3

BACK AT THE REINSCH FARM

 

 

 

Today, Lubbock, Texas, is indeed the “cottonest city in the world,” and the surrounding farmland is the leading birthplace of the world’s T-shirts. Lubbock has the world’s largest cotton cooperative and the world’s largest cottonseed oil mill, and the region produces nearly 30 percent of American cotton. Texas Tech University, on the west side of town, performs some of the most advanced cotton research in the world. And Lubbock is an international cotton center. A majority of the region’s cotton is exported: loaded onto trucks and trains in Lubbock, and bound for ports on every U.S. coast. And at the bottom of this successful chain are neither plantations nor sharecroppers nor company towns nor even family farms, but people like Nelson and Ruth Reinsch.¹

No single factor explains the success that cotton farmers in west Texas have had in competing in international markets. The growers are embedded in a web of institutions that help them to continue their tradition of shifting market risks away from themselves, and they continue to win as much by limiting competition as by competing. Texas cotton farmers have solved, once and for all, the age-old labor market risk problem associated with cotton production, creatively applying mechanization, scientific research, and public policy to the challenge. These producers were also leaders in the development of the modern agricultural cooperative, a brilliantly simple organizational form that allows cotton farmers such as Nelson and Ruth Reinsch to capture every shred of value from the cotton plant, backward into the oilseed and forward into blue denim. Texas cotton farmers are also masters of political influence, leading the U.S. government to assume the business risks—including price and nonpayment risks—that the farmers would rather not. Remarkably, the Reinsches and their west Texas neighbors have even taken control of the wild Texas climate. They can make it rain, they can stop the sand from blowing, and they can even freeze the cotton plant on a warm and sunny day.

Perhaps most significant, Lubbock is the center of the “Silicon Valley” of cotton production. The Lubbock area benefits from a highly symbiotic and virtuous-circle relationship between farmers, private companies, universities, and the U.S. government. The farmers, well-educated and entrepreneurial, both contribute to and benefit from the research that takes place in the universities and firms, while the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) supports both the research and the farmers with funding, technical, and business assistance. Cotton growers in poor countries are challenged not so much by the prospect of competing with Nelson Reinsch, but by competing with the much larger and permanent advantages of this interlocking virtuous circle. Competing with Nelson is hard enough, but competing with Nelson as he is teamed up with Texas Tech, Monsanto, and the USDA is another matter entirely.

To the untrained eye they might be hard to see, but a close look at the original seal of Texas Tech University shows 10 cotton bolls in the form of a T, each boll representing one of 10 cotton-producing counties that surround Lubbock (Figure 3.1). Indeed, Tech history buffs are quick to point out that the university was founded to support the cotton and textile industries. Today, though the University is widely acknowledged to be one of the most advanced centers for cotton research in the world, Tech is also a diversified national research university with distinguished programs in many academic fields.

In 2002, Dr. David R. Smith was appointed the new Chancellor of Texas Tech. Though Smith had spent a number of years in Texas, he was an Ohio native and a graduate of Cornell. According to marketing consultants hired by the new Chancellor, most people outside the region associated Texas Tech with sports. Smith believed that Tech needed to show the world a new image that reflected the University’s diverse academic and research accomplishments. After all, the modern Texas Tech was about more than cotton farming and football.

Figure 3.1 Original Seal of Texas Tech University. (Photo Courtesy of Texas Techsan Magazine.)

The Chancellor proposed a new “visual identity system” for Tech, and in May 2005, he unveiled a new seal for the University. The seal had an academic emphasis, including an open book and a scholarly-looking key. In a nod to the University’s agricultural heritage, a branch of vines decorated the bottom part of the seal. The cotton bolls were gone.²

An uproar followed. Generations of Tech alumni were bound to the cotton industry: cotton farmers, cotton traders, cotton ginners, cotton brokers, cotton scientists, cotton exporters. There were news conferences, town meetings, and angry blogs. Eddie Smith, chairman of the local cotton cooperative and a Tech alum, took umbrage not only at the removal of the cotton bolls but at the addition of the vines (“Vines are weeds in my cotton field,” he complained to the local newspaper).³ The alumni clung fast to their cotton tradition while the Chancellor argued that the time had come for Tech to move on.

John Johnson of the Plains Cooperative Cotton Association was telling me this story in late 2007:

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Oh, they’re gone now,” John told me.

“The cotton bolls?”

“No” John said, “the Chancellor and the marketing consultants.”

Tech’s new Chancellor, Dr. Kent Hance, was appointed in 2006. Hance is a Tech alum from Dimmitt, Texas, a tiny cotton community 90 miles and zero stoplights northwest of Lubbock. On the cover of the next issue of the Techsan—Tech’s glossy alumni magazine—was a field of snow white cotton bolls in a Texas sunset.

In many years of thinking about international trade, I had never thought of tradition-bound and loyal university alumni as the basis for comparative advantage. But there it is: Tech looks after cotton, cotton looks after Tech, and Texas cotton is still winning in the global marketplace.

Today, it looks as though Nelson and Ruth Reinsch have arrived at something of a comfortable place. They are still here, bringing in the cotton each year, more than 50 years after they arrived. The virtuous circle works pretty well on the Reinsch farm: the machines, the chemicals, the GM seed, the cooperatives, the university research, and the government programs. They can relax now, as Ruth kept telling me back in 2000. Only now, eight years later, is Nelson giving this a try.

