Chapter 5

Agriculture That Nurtures Nature

The entomologist Jonathan Lundgren and I stand at the edge of Roger’s cornfield on a cool August morning in the Prairie Pothole Region of South Dakota. We’re supposed to meet a group of his students, but there is no sign of them. Perhaps they are on their way, I think, then Lundgren cups his hands around his mouth and sings out, ‘Marco!’

No one answers, but he nonetheless springs off the gravelled edge of the road and strides into the field next to the corn, carpeted with a tangle of low-growing greens and golds, which I try not to crush as I follow. ‘Marco!’ he calls again, and then again. Finally a voice responds from deep within the muffled confines of the cornfield itself. ‘Polo!’

Not that it’s all corn in this cornfield. Roger is one of the innovative farmers who has invited Lundgren and his team onto his land to conduct research into the benefits of regenerative agriculture, generally defined as agriculture that builds soil health and overall biodiversity and yields a nutritious farm product profitably. Where most of America’s nearly ninety-two million acres of corn feature armies of a single genus arrayed in military precision with identical thirty-inch corridors of bare, baked dirt between them — these single-genus plantings are called monocultures — it’s hard to see Roger’s corridors. Each hosts its own jungle of plants — buckwheat, field peas, hairy vetch, lentils, flax, millet, sorghum, sorghum-sudangrass, and cereal rye — and as we approach the field, some poke through the outer edge of corn, like rowdy vegetative inmates straining against cornstalk bars. High above the corn tassels, sunflowers loll their yellow heads.

It takes several more iterations of Marco Polo before we narrow in on the location of the students. Even after Lundgren and I push our way in, there is so much vegetation that we can’t see them until we’re only a few feet away. There, they sit between rows of corn, long clear tubes dangling from their mouths. They’ve spent the morning sucking up insects from soil transects and collecting them in a container so they can tally up the number of beneficial bugs all those non-corn plants have drawn to the field. While conventional American agriculture — and even many large-scale organic enterprises — follow the monoculture model, Roger is trying out the robust biodiversity of a polyculture in this field.

Jonathan Lundgren is an independent scientist whose partners and funders are farmers, but until a few years ago, he was an entomologist with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). He was hired right out of grad school in 2004, at a time when farmers were reeling from the impact of a soybean aphid that found their fields an inviting target — as nearly all of them were planting huge soybean monocultures, it’s almost as if they were inviting the pest to dine without the distraction of any plants not on their preferred menu. Lundgren began pursuing two related fields of study: whether the aphid could be defeated by diversified systems — meaning, fields in which farmers encouraged biodiversity over monocultures by adding other plants and even animals to their fields — and whether the pesticides most farmers used to control the aphids and other pests posed unnecessary risks.

Some farmers had tried bringing in biocontrols — packages of pest-eating insects — just as backyard gardeners send away for praying mantises or ladybugs. But the effort was largely a failure, Lundgren says, because there was nothing in these monocultures for the predator insects to eat other than the pest itself. The beneficial predators would happily eat pollen and nectar until the pest arrived, but farmers had been convinced — by their ag-school professors and professional agronomists as well as a farming culture that values neat-as-a-pin landscapes — to keep the corridors bare of any plant that might steal water or nutrients from the crop. And, of course, the purveyors of herbicides and the seeds for plants bioengineered to resist herbicides — usually the same powerful monopolies — drum a constant message of the necessity of chemical warfare against weeds. It’s key to their business plan.

Lundgren’s research showed that the chemicals farmers were using to combat the aphid — called neonicotinoids — didn’t increase their yields, as the big companies selling neonicotinoid-coated seeds loudly claimed. Rather, the neonicotinoids hurt the farmers. ‘They were killing the natural enemies of the soybean aphid,’ he tells me back at the Blue Dasher Farm, which he started as a living model farm with his wife and children to show that one can make a good living from regenerative agriculture — he is now a small farmer as well as a scientist. ‘And the neonicotinoids don’t even kill the soybean aphids, because they don’t arrive in the field until the chemical is largely out of the plant.’

After he’d been working on soybean pests for a few years, Lundgren got word from his bosses at the USDA that they wanted him to shift his research focus to corn. ‘I swore I’d never work in corn!’ he groans. ‘Corn is a miserable crop to work in. You get soaking wet in the morning, and when it’s tasselling you get covered in pollen, and you itch like crazy.’ But he knew it was an important field of study, as corn agriculture has such a huge footprint in the United States. This is America’s largest crop, covering an area the size of sixty-nine million football fields, and the way farmers grow it has an oversized impact on our landscapes, air, water, and health.

