Deeply Rooted

BEFORE JULY 15, 2007, nobody had seen anything like it, at least not anyone around this part of North Dakota. A hailstorm fifty-four miles long and at times fifteen miles wide, five separate tornadoes within its sweep. Hail the size of golf balls whipped around in eighty mile-an-hour winds. It took vinyl siding off of buildings and bark off of trees.

The majority of the land in the seventy mile-long strip that the storm hit was cropland, and for most of that, the “white combine” brought the end of the season early. Corn stalks as tall as grown men were reduced to six-inch skeletons. Fields of spring wheat not long from being harvested looked like they had been plowed under. The storm knocked out two hundred and fifty thousand acres in Cass County alone, one of four counties where the governor declared a disaster and called in FEMA. According to extension agent John Kringler, the losses later proved to be a “double whammy” for the farmers: when commodity prices skyrocketed during the following winter and growers around the country were cashing in like never before, these guys had nothing to sell.

Dan told me the storm passed just north of their farm but brought them only rain. He is a devoted home-meteorologist, a guy who can tick off a half hour looking at online radar maps to see what high-pressure system is moving where or how dew points are pooling. For him, the storm was a fascinating anomaly. Watching his eyes, wide-open as he recounted the storm’s details, I guessed there was a sliver of him that wished he had witnessed it himself. But in another way it was not surprising at all, rather a predictable link in a larger chain of events. For the Podolls, the hailstorm was just one more piece of evidence that in LaMoure County, North Dakota, climate change had begun.

That was not the prevailing opinion. Locals agreed that it was a “severe summer storm” and an “unusually large system,” but in these parts, climate change is still largely considered a theory. A 2008 editorial about global warming in the LaMoure Chronicle ended with, “This could go on and on but the main thing is that people are jumping to wild eyed fear mongering conclusions on something that will probably never happen.” In an earlier Associated Press article with the headline “Talk of global warming gets chilly reception in N.D.,” a LaMoure farmer told the reporter, “I don’t know where this global warming comes from . . . We’ve had hot summers, we’ve had cool summers . . . I think it’s just somebody trying to start something.”

David was quoted in the AP article, too, as an “organic farmer and gardener . . . who does believe global warming has arrived on the Great Plains.” What the article didn’t mention is that he had been recording the farm’s meteorological details every day since 1973. He was meticulous about it; if he went out of town, someone had to cover for him. Over time, he saw clear shifts in the farm’s climate. So clear, in fact, that he stopped keeping the records. “We know what happened,” Dan explained. “At a certain point there was no need to track climate change anymore, because it was here.”

Spinning off of the hailstorm story, Dan gave me evidence of climate change that to him is staggering. “For starters, pooling dew points are higher every year,” he said. “Just last week, there was a dew point of eighty-three in Saskatoon.” When I told him that was not something that registered with me as shocking—that in fact, it didn’t register at all—he nodded. “Well, yeah. Weather is something you experience every day, but you don’t notice it unless you mean to. That’s true even for farmers.”

What has happened in their area is not the simplistic, literal translation of global warming that makes for a nudge and a wink every time it snows in April (“Doesn’t feel like global warming to me!”). What they’re experiencing is more accurately called a climate change, in that the climate that southeastern North Dakota has had for as long as anyone can remember is changing. It is, in a word, wetter. As Dan explains it, higher temperatures across the West and a heating of the upper atmosphere are making it so moisture that would normally stop at the Rockies is sailing over and landing in North Dakota. On the radar, he can see the huge vapor trail streaming over from the Pacific. Likewise, moisture from the Southern Plains is heading north into the Dakotas and Manitoba. Since 1992, rainfall on the Podolls’ farm has been 150 percent of normal.

You can feel the increased moisture in the air—dew points, just like Dan said. You can also see the rain in the landscape. This area is called the “prairie pothole” region for the land’s many small natural depressions filled with water and cattails. The potholes are shallow, and as the rains have increased they have spilled over in every direction. Now each year entire sections of cropland are abandoned to standing water, left as flat mirrors to reflect the blue sky all summer long. Here and there among them are big trees rotted, dead, their long limbs stretched out in what seem like illogical positions now that they are bare of leaves. Along the side of the road sit bales of hay just sagging, folding in on themselves.