C.F. and Hattie Move West (and Bring a Tractor)

As cotton continued its westward push in the 1920s and 1930s, the Reinsches moved, too. Although Texas had already become the nation’s biggest cotton producer by 1890, at this time virtually all Texas cotton was produced in the eastern part of the state, bordering on the plantation South. By the 1930s, however, cotton began to take hold of the west Texas region surrounding Lubbock. It was during this period that C.F. and Hattie Reinsch arrived here with young Nelson, then a teenager.

The Reinsches come from a long line of early adopters and innovators. Cotton farmers near Lubbock were starting from scratch. There was no dismantling of the old ways to be accomplished, no old habits to break, no Old South traditions to hold back progress. This freedom to start from scratch undoubtedly explains why most innovations in cotton production spread from west to east rather than from east to west. They still do.

In 2007, I met with Wally Darneille, the new president of the Plains Cotton Cooperative Association in Lubbock. Wally had spent the previous 30 years in the cotton business in Alabama before moving to Lubbock in 2006 to assume his new role. Wally found a striking difference between the cultures of the cotton business in west Texas and Alabama: He told me that a change in practice that would have taken years in Mobile takes just months in Lubbock.

In the Old South, mule farming in cotton production persisted into the 1960s. In west Texas cotton country, it never started. When cotton farmers began to settle near Lubbock—the mid-1920s—the gasoline tractor arrived with them. Whereas the Old South cotton farmers gradually sold their mules and replaced them with tractors, cotton farming in west Texas used tractors from the beginning. This led to drastically different labor patterns in the two regions, differences that would have lasting implications.

Richard Day has divided the mechanization of cotton production to 1960 into four stages (see Figure 3.2).⁴ In Stage 1, all land preparation and planting is mule-powered, and weeding is done by hoe. Cotton is handpicked. In Stage 2, some cultivation and weeding is also mule-powered, but land preparation is done by tractor. Cotton is handpicked. In Stage 3, the use of fertilizer increases cotton yields, and more cultivation and weeding is done by tractor implements, but cotton is still handpicked. Finally, in Stage 4, cotton is mechanically harvested and only a small amount of hand weeding remains in the spring and summer seasons.

Early tractor technology was capable only of the brute-strength chore of breaking the land in winter and so did little to solve the ancient labor problem of cotton production. There was little reason to buy a tractor for land breaking, since this chore required the least labor. Therefore, there was little incentive for Deep South cotton farmers to move from Stage 1 to Stage 2, since the labor force was still needed on demand for the rest of the year for weeding, cultivating, and harvesting, and the mules would be needed as well. Gradually, tractor implements became capable of the finer tasks of weeding between rows, though weeds close to the cotton plant still had to be pulled by hoe. On the other hand, growers at Stage 3 who had started with tractors had every incentive to mechanize the harvest or move to Stage 4, because of the highly uneven labor requirements associated with harvesting.

Figure 3.2 Manual Labor Requirements in Cotton Production

Source: Adapted from Day, p. 440.

Figure 3.3 Use of Tractor Power in Cotton Production, 1939 and 1946

The remarkable mechanical leapfrogging of the Reinsches and their west Texas neighbors is shown in Figure 3.3. By 1946, over 80 percent of Texas cotton production—including that on the Reinsch farm—had reached Stage 3, while in the Deep South, this stage had been reached by only 14 percent of cotton farmers. In 1946, more than 20 years after the widespread introduction of the tractor into west Texas cotton country, 67 percent of Deep South cotton farms were still exclusively mule-powered.

The reluctance of Deep South cotton farmers to trade in their mules for tractors in the move to Stage 3 was due largely to a faithful attachment to tradition and reluctance to change, as well as to the economics of small holdings. It was even due to an attachment to the animals themselves. In speaking to his biographer, Ned Cobb seemed to remember each of his mules—their colors, their names, their personalities, their quirks. To give up mule farming was to relinquish a way of life, and many were loath to do so, even as they clearly saw the future in front of them. Here is Ned Cobb, speaking in the early 1970s:

I was a mule farmin’ man to the last; never did make a crop with a tractor. I’ve owned some of the prettiest mules that ever walked the roads. Now there ain’t none of my children, nary one by name, got a mule.⁵

Something was lost, of course, in the move from mules to tractors: You couldn’t pet a tractor, or name it, and the machine had no personality at all. Into the mishmash of obsolete Southern traditions went the art of talking to a mule.⁶

Figure 3.4 Cotton Yields (Pounds of Lint per Acre)

Source: USDA/NASS.

But while the Reinsches had nary a mule, either, there still was not a satisfactory mechanical way to pull the fluffy white lint from the cotton plant. From the settling of west Texas cotton country, this was done as it always had been, by men, women, and children pulling heavy sacks between the rows. And there was more to pick. Thanks to the introduction of advanced fertilizers, cotton yields were increasing (see Figure 3.4). While a traditional Deep South plantation might hope for 120 pounds per acre, by the 1950s, the Reinsches were coaxing nearly a bale (480 pounds) out of each acre planted in cotton. As Day’s estimates show then, the labor necessary to harvest the crop from an acre of cotton had approximately doubled from the pre-Civil War South. At the same time, labor requirements during the rest of the year were dropping dramatically. Rather than solving the labor problem, the mechanization made the labor problem at harvest even worse.

