness about to expire. Within moments the weight of the world returns to the combine’s cab. David’s face clouds over. “We made a bad turn in our culture when we took food production away from women and gave it to the men,” he says, “when we went from the hoe to the diesel engine. Ever since then we’ve been on a power trip, and I think it’s been really bad for the land—it’s been bad for a lot of things.” His voice softens. “Honestly, I guess I’d rather just be a gardener.”