One reason the Podolls recognize climate change more than their neighbors is because of the way that they’re farming. Nearly everyone around here deals with weeds by spraying herbicide. It knocks down everything except their crops, which are genetically engineered to withstand it. The Podolls rely instead on cultural practices such as crop rotation, which manages weeds by alternating crops to suppress them. For instance, the first year of a rotation they’ll plant a crop that’s sowed early in the season. Its weeds, such as mustard, will also be early, and they’ll go to seed along with the crop. The next year when those mustard seeds come up early in the season, the Podolls will till them in and then plant a different crop, one that’s planted later. Along with that late crop will grow a late weed such as pigweed, which will also go to seed. The next year they’ll switch back to the early crop, so that by the time the pigweed germinates the crop will be tall enough to crowd it out. Every year, bit by bit, the weed seed bank is diminished.

Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work. With the wide temperature swings they’re having because of climate change, they see pigweed germinating two months early because April is so warm, and then mustard seeds coming up in July when the temperature is at fifty—thirty degrees below normal. And it’s not just the weeds. Torrential spring rains have kept their vegetable seeds from germinating in the seed plot. Summer humidity and low temperatures are what brought on septoria in their tomatoes.

The biggest loss has been wheat. Beginning in the 1990s they had to plant the crop later each year because of the increasing springtime moisture. By the time the plants started forming the heads that produce grain, the temperatures were reaching the eighties—too hot for grain to form well. Planted late the crop was also more susceptible to disease, a threat doubled by the rising humidity. For years they planted a variety that could fend off the pathogens, but eventually its resistance broke down. The neighbors who kept growing wheat sprayed fungicides to fight disease, but the Podolls ran out of options. In 2005, after growing wheat for more than fifty years, they had to give it up.

Less than a year after the hailstorm hit southeastern North Dakota, the world began to panic about food. Hungry people rioted in Mexico and India, Haiti and Yemen. Before the end of March, more than one newspaper had declared 2008 “The Year of the Global Food Crisis.” The dire circumstances reverberated in newspaper headlines across the world:

Of particular concern was wheat. In April, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schaefer told the International Food Aid Conference that the world had “never been less secure about the near-term future of wheat.” Global stocks had hit their lowest point in thirty years, and U.S. wheat stocks were at sixty-year lows. In Pakistan, paramilitary troops had been assigned to protect trucks transporting wheat and flour.

There was a tangle of reasons why the world’s wheat supply was in trouble. Over the long term, industrialization had changed global diets and increased demand for wheat. In the short term, high prices for corn and the demand for ethanol in the United States had switched acreage out of wheat production. As supplies dwindled, players in the commodity market drove prices higher with speculation. A rapacious disease called African stem rust was making its way across the Middle East and into India, laying waste to all the wheat it touched. Perhaps most importantly, there had been a series of crop failures in major wheat producing areas. A too-dry fall and too-wet spring had ruined the American winter crop harvested in 2007. In Australia a seven-year drought left colossal grain silos empty. Britain’s Special Representative on Climate Change told Reuters that the drought was “almost certainly, or at least very probably” the result of climate change.

Agriculture Secretary Schaefer responded to the crisis with a three-point plan, which he presented in June 2008 at a meeting of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. He called for improved plant breeds that would boost yields, specifically hybrids and new genetically engineered varieties of major food crops. The seed industry followed suit. The day after Schaefer’s speech, Monsanto released its own three-point plan, also focused on creating crop varieties with increased yields. “In short, the world needs to produce more while conserving more,” Monsanto’s CEO, Hugh Grant, said. “As an agricultural company focused on increasing crop yields, we will do our part.” It was the traditional fight song of agribusiness: More, Schaefer and Grant said, nearly in unison. We must simply figure out how to make more.

With regard to wheat, the statements were particularly provocative. Currently there is very little hybrid wheat and no commercially grown GMO wheat. That is to say, wheat remains one of the few crops with which farmers still save back their seed each year. They generally aren’t involved with breeding or “evolving” the wheat they keep—they buy new seed every few years to take advantage of new, improved varieties—but they also aren’t tied to the cycle of buying new seed every single year. Indeed, this is central to why wheat is also one of the few commodity crops that is not yet grown as a GMO: farmers have not wanted to give up that right to save seed.

There have been attempts to introduce genetically engineered wheat, but it has never gotten off the ground. This is in large part because it came on the scene later than the GMO versions of other major crops—which is to say, after wheat farmers had already watched consumer rejection of GMOs cripple exports of those other major food crops. When Monsanto’s herbicide resistant wheat was nearing commercial release, farmers resisted it. In North Dakota, the significant organic grain-growing community was particularly vocal in the opposition. (Theresa, of course, was on the front lines.) After months of argument, Monsanto shelved the product because of what it called “a lack of widespread wheat industry alignment.”