White Guys Get All Draggy-Like

Though public policies had ameliorated growers’ labor market risks since the beginning, on the eve of World War II the federal government entered the labor market directly to assume these risks on behalf of farmers. With the December attack on Pearl Harbor and the resulting drain of agricultural labor to the military, Congress charged the USDA with mobilizing women and children to bring in the crop. Farmers across the country insisted, however, that additional workers were needed, not just to harvest the crop, but even to win the war. Once again, it seemed, civilization teetered on the ability to get the cotton picked. Governor Olson of California wrote to Washington in 1942:

Without a substantial number of Mexicans the situation is certain to be disastrous to the entire victory program, despite our united efforts in the mobilization of youth and city dwellers for emergency farm work.⁷

Congress responded in 1942 by authorizing the Bracero program, which allowed Mexican labor to enter the United States for short periods to work in agriculture. And Mexican farm labor, according to the growers, was much better than white labor, which was “lazy and draggy-like,” or black labor, which exhibited “too much independence.”⁸ So, as Nelson went off to war at the age of 20, Mexicans flowed across the border to pick the Reinsches’ cotton. Though the Bracero program was authorized as an emergency wartime measure, farm interests succeeded in extending the program until 1964, 19 years after the war had ended. By that time, 90 percent of cotton was mechanically harvested. Most cotton was in Stage 4 of mechanization, and the workers were no longer needed.

The Bracero program—and its long-term extension—illustrates again the political influence that enabled cotton farmers to avoid competitive markets. The program went much further than simply easing immigration restrictions for U.S. farm work. Had the program stopped there, cotton producers still would have had to contend with the dreaded labor market. Even with the influx of Mexican labor, how would producers know that workers would be there when the cotton needed to be picked? Further, wage uncertainty in this volatile market posed an economic risk as well. Because all of a region’s cotton had to be picked at the same time, “the market” might allow wages to be bid up to uneconomic levels to meet peak demand. Though there were a number of attempts by growers collectively to fix the price of Mexican farm labor, none of these attempts had any lasting effect. Attempts to restrict worker mobility to keep laborers from seeking higher wages on the next farm were also largely unsuccessful.⁹ In brief, simply lifting the floodgates to allow Mexican labor onto U.S. farms still left the growers at the peril of a competitive labor market. They didn’t like it then any more than they had before.

What the growers wanted was threefold. First, they wanted the labor they needed to be available on demand. Second, they wanted to know in advance what the labor would cost, and they did not want to compete with one another on the basis of price. Third, they wanted a guarantee that the labor would be productive. In other words, the growers wanted to assume none of the labor market risks that are normally associated not just with agriculture, but with business in general.

Congress gave the growers everything they asked for. Under the Bracero program, which was administered by the Department of Labor, the growers ordered a certain number of workers to be picked up on a certain day. The government guaranteed that the growers’ order would be filled at a certain price. The laborers imported could work for only a single employer, so growers no longer had to worry about workers leaving in search of higher wages. Government workers also assumed the role of screening workers for health, likely productivity, and political ideology.¹⁰

Nelson and Ruth remember well the days of the Bracero program, the hundreds of Mexicans crawling through the cotton fields plucking the low Texas cotton. Whatever its effect on liberal sensibilities, they believe the program was a good one. How else could the cotton have been picked? How else could these workers have supported their families? Nelson and Ruth treated the workers fairly, and required their two sons to perform the same chores as the Bracero workers. Their older son, Lamar, remembers it this way, too.

Bureaucrats Push Out Sharecroppers

By the early 1930s, cotton prices had dropped to the lowest level ever observed (see Figure 3.5). While public policies had cushioned farmers’ labor market risks since the beginning, with the federal price support programs of the early 1930s, the government also began to assume the risks of falling commodity prices. As the economic situation on Southern cotton farms became increasingly desperate, attention turned to Washington. For cotton farmers, the critical element of the New Deal’s agricultural policy was the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which, for the first time, introduced government price supports for agricultural products, and also introduced the concept of paying farmers to take land out of production. The objective was for the government payments to put a safety net under rural poverty while at the same time helping commodity prices to stabilize.

A look at the winners and losers from farm price support programs, however, suggests a lesson about the beneficiaries of government policy. In practice, while growers such as the Reinsches benefited, landowners in the Deep South typically chose to take the government check and then take their sharecroppers’ acreage out of production, pushing farmers into the ranks of migrants who gradually went west into the pages of The Grapes of Wrath. Rarely did the sharecropper have the means to fight the landlord for his share of the government’s payment.¹¹ In a cruel irony, it was the government programs designed to alleviate the sharecroppers’ poverty that intimidated Ned Cobb out of cotton farming. Cobb had never intended to give up cotton farming. He had wanted to die growing cotton, and certainly was not about to be pushed aside by whites:

Figure 3.5 Cotton Prices

Source: Cotton prices from USDA. CPI 1800-1912 from International Historical

Statistics: The Americas 1750-1993, CPI 1913-1998 from Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I was born an raised here and I have sowed my labor into the earth and lived to reap only a part of it, not all that was mine by human right ... I stays on if it gives ’em satisfaction for me to leave, and I stays on because its mine.¹²

A short time later, Ned Cobb gave up. And he gave up because of, not in spite of, the government’s efforts to help:

... the government took over this cotton business to a greater extent than ever before; I jumped out right there. Didn’t want to fill out them papers every year, and a whole lot of red tape to it. I can’t read and write; Josie can’t either. And if I couldn’t conduct my business myself, I weren’t going to have nobody do it for me.¹³

And the final cruel joke: Many large farmers used their AAA payments to buy tractors, so many small sharecroppers were “tractored out” by World War II.