Lundgren quickly applied himself to researching the corn rootworm, which American farmers spend millions of dollars on chemical pesticides to combat. He soon ran into a brick wall of dogma. His interest, as always, was not in looking for the right chemical to kill it, but rather trying to figure out how to help its natural predators eliminate it. Everyone told him the corn rootworm had no predators — even entomologists who had spent their entire lives studying this pest. Regardless, Lundgren was convinced that there had to be natural predators and that the other scientists were somehow missing them. He and his lab began trapping insects inside little cups stationed in cornfield soil, then smashing the insects open back in the lab and using DNA analysis to examine their stomach contents. The result, Lundgren says, was that ‘we found rootworm DNA everywhere we looked. Everything was eating it! Ants, beetles, spiders, dozens and dozens of species.’

He found that farmers’ problems with rootworm depended on the number and diversity of these predators. The rootworm has several defences, including a sticky toxin that gums up the mouths of chewing predators like beetles. They avoid the rootworm unless there’s nothing left to eat. For this reason, Lundgren calls rootworms the orange creams of the insect prey world. ‘You get a box of chocolates, and the orange creams are always the last damn chocolates in that box,’ he says. ‘You usually bite one and put it back. Same thing with the rootworm: only when the predators are abundant and all the other prey are eaten, that’s when they’ll finally eat the rootworm — the orange cream.’

Lundgren began meeting farmers who were attracting robust predator communities to their farms by planting cover crops — plants not intended for market, but which were traditionally used to protect soils from erosion and are now also being used to add biodiversity — on fallow fields and between the rows of their market crops. They weren’t using pesticides and weren’t having pest problems. They were even having fewer weed problems, as all that extra vegetation was also attracting beneficial insects that eat tiny weed seeds. He felt that he was witnessing the birth of a new approach to agriculture, and he wanted to support it.

At the same time, the problems with conventional agriculture were becoming more and more apparent to him, as he met commercial beekeepers whose bees were dying by the millions as they were trucked around the country to pollinate crops from one heavily sprayed field to another. And even though Lundgren’s early years at the USDA were career gold — he ran his own lab, published a book and nearly 100 scientific papers, and won awards from both the agency and President Obama — he started feeling a chill within the agency after his paper was published in 2012 showing that neonicotinoids don’t increase soybean yields. He was reprimanded over and over for minor issues, especially for talking to the press and the public about his research, then suspended twice. The hostile scrutiny mushroomed when he wrote a paper in 2015 showing that a neonicotinoid pesticide harms monarch butterflies. He filed a scientific integrity report with the agency, alleging that his work and communication with the media were being disrupted, and later, a whistleblower suit arguing that he was being unfairly disciplined to suppress his science.

‘It became clear that the USDA wasn’t interested in alternatives and that their job — and mine — was to protect agriculture as we know it,’ he says. ‘But the farmers were doing something different in spite of the USDA. I’d rather work with them.’

Lundgren left the government in 2016 to start the fifty-acre Blue Dasher Farm — named for his favourite dragonfly — as well as Ecdysis Foundation, a non-profit research lab located on the farm and named for the stage of metamorphosis when insects shed their skin. His connection to some of the country’s most innovative farmers had blossomed into a community by then. He decided to embark upon agricultural research in a way seldom done — by having farmers fully participate in the science, fund it, and sometimes initiate it.

I visited him a year later, arriving in a gas-guzzling, cheese-yellow Dodge Charger, which the rental agency gave me when I said I wanted a small car and they said, ‘Two door?’ and I cluelessly nodded. I roared up the freeway, then roared onto the grounds of Blue Dasher — the car didn’t do anything but roar — scattering chickens and cats and prompting one of his students to later complain, ‘I thought you said she was an environmentalist!’ By then, Lundgren was connected to a worldwide network of farmers. Sometimes he reaches out with a research question and the farmers offer themselves as participants in a new study. Sometimes a farmer or two will come to him with a question and he reaches out to the greater community to see if others want to join a study. While the lab work takes place in the Ecdysis building — an old milking shed that Lundgren transformed into a well-endowed laboratory with discounted shelving and cupboards from home-supply stores and donated beakers and other equipment — all the field work takes place on the farmers’ land, not designated research plots that have never been part of putting food on the table. He usually has over a dozen different research projects underway.

Much of the rest of the country has signed on to the dubious idea that farmers — especially in places like South Dakota — are not interested in science and sullenly resist enlightenment. It’s probably no truer than any of the other mean-spirited stereotypes flying around the country, and it’s certainly not the case for the worldwide cohort of farmers who are trying to raise food and steward their land ecologically. That worldwide cohort is a larger group than the ones who now call themselves regenerative farmers, who are largely the scarred, savvy survivors of industrial agriculture in the United States and other so-called developed countries and who began to carve a different path to save their farms and their health. The larger cohort also includes Indigenous farmers around the world who have been respectfully cultivating their land and seeds for centuries; their kind of farming is often called agroecology. It includes Asian farmers who follow in the footsteps of Masanobu Fukuoka, the scientist and rice farmer who wrote the 1975 classic The One-Straw Revolution, relying on the fertility of the local environment and eschewing tilling and costly inputs; theirs is called natural farming. It includes the best organic farmers who are paying close attention to the health of their plants and soil.