With climate change, genetically engineered wheat may have another chance. Researchers are trumpeting a new solution for the challenges of growing food on a warming planet, in the form of a new generation of GMO crops that are “climate ready.” Hundreds of patents have been filed around the world for the use of genes that might help food plants withstand the extreme conditions that climate change will bring. For wheat that means varieties that are drought-resistant, designed either to withstand drier conditions or to produce consistent yields despite fluctuating amounts of moisture. To a farmer who has watched his crops wither and die while waiting for rain, such a promise is tantalizing. In Australia, where the multi-year drought has left massive grain silos empty, field trials have already begun.

Meanwhile, in North Dakota, David and seven other organic farmers have been devising a solution of their own. Working with two researchers from North Dakota State University, the farmers formed a group called the Farm Breeder Club. They, too, intended to breed a wheat for the future, but using a totally different set of priorities. As they saw it the current food crisis was linked to a much bigger issue. Over the past century the industrialized world built an agricultural system using a scaffold of external supports: cheap fuel to run machinery; fertilizer manufactured from natural gas; imported water for irrigation; pesticides to eliminate insects, weeds, and diseases. With these inputs, fantastic yields were achieved, the likes of which the world had never seen. When turned into vast quantities of inexpensive food, those yields allowed the world population to grow exponentially. That, in turn, created greater demand for more food. The problem was that the scaffold became inseparable from the system itself. Agriculture could not function—the world could not eat—without those external supports, yet suddenly they were running out. Oil and gas reserves were dwindling, aquifers were being drained. And, in spite of the skeptics in LaMoure County, climate change had already begun to amplify the challenges.

According to David and his comrades, more of the same scaffold-supported, yield-fixated production was not the solution; to feed the world now and in the future, agriculture would have to learn to stand on its own two feet. Likewise plant breeding: for decades, the focus has been on creating high-yielding crops designed for the conventional system. Called “prima donnas” by detractors, these breeds thrive only in a narrow environment supported by chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and often irrigation. But the Farm Breeder Club wanted to create just the opposite: workhorse varieties that would thrive without the scaffold and be resilient enough to withstand whatever curveballs climate change threw them.

The Podolls were already growing a plant that could serve as a model—one that was, to use David’s words, truly enduring. It was a proso millet called Crown, which the family had grown and saved back every year since they bought the farm in 1953. On most modern varieties the head of the plant is tightly closed, but this one’s is a loose, open spray of stems, which allows it to shade out weeds below. It also makes for a beautiful plant, whose thick, grassy understory of green is topped with a dapple the color of lemons. The slightest breeze turns a field of this millet into a rippling yellow ocean.

More importantly, this millet has muscle. Its seeds are smaller than the head of a dressmaker’s pin and yet they can emerge from four inches down in bone-dry soil. Once grown, it can kill off Canada thistle plants that dare to emerge in its midst. And because it has adapted itself so perfectly to the farm, in fifty-five years this millet has never failed the Podolls. In years when it has not rained a drop, this millet still produced a crop of excellent quality. In 1982, when it was hailed down to the ground in mid-July, the stalks grew back and made a crop that was harvested in September. As David and Dan watched their wheat crops succumb to disease, they couldn’t help but think about the millet and wonder, What if we had a wheat like this?

The natural place to go with such a concern would be North Dakota State University (NDSU), the state’s land grant college. But for years their public breeding efforts have been geared toward serving the conventional wheat industry. Aside from a few rogue researchers, the university has shown little interest in breeding for organic farming systems. So David and the others have instead done what farmers do when they need something accomplished: they figured out how to do it themselves. First they conducted scientific comparisons of dozens of wheat varieties, modern releases from NDSU as well as heirloom varieties, some of which were more than a century old. Guided by two NDSU researchers, Steve Zwinger and Pat Carr, the farmers replicated the sorts of tests done in university research fields, right down to the tedious data collection. The difference was that they executed the tests on their own farms, without chemicals, and judged according to their own criteria—bushels per acre, yes, but also things like how quickly the plant emerged and how well it shaded out weeds. They were looking for varieties that might work on their farms without the scaffold, as well as for those that they might crossbreed to create new kinds of wheat.

Before they ever reached that point, luck brought a new variety to them. It came in the hands of a professor emeritus at Oregon State University named Mat Kolding, a white-haired plant breeder who is long since retired but still goes to the test plots every day of the growing season. He was born on a farm in Shawnee, North Dakota, a few hours north of the Podolls, and before his university career he, too, was a wheat farmer. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why as a plant breeder he still values the old-fashioned methods of observation. For him, being out in the field just looking at what happens naturally is an essential part of the work. “If you listen to the plants,” he says, “they’ll tell you a lot.”