The cause of Ned Cobb’s demise as a cotton farmer bears an important lesson for explaining the winners, both then and today. Cobb’s biography shows us a brilliant man with a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of history, human nature, and science. But with the introduction of government price supports and the dozens of federal farm programs that soon followed, skill at navigating the bureaucracy and using the levers of political influence became prerequisites for survival. In 1999, the USDA acknowledged that decades of indifference and blatant discrimination against blacks in government farm programs had persisted well into the 1990s, and in 2008 the Government Accountability Office issued a report concluding that, nearly a decade later, things were not much better.¹⁴

For Ned Cobb, dealing with bureaucrats meant a brave new world: All of a sudden, if you couldn’t read, you couldn’t farm.

Machines that Don’t Get All Discouraged

In the center pages of a catalog from Lands’ End, a beautiful young girl beams into the camera from the center of a cotton patch. She is 17 or 18 years old, with long and shiny beauty-shop hair. She has peaceful and happy deep-pool eyes that say all is well in this place with the blue sky. And she has perfect teeth, lined up white and evenly, in a smile designed to bring forth your credit card. We are supposed to buy the polo shirt: It comes in many colors of the softest cotton. In the highlands of Peru, Maria picked the cotton by hand, fluff by fluff. It’s better, says the catalog, than the machine-picked cotton.

Better for whom? In researching this book I met many people who had grown up handpicking cotton, but I didn’t meet anyone who was nostalgic for it. Cotton farmers in almost all countries outside the United States still handpick their cotton; indeed, Terry Townsend of the International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC) told me that he did not believe that there was a mechanical picker in all of Africa. While handpicking cotton may be a job, it is not a job of choice. The Marias of the world don’t get their hair done, and their teeth haven’t been fixed. Surely they smile now and again, out there in the field, but it’s not because they are picking cotton.

In 2005, I met Dr. Dick Auld, a chaired professor of Plant Genetics and Breeding at Texas Tech. He had grown up on a cotton farm, and had memories of coming home from school and handpicking and handweeding, the endless hours of backbreaking labor in the merciless sun. “Why I am here today?” he asked rhetorically about his academic career. “Why do I keep doing the research? Because no human being should have to work that way, or live that way, not here, not anywhere, not ever again.”¹⁵

In 1999, Adrian Gwin still harbored a 75-year-old memory of picking cotton. It was only one day, long ago, but it was enough:

There just ain’t enough money in the world for me to do that again. I was a full-fledged, on-the-payroll cotton picker for one whole day about 70 years ago, and it cured me. ... I’ve been there. It was about 1925 or 1926 that I got my cotton picking baptism, right out in a mile wide cotton field. ... I’d seen other little boys making fortunes picking cotton, and I wanted some of that easy money. Cotton picking paid a dime a hundred. Ten cents for picking only a hundred pounds of cotton in the fields. I’d seen black boys and girls make 2 dimes a day. ... To make that dime you had to loop a strap of mattress ticking around a shoulder, and drag behind you a six-foot ticking bag that would hold 30 or so pound of cotton. You went down the cotton row and grabbed the fluffy white cotton off the bolls and flipped it into the mouth of the bag. Before the sun was half up in the sky, I was convinced my bag had a hole in the bottom. My shoulders ached. My legs ached. My arms ached. My fingers ached. I was plumb sore all over before I got to the end of that first row.... I was ready to call it a day—but the day was hardly half-spent. And I wasn’t yet halfway to that shiny bright dime I wanted. When Stentius blew his horn and twilight hovered over the cotton field, I looked back at my 100-pound bag diggin its feet into the ground as I dragged it—and it wasn’t full yet.

I remember so well. I didn’t get a dime. I got a nickel. Five cents. The weighmaster at the gin was generous. I hadn’t quite picked 50 pounds of cotton in my 14-hour day. Long years later, I remembered that day of cotton picking. ... Never again would I drag a bag down a cotton row. Never again that cotton pickin’ cotton picking. Today, they have machines to do it. Great big super-efficient machines that don’t get tired all over and discouraged.

Boy, I’m glad.¹⁶

Nelson and Ruth are glad, too. With a cotton-stripping machine, they could drastically reduce once and for all their risky association with farm labor. Whereas inventive farmers had tried various ways to mechanize the harvest before, it was not until the 1920s and early 1930s that researchers based in Lubbock, only a few miles from the Reinsch farm, began to perfect the tractor-mounted cotton stripper in one of many applications of the fruitful relationship among USDA cotton researchers, universities, and farmers. The basic stripper technology, which survives today, consists of a set of brushes that are pulled around the cotton plant, knocking the bolls onto a belt and blowing them into a trailer. Though this essential technology was developed in the 1920s and 1930s, widespread adoption of mechanical strippers did not take place in west Texas until shortly after World War II, and in the Deep South, much later.

The mechanical march forward was halted first by the Depression, and second by the necessity to adapt other phases in the production chain, especially ginning, to mechanically picked cotton. And mechanical cotton picking required farms of a certain size, as well. It was difficult to justify an investment in cotton-picking machinery on a farm of under 150 or so acres. While most Texas farms were easily large enough to benefit, the small cotton patches across the Deep South were not. Today, the millions of farmers across Africa and Southeast Asia also find it difficult to make the leap to mechanical harvesting. Even if the farmers banded together to share the machines, because of the whims of nature, everyone would likely need the machine at the same time.

It was 1953, Nelson believes, when the two-row International Harvester cotton stripper arrived at the farm and changed everything. The machine could pick 10 bales a day, the work of 25 men in the field, and, like Adrian Gwin said, it didn’t get all tired and discouraged.