All these farmers are citizen-scientists. They walk their lands with the informed, fond curiosity of naturalists and know that it’s folly to approach their work as if they were baking the same cake every season using the same recipe and ingredients. They know that nature has many moving, changing, interacting, living parts and that these parts need our respect. For the farmers trying to find a path to both healthy profits and healthy landscapes, Lundgren’s science can answer some of their questions about how to proceed.

‘The farmers I work with are really interested in science,’ Lundgren says. ‘For the farmers who want the status quo, an infrastructure of science and education is all lined up for them. But there is no infrastructure for the ones who are trying to innovate, and that’s who I’m tailoring our work to: the farmers who are really trying to push it.’

Status-quo agriculture has a ruinous impact on the 4.5 billion acres around the world devoted to row crops and the many billions of acres of rangeland and pastures, as well as on the landscapes that surround them. For every pound of corn harvested in Iowa, for instance, more than a pound of topsoil is lost; for every pound of soybeans, two to three pounds. That lost soil drifts into our watersheds with the wind and the rain, carrying the chemicals conventional farmers have so diligently applied to their fields. Fertilisers poison our waters by altering the balance of microbial life there: nitrogen pouring into the Gulf of Mexico prompts the growth of algae, which sucks oxygen from the water, causing a massive dead zone for fish and other living things; phosphorus pouring into Lake Erie prompts the growth of cyanobacteria, which squirt toxins into the drinking water. The total annual cost of erosion from agriculture in the United States is about $44 billion per year. On a global scale, the annual loss of seventy-five billion tons of topsoil costs the world about $400 billion per year.

We can rebuild that precious topsoil — molecular microbiologist David Johnson’s research suggests that ten tons of soil carbon per hectare can be rebuilt annually — but only by mimicking nature to restore the soil’s microbial diversity. Through photosynthesis, plants pull carbon dioxide out of the air to create the sugary carbon-rich compound that fuels their growth, but they don’t keep all of it. Instead, they strategically leak some 40 per cent of that fuel through their roots to feed their partner microorganisms in the soil. Johnson has found that plants can even direct up to 90 per cent to their soil partners when that community needs an extra boost — in other words, the plants disperse more of that hard-won carbon fuel to improve their shared environment. The microorganisms pay for that carbon bounty with minerals, water, chemical defences against disease and insects, and other things plants need. The microorganisms exhale carbon dioxide, just as other carbon eaters like humans do. But when soil is healthy and covered with vegetation, it stores some of that leaked carbon, often for very long periods.

Johnson has found that as soil becomes richer in carbon, its microbial community has the energy to take on bigger and more varied tasks. ‘They’re like us,’ he says of soil microbes, ‘they depend on energy to function. Without energy, they’re basically cavemen.’

When soil is low in both fresh carbon from plant roots and stored carbon, the microbial population struggles to survive. But as carbon and the population of microorganisms increases, what was once basically rock dust — that’s earth without the precious ingredient of life — becomes topsoil. As the population of microbes continues to grow beyond what Johnson calls their caveman stage, mutualisms and specialisations develop. Specialist microbes in the soil can do many things, including gobble up just about any pollutant thrown at them. ‘All these chemicals that are building up in our environment can be a food source for them,’ Johnson says. ‘As long as they have a carbon-carbon, carbon-hydrogen, or carbon-oxygen bond, there’s energy there for them.’

At this point, Johnson says, the bacterial colony can muster the kind of cooperative efforts that exist in human cities — the microbial version of traffic laws, hospitals, and community gardens. This large-scale cooperation enables them to use carbon more efficiently and can turn a piece of degraded land from one that’s gassing off copious amounts of respired carbon dioxide into healthy land that actually retains carbon.

‘We have to slow the respiration of carbon through the system,’ Johnson says. In one of his field studies, he managed to increase soil carbon fourteen-fold, while respiration from the soil microbes only doubled. And this kind of super soil doesn’t come at the cost of agricultural production; rather, it promotes it. On one of Johnson’s plots — carved out of the New Mexico desert, inoculated with his custom-made, fungal-rich compost, and then managed in cover crops without tillage — sunflowers that usually grow five feet tall with six-inch heads grew seven feet tall with twelve-inch heads.

‘Same seeds,’ he told me. ‘We don’t even know what plants can do when they have the right microbes.’