The town where he grew up no longer exists aside from a sign on the railroad tracks, but the farm is still intact and until recently his mother lived there. In 1993, while Mat was visiting, he took a walk through the forty-acre field next to the house. It was rented to a local farmer and, like every other field in North Dakota that year, was infested with a disease called head scab. Mat says when you walk through a crop you can tell how good the yield will be by the feel of the plants. As he walked through this field, it felt like nothing more than a bunch of grass, his pantslegs barely registering the scrawny leaves and stems.

“And then, aha!” He loves to tell the story. “There was a plant shouting, Here I am! Take me!” Estimating one hundred and twenty thousand plants to an acre, Mat guesses there were close to five million wheat plants in that field, and in the middle of them all was a single one untouched by the disease. Mat pulled it out, brought it home to Oregon, and seeded it in his garden in the spring. For ten years he selected out the best offspring and planted back their seed the following year. In time he came up with a strong variety, which he gave the unceremonious name KW960175.

When Mat heard about the Farm Breeder Club in 2004, he sent them some seed. There were no strings attached, he just hoped the farmers would be able to make something of it. “Everything we do is built on something somebody else did in the past,” he explains. “Borrowing material, building on others’ work—that’s the only way you can start making progress. After all I had learned from farming in North Dakota over the years, I figured it would be good to give something back.”

After a few seasons of making selections on KW960175, the Farm Breeder Club came up with its own variety. It was high-yielding and resistant to diseases including stem rust and fusarium head blight. When they tested it for industrial milling and baking qualities it came up somewhat short, but when they tested it with artisan bakers it got high marks for flavor and quality. Most of all, it grew well without chemical fertilizers and herbicides. It wasn’t the perfect wheat; to begin with, because it came from a single parent it lacked genetic variation. Still, it was a good starting place.

In 2006, three farmers in North Dakota grew it on 68.1 acres. The next year their harvest was sold as seed under the name FBC-Dylan—“FBC” the acronym for the Club and “Dylan” for researcher Steve Zwinger’s son. In 2007, FBC-Dylan was planted on close to four hundred acres by fifteen farmers: eleven in North Dakota, one in South Dakota, and three in faraway Maine. In 2008, twenty-five farmers in six states (now including Vermont, New York, and Minnesota) planted it across two thousand, four hundred acres.

The Podolls themselves cannot share in the accomplishment directly. Most growers in the Farm Breeder Club are west of LaMoure, where it’s drier. Even FBC-Dylan isn’t disease resistant enough for the Podolls to plant it on a commercial scale in their wet climate, at least not yet. Still, David has a patch of it planted near the garden, alongside several other varieties of wheat. He will select seed from the best plants and hope for a gradual improvement, however slowly it comes. He will also make sure to walk among the plants as they grow, just in case there’s a plant looking different, looking better, trying to get his attention.

Really, though, David measures the value of FBC-Dylan in terms much bigger than the success or failure of his own crop. For him it is significant as a first step toward restoring the vital partnership between farmers and the plants they grow. Consider again the scaffold of dependency built around modern agriculture. As artificial inputs and external supports have become integral parts of our food production, they have eliminated the farmer—the steward. Of course farmers are still called upon to perform the perfunctory acts of buying seeds and applying fertilizer and driving machinery, but no longer are they asked to think or care or protect. When David agonizes over how farmers drive their combines from one field to another without ever touching the soil, this is the loss he is mourning.

While the Farm Breeder Club aim is to create food plants that can stand on their own two feet, without the scaffold, it is equally about restoring this essential human role of stewardship. That’s because when the scaffold is taken away, what replaces it is the farmer. The real value of the Farm Breeder Club’s wheat is that it is designed to begin that restoration. To make FBC-Dylan an enduring variety will require the humans who grow it to steward it from year to year, watching its habits and changes and helping it to become something better. To use David’s words, the farmers will need to reestablish their intimate participation in the evolutionary process.

What makes that possible is a single, small but salient point: FBC-Dylan belongs to no one. Instead of a corporate contract, each shipment of seed comes with a letter from the Farm Breeder Club. In it the Club encourages recipients to save organic seed and to promote it with their neighbors. They also ask that if the recipients sell some of the harvest as seed, that they collect a 10 percent development fee and return that to the Club to support its future work. The whole thing is done on the honor system. At the bottom of the letter, instead of a dotted line to sign, there is just a quote: “Seeds are our past, present, and future. May we always posses the wisdom and knowledge to use them appropriately.”