But while the machine solved the picking problem, it created new bottlenecks. The cotton picking weather windows in west Texas had always posed a problem: a race to get to the cotton before the Texas elements. The cotton needed water, yet it couldn’t be picked wet. The hail would come down and knock the fluff right off the plant, or the gusty wind would blow it away, or the sand would make it dirty and lower its price. In the three-month harvest season, Nelson needed windows where he could get to the cotton after it had bloomed and dried but before the wind or hail or sand or rain. Unfortunately, the new stripper made this already-random challenge trickier yet.

With the mechanical harvester, Nelson had to wait for a hard freeze as well. The machine could not strip the cotton from live green plants. In order to work properly, the cotton stripper required that the plant be brown and brittle, as happened after a freeze, so that the cotton bolls could snap off easily. And worse yet, the picking day was shorter, because the stripper also did not do well in the morning dew. So into the already-impossible climate constraints on cotton picking came more things to wait for, while hoping the Texas weather monsters wouldn’t get there first.

The result, for C.F., Hattie, and Nelson, and by now, for Nelson’s young sons, too, was that when the stars were finally lined up right for stripping, the crew worked frantically. Harvesting the cotton required three to four workers: one to drive the tractor, the rest to ride in the trailer mounted behind the stripper. The riders’ job was to move the cotton evenly around the trailer as it blew in, using pitchforks, and to tramp the cotton down to get better use out of the trailers. There was a definite hierarchy: Driving the tractor was better than riding the trailer. Nelson would drive the tractor and his sons Lamar and Dwade would ride in back, often with a hired hand. Because they couldn’t strip the cotton until midmorning, they went until darkness was complete, until they had to stop because of the pitchforks.

Lamar’s memory of riding the cotton trailer is permanently engraved, like Gwin’s memory of cotton picking. It was hard, noisy, dirty work. Hard was okay, he was young and strong. Even though his hearing is still damaged, noisy was okay, too. But, dirty, well, you just can’t imagine.

This is what he remembers: as darkness fell, being splattered with bloody rabbit pieces, from the ones that didn’t jump quickly enough.

Lamar decided to go to college.

Pick Your Weather

Of course, in a given region, the hard freeze came at the same time for everybody, so while Nelson and his sons worked frantically, all of his neighbors were working frantically as well. This created a major bottleneck in getting the cotton to market. First, there were never enough trailers, and never enough time to tow them to the gin. In the middle of the harvest, Nelson needed empty trailers to catch the cotton, but to get them empty he had to stop work and tow them to the gin. And once he arrived there, his cotton trailer had to get in line with everyone else’s, and wait its turn to get emptied into the gin. In those very brief west Texas weather windows, the cotton poured into the gins at a much faster rate than the system could handle.

In a pattern that continues today, one advance begot the next. Once the scientists and engineers created the mechanical stripper, they were forced next to address the challenges created by the innovation.

As the mechanical stripper closed the weather window, the virtuous circle turned to opening it. The idea was to let Nelson decide when the hard freeze would come—and, indeed, to let him decide which part of his field would freeze today, and which tomorrow. Scientists soon created chemical compounds that could make the cotton plant brown and crunchy, no matter what the temperature. Today, Nelson doesn’t wait for the hard freeze. When the cotton is open and the weather stars are lined up, he freezes the cotton himself, with chemicals sprayed from behind his tractor. The plants turn as dead and crunchy as can be, whenever he wants them to. In fact, there isn’t much that looks deader than a defoliated cotton field in west Texas. When I stood in the middle of the Reinsches’ chemically frozen field, I felt like the earth itself was rusting away around me.

Actually, maybe the earth was rusting away around me. If a chemical kills the cotton plant, what does it do the rest of the natural world? Perusing the EPA-mandated Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for a leading cotton defoliant left me more confused than alarmed.¹⁷ On the one hand, the MSDS made it clear that the defoliant was dangerous to everything from humans to groundwater to rats to “non-target” plants. On the other hand, the EPA’s reams of regulations and exhaustive rules for application and disposal, as well as its ongoing tests, seemed to construct at least a modicum of a safety net. It is hard to know whether to be alarmed by the toxicity of the chemicals or reassured by the thousands of pages of rules. But can we go backwards and ask cotton farmers to wait for God to send a freeze? Not likely; the growers’ increasing control over both markets and nature—whether through politics, chemicals, or machines—was not to be a reversible trend.

Even with the stripper and the defoliants, there was still plenty of human labor involved in Nelson’s cotton production in the late 1960s. Though the huge number of seasonal factory workers was no longer needed, Nelson, Lamar, and Dwade had plenty to do. The Reinsches described to me a system of team production, a real family farm where each member of the family had a job to do in getting the cotton to market. Nelson and his sons were busy in the field, and Ruth and daughter Colleen kept the books, tended the garden and canned, kept the family fed, and sold eggs in town. The next chapter in cotton’s story, though, beginning in the early 1970s, would change all this. The next chapter would let the children go off to the city and let Nelson do it all, hundreds of thousands of pounds, pretty much by himself.

The Reinsch Children Leave the Farm

Until the late 1960s, Nelson needed his sons, or at least reliable hired help, in every season except winter. In the fall, the cotton trailer needed two or three riders while Nelson drove the tractor and ferried cotton to the gin. In the spring and summer, irrigation was almost a full-time job for Lamar, as keeping the right amount of water going to the right places, through a system of wells and pumps and pipes, required pretty much constant attention. And in the spring, there were the weeds that threatened to overtake the young cotton plants, and somebody needed to drive up and down the rows, carefully chopping and burying them, for most of the season.

One by one, the USDA, the university scientists, and the large agribusiness companies invented these jobs away. First, in the early 1970s, new methods were devised that eliminated the need for riders during the harvest (no more rabbit pieces or pitchforks) and also did away with the need for Nelson to ferry his cotton to the gin. Nelson replaced his trailers with large baskets that caught the cotton but didn’t carry riders. When the basket is full, Nelson simply tips it into a “module builder,” a metal box with an open top, about the size of a large moving van. As the module builder fills, Nelson doesn’t need his sons to tramp down the cotton. He has a hydraulic press, powered by the tractor, that turns the cotton into a gigantic snowy brick. When the brick is the right size, up to the top of the box with about 22,000 pounds of cotton, Nelson slides the box away, leaving the white brick in the field and the box empty and ready for more cotton. Workers from the gin drive a module truck over to pick up the cotton: A giant spatula slides under the cotton and lifts it up onto the truck. The cotton arrives at the gin only minutes later.

The irrigation man’s job was the next to go. Though some of Nelson’s cotton is still irrigated by pipes, most is watered by a giant computerized sprinkler that moves back and forth across the field like a big windshield wiper. It doesn’t actually spray or sprinkle—west Texas is much too dry for Nelson to spray his water into the sky—instead, it drags hundreds of tiny dripping hoses gently across the field.

On a trip to Lubbock in 2007, I found that cotton harvesting had taken another leap into the future. In Levelland (a bit of west Texas understatement there)—just a few miles from the Reinsch farm—cotton grower Mike Henson is trying out the next-generation technology. Henson farms significantly more acreage than the Reinsches, and so has still been dependent during harvest season on a dozen or so workers. Henson repeated the cotton grower’s age-old plight: Labor was his toughest challenge, he told me. Would he be able to find workers? Would they show up? Would they be back tomorrow?

Henson graciously invited me to hop aboard the new John Deere 7760 cotton stripper. He was pilot-testing the new technology on the last of his 2007 crop. Riding in the tractor cab with Henson was a bit like riding in a spaceship, with lots of computer programs running to tell us what was happening. The price tag of the 7760 is close to $600,000, but Henson thinks it will be worth it.¹⁸ As the modules had eliminated the need for riders, the 7760 eliminates the need for modules. Once the 7760 has collected a certain amount of cotton, belts are activated that form the cotton into round bales and then wrap the bales in protective plastic. The grower no longer needs to stop harvesting to empty his basket into the module builder, and no longer needs to form and protect the modules. In the past, Henson might be stripping cotton with one tractor while workers formed modules with another. The 7760 allows the grower to simply drop the formed round module at the end of the row, make his U-turn, and continue harvesting with no interruption. With the new technology, Henson can strip about 75 bales before lunch. Nelson Reinsch’s first mechanical stripper could strip three.

Henson believes that the 7760 will allow him to do the work of 10 or 11 men, and therefore almost dispense with seasonal workers. Other equipment will no longer be needed: no more boll buggies and module builders. From the perspective of the environment, the 7760 is a step in the right direction as well: Henson expects to save thousands of gallons of fuel per week with the new technology.

Old Enemies, New Friends

Throughout cotton’s history, the fluffy plant has battled two enemies: insects and weeds. These battles continue today, yet in typical fashion the Texas growers have an increasingly sophisticated repertoire of weapons against these natural enemies. The saga of these battles seems to be a tale of quick-wittedness and intrigue: Though the growers can never eliminate the weeds or the insects, they can, through science and technology, manage to stay a step or two ahead of them. While no one questions the resourcefulness of the farmers and the larger agricultural complex in battling these natural enemies, many question the long-run ecological consequences of the battles.

The traditional manner of keeping cotton “out of the grass” or free from weeds was to bury or chop the weeds. During the past century, this was done first by hoe, and then by implements pulled by mules and then tractors. Shortly after World War II, however, the battle against weeds went chemical.

The shift in tactics—from mechanical to chemical methods—began a battle of wits that continues today. One challenge is that herbicides by definition are substances that kill plants, and it is a continual challenge to design herbicide applications that kill the weeds (the “target plant”) while sparing the cotton plant itself. A second challenge is the power of plant evolution to stay one step ahead of the scientists. While a chemical might kill most of a certain variety of weed, some renegade members of the weed’s family will be resistant to the herbicide, and those weeds are of course the ones that will successfully reproduce. Some weeds, the growers found, developed resistance after just a few seasons. The chemicals, then, needed to stay a step ahead of the weeds’ resistance, and so growers are dependent on private sector and university researchers to continually outwit the weeds as the plants develop resistance.

From an environmental perspective, substances that kill plants are unlikely to be good for the rest of us. Herbicides leach into groundwater and waterways, affect fish and wildlife, and contaminate adjacent areas. During the postwar era, a number of especially hazardous chemicals, including paraquat and arsenic, have been used to control weeds. Today, herbicides must pass stringent regulatory hurdles set by the EPA. I spent many hours reading the EPA’s Material Safety Data Sheets (MDSAs) for common cotton herbicides. Threats, it seemed, were everywhere: to water, wildlife, air, and people. Herbicides could cause thyroid problems in rats, or liver problems in rabbits, or cancer in fish.

Fortunately for the planet and for the cotton growers, one of the most effective herbicides is the chemical compound glyphosate. Sold by Monsanto under the tradename Roundup, the compound is one of the most effective herbicides as well as one of the more environmentally benign.¹⁹ In west Texas, Roundup came into widespread use in the mid-1970s. Roundup, however, was a nonselective herbicide, so, used incorrectly, it could damage the cotton plant as well as the weeds. The use of Roundup required the elements of the virtuous circle to work together: Only if the farmers received the right advice from Monsanto and from the scientists at Tech would the Roundup be sprayed at the right time, in the right place, and with the right method to spare the cotton itself. Roundup in the wrong hands was worse than no herbicide at all.

The virtuous circle became increasingly interdependent: The scientists at Monsanto and Tech created the herbicides, but the farmer then became dependent on the evolving and complicated advice from the scientists.

Ned Cobb, of course, battled weeds by relying on his hoe, his mules, and himself.

Designer Genes

In 1996, there was another leap into the future, a leap that some believe will one day be seen as momentous as the cotton gin or the mechanical stripper, but that others believe might turn out to be a dangerous corporate-led conspiracy. In that year, the first commercial crop of genetically modified (GM) cotton was planted in the United States. Developed by Monsanto and called “Roundup Ready,” the cottonseed was genetically engineered to allow the cotton plant to withstand “over-the-top” applications of Roundup herbicide. The delicate balancing act of how, when, and where to spray became immediately easier, because now the herbicide would attack the weeds but spare the cotton. Roundup Ready cotton and its subsequent improvements also meant that many farmers no longer needed to chop or bury weeds by machine. The cultivator—the tractor implement used to chop and bury weeds—began to go the way of the mule.²⁰

For Monsanto, the combination of Roundup herbicides and Roundup Ready seed was a homerun: Each product created demand for the other. In addition to selling the cottonseed itself through a subsidiary, Monsanto also charged a “technology” fee for the use of the genetic trait. For the most advanced genetic traits, this fee was $136 per bag of seed in 2008. When added to the cost of the seed itself, this meant that the GM cottonseed cost growers about six times as much as conventional seed.²¹ By 2007, thanks largely to the widespread adoption of Roundup Ready seeds, Roundup herbicide was responsible for more than 30 percent of Monsanto’s revenues.²² Sales of Monsanto’s herbicides increased by 85 percent in the second quarter of 2008 compared to the same period the year before, and between May 2003 and May 2008, Monsanto’s stock price rose from $11 to $125.²³

The new seed, however, was not just a new biological life form; it was a new business life form as well. Because Monsanto, not nature, had created the cotton plant, it was protected by patent. Since the dawn of agriculture, farmers had “caught” seed from each year’s harvest to plant the following year. Monsanto prohibited this practice, however, and required the growers to buy new Roundup Ready seed each year.

Roundup Ready cottonseed was soon followed by seed that was genetically engineered to solve insect problems as well. Monsanto injected the gene of a natural bacteria—Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt)—into the cottonseed. Bt was toxic to several of cottons’ most troublesome pests, particularly bollworms. The worms would eat leaves from the genetically engineered cotton plant, ingest the Bt bacterium, and a short time later would develop fatal holes in their guts. Once again, it appeared, the virtuous circle had developed a scientific solution to nature’s risks. Bt seed was also protected by patent, and Monsanto again prohibited the “catching” of the seed for replanting. Within a few years, Monsanto was selling “stacked” varieties of cotton seeds that had been engineered to contain both the Roundup Ready and the Bt trait.

But no one—not Monsanto, not the scientists at Tech, and certainly not the cotton growers—can relax. The weeds and the insects on the one hand, and the virtuous circle on the other—continue to try to outwit one another.²⁴

A tiny percentage of bollworms are resistant to the Bt cottonseed, and of course, while their friends wither from the poison, the resistant worms will reproduce. Left to themselves, these resistant worms could likely render Bt seed useless within a few years. Monsanto’s solution to this challenge was to require the growers to plant a certain number of acres as “refuge.” This acreage would be planted with conventional cottonseed, and would therefore allow some bollworms to live long enough to reproduce with their resistant neighbors. Since the resistance gene is recessive, the refuge system would keep the entire bollworm population from quickly developing resistance. The virtuous circle, in its ceaseless quest to control nature, was now trying to control the sexual partners of worms. At the same time, the cottonseed was being continually reengineered to respond to insect resistance, and Monsanto was strictly monitoring and enforcing the use of refuge. The technology agreements signed by the growers gave Monsanto’s “seed police” power to inspect farms and punish those either replanting seed or failing to follow the company’s refuge and other specifications.

Other challenges—real and potential—had to be met. The control of the bollworm meant that the insects that had previously been minor pests because they had been eaten by the bollworms, could now become major pests, so new treatments were needed control these “secondary pests.” Other secondary pests could become major pests because they had previously been destroyed by the pesticides that had been targeting the bollworms. Furthermore, there were concerns that some “beneficial insects”—so-called because they fed on cotton’s enemies but did not damage the cotton itself—might be harmed by an interruption in their food supply. In other words, the toxins directed at cotton’s enemies might indirectly harm its friends.

The scientists at Monsanto and Tech, however, remain a couple of steps ahead, and continue to meet these challenges one insect and weed at a time. For Texas cotton growers, Monsanto’s price premium and restrictions have been a small price to pay for the leap forward in their battle against weeds and pests. By 2007, nearly 90 percent of U.S. cotton acreage was planted with GM seed.²⁵ U.S. cotton farmers’ incomes have likely increased by at least $1 billion as the result of GM technology, primarily through lower costs and higher yields.²⁶

Back to Nature or Forward to the Future?

In traditional “high-input” industrial agriculture, there are growing environmental threats from increasing use of pesticides, fertilizers, water, fuel, and herbicides. While high-input agriculture has been the result of continuing scientific leaps, the scientific and chemical advances have come at a high environmental cost. The environmental effects of chemical-intensive agriculture are well-known, but there is a philosophical divide regarding the best way forward. One option is the “back-to-nature” response of organic farmers. Another, however, is to push forward with scientific advances that can solve environmental problems. In this view, the environmental problems created by scientific advances can be solved with more scientific advances. The back-to-nature and “scientific advance” responses to environmental challenges occupy opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum.

Today, GM technology is rapidly evolving so as to reduce chemical inputs required in agriculture. The GM technology, advocates argue, can address traditional problems such as weeds and pests while at the same time addressing environmental challenges. Bt seed already has drastically reduced the volume of pesticides applied to cotton in the United States (according to several farmers I spoke with, the reduction has been upwards of 90 percent), and the reduced application has the positive environmental effect of less fuel use from applications as well.²⁷ Somewhere, in the scientists’ fantasy of the future, is a genetically engineered seed that takes care of insects without chemicals at all, that flourishes without chemical fertilizer, and that can coexist with weeds or benign herbicides. GM cotton and other crops are being created to use less water, to capture more solar energy to achieve higher yields, and to withstand both higher and lower temperatures. Indeed, Monsanto has pledged to double cotton crop yields by 2030, while at the same time reducing land, water, and energy requirements by 30 percent.²⁸ According to this version of the future, to doom genetic engineering is to doom the planet itself.

In an ironic twist, corporations are now genetically engineering seeds not only to reduce environmental damage but to withstand it. As of the spring of 2008, a small number of the world’s largest agricultural biotech companies were seeking hundreds of patents worldwide for GM crops that would be able to withstand sustained global warming.²⁹

Readers of a certain age will remember the queenly character in the 1970s TV commercial for Chiffon margarine. “It’s not nice to fool Mother nature,” she’d warn.³⁰ The list of things that have gone wrong with GM agriculture in the United States is relatively short and reassuring. Both weeds and insects have exhibited the ability to outwit Roundup and Bt seed traits, but this resistance was expected and, at least so far, has been managed by further GM advances.³¹ The list of things that might go wrong, however, is more worrying. Could “superweeds” emerge and deprive growers of the use of the most effective (and environmentally safe) herbicides?³² Could secondary pests and the emergence of new insects as pests reverse the scientists’ gains? Could the widespread use of illegal and “pirated” seed grown “outside the rules” threaten the safety of plants, insects, and people? And what are the long-run economic and social effects of private ownership of a variety of life forms?

As GM seed is planted on increasing acreage, it has become more difficult to segregate GM crops from their conventional and organic counterparts because wind and water carry GM seeds from one field to another. While conventional and organic farmers bemoan the fact that their crops have been tainted by the GM seed, Monsanto has responded by suing these farmers for unauthorized use of the seed.³³

I am not a scientist, and slogging through the research on GM agriculture was slow and confusing. Given the limited resources available, most research papers had limited scope: one country, one time period, one GM crop. I finally happened upon a definitive study. The paper looked at broad environmental and economic impacts of GM cotton over 10 years in 11 countries. The report was over 100 pages long, and the empirical methodology was clear, careful, and convincing. The conclusions were clear as well: GM cotton had been a boon, economically and environmentally, in each of the countries studied. It was only in footnote 9 that I saw that the study had been funded by Monsanto.³⁴ One does not need to be a cynic, or to doubt the integrity of the researchers, to wish that the science, commercial development, control, and evaluation of GM technology were spread around a bit more.

Yet the cotton growers I met around Lubbock seem still to be marveling at the good fortunes GM technology has wrought. So much less pesticide, so much less fuel, so much more free time, and so much more cotton! Criticisms of GM technologies sound to the farmers to be criticisms of progress itself, and of the 200-year-old success story of American cotton. The powerful position of Monsanto doesn’t seem to bother the Texas growers, perhaps because Monsanto’s power is part of the virtuous circle to which they, too, belong. Indeed, some research shows that the economic benefit from GM cotton has been larger for the growers than it has been for Monsanto.³⁵

The growers are nothing if not practical. Roger Haldenby of Plains Cotton told me in 2008 that virtually 100 percent of the farmers in his area were planting GM seed in that year. He also told me, however, that almost every farmer has some old-fashioned conventional cottonseed tucked away in his barn, just in case.

Most of the farmers I met had an almost spiritual relationship with the land they farmed, and yet they also have little patience for environmental alarmists. Nelson Reinsch has a deep respect for land passed down by his father, and he takes seriously his obligation to look after the land for whomever will farm it next. Wally Darneille, president of the Plains Cooperative Cotton Association in Lubbock, put it differently. “Farmers are the original environmentalists,” he told me. “Telling a farmer to take care of the land is like telling the ice cream man to keep his freezer plugged in.” Wally has only disdain for the idea of farming organically—without chemicals or GM seed. He quoted his predecessor at the PCCA: “We tried that. We called it the Dust Bowl.”

Nelson and Ruth Reinsch have no nostalgia for the Dust Bowl, or the old two-row stripper, or the days before Roundup Ready and Bt seed. The Reinsches still look forward, not backwards, because forward progress is the story of their lives on this farm. It is a narrative of discovery after discovery, advance after advance in a region of the country where the gears continue to engage among the USDA, Texas Tech, Monsanto, and the farmers. The virtuous circle of scientific discovery in American cotton farming continues to do away with risks—labor market risks, weed risks, insect risks, weather risks—each random element of the farmers’ livelihood has gradually been brought under Nelson’s control. And the virtuous circle, the growers believe, can address environmental risks as well.

The virtuous circle has not only done away with many risks, it has almost done away with farmers. Today, growing cotton in America is almost a one-man show.

Most days, Nelson Reinsch takes a nap after lunch.