Because of business-as-usual agriculture, lands that could be part of the climate solution are instead part of the climate problem. Soil that’s disturbed and debased by status-quo agriculture and other human activities releases stored carbon — according to a 2018 report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, agricultural land has lost 116 billion tons of carbon, with the most dramatic losses occurring in the last 200 years. Even as degraded as the world’s soils are, though, they still store some 3,000 billion metric tons of carbon, according to soil biochemist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe. Every year, 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — around half of what human activity releases into the atmosphere every year — are absorbed by the soil, the plants, and the seas, and most of it sticks in the soil. But imagine what healthy resilient soil could be doing for the planet! Continuing the kind of agriculture that ruins soil is a huge lost opportunity. Converting it to regenerative agriculture is the only way we will effectively deal with climate change.

Many regenerative farmers and ranchers have been growing commodity crops and control hundreds if not thousands of acres of land, thus they have an oversized impact on landscapes. Their successes might help other farmers around the world who are currently being courted or coopted by industrial agriculture. It might help smaller practitioners resist industrial practices, and that would be a great thing — according to some estimates, 70 per cent of the developing world’s food is actually produced by small farmers, not by megafarms. Regenerative agrarians have many champions and helpers, and Jonathan Lundgren is not the only scientist working directly with and for them. But his work is especially important because it is among the largest and most focused bodies of research on the differing impacts of conventional versus regenerative agriculture. Despite the many case studies and stories of success from the ranks of regenerative farmers and ranchers, professional doubters always say, ‘Where’s the science?’ Lundgren’s work can amplify the successes and help these innovative agrarians convince the rest of society to throw its weight behind this movement, instead of allowing a government under the sway of the big industrial agriculture monopolies to hinder it with status-quo policies.

Buz Kloot is another champion and helper. He’s an aquatic scientist at the University of South Carolina who used to hate his work because he felt like a coroner: the waterways were dying and, he says, it seemed like the only thing he could do about it was to declare the cause of death. He didn’t think anything could change, because he didn’t think farming could change; he certainly didn’t think the health of the soil in modern America’s farmlands could change. Then he visited a farm owned by a soil-health pioneer, Ray Styer, who hadn’t used chemical fertilisers in twenty-five years.

‘Everything I knew said you had to put on fertiliser to make crops grow, but he told me he was just using cover crops to feed his plants,’ Kloot tells me. ‘I could understand every word, but I couldn’t understand the concept. I couldn’t understand how the biology alone could do this.’

As Kloot started to meet other farmers who were interested in pivoting away from the industrial model, he heard a lot of confusion about how they could wean themselves from chemicals without a precipitous drop in production. He found that university extension services’ advice for fertiliser use varied wildly from state to state and seemed to be based on studies conducted decades earlier, when nearly all farmers were tilling their fields and weren’t using cover crops. Farmers might spend $230,000 more on fertiliser depending on which side of a state’s border they were on. But the regenerative farmers were creating new conditions on their land, and Kloot realised that they might have completely different fertiliser needs.

‘If you have a chemical view of soil, you just think of soil as a place to grow plants,’ Kloot says. ‘With that view, the only way to make things grow is to manipulate them chemically. But if you see soil as a living, mutualistic dynamic ecosystem that’s changing all the time, that’s full of microbes, it’s a whole different view and it affects the way you do things.’

Kloot went on to do his own experiments, with some funding from his university foundation as well as crowdfunded cash from dozens of farmers and other small donors. For one study, entitled ‘How Much Fertilizer Do We Really Need?’ Kloot worked with regenerative farmer Carl Coleman to set up plots on Coleman’s cover-cropped fields, some with no fertiliser at all and others with varying amounts. The results — which Kloot confirmed in a set of replicated studies — showed that regenerative farmers did not need as much fertiliser as was often recommended. Plus, they were steadily building up more soil organic matter — microbial, plant, and animal matter in various stages of decomposition. That organic matter contains both organic carbon and nitrogen, which soil microorganisms convert into a plant-available form near the roots. That suggested that the farmers’ needs for supplemental nitrogen would continue to decrease in the future. And while conventional thinking predicted that the levels of potassium — another nutrient farmers typically add to their soils — would drop so low that the farmers might lose productivity, soil tests found that potassium levels fluctuated according to crop stage and weather.

‘The farmers I work with haven’t applied potassium in six years,’ he says, ‘but the prognosticators of crop failure continue to make dire predictions as these guys continue to yield the same or better and save a bundle on fertiliser. In our conventional, reductionist science, we’ve overlooked the ability of soil to supply these nutrients if we work with Mother Nature, not against her. The rules literally change when you allow soils to be living ecosystems.’

Regenerative agriculture encompasses a set of principles first articulated by a group of conservationists and educators from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service — Ray Archuleta, Jay Fuhrer, Barry Fisher, and Jon Stika — that respect and support nature and that guide farmers to work with the many complex relationships that comprise nature instead of disrupting them. Nature is inherently complex, but humans often try to make it simpler for the production of food. Of course, farming can’t help but disrupt nature — just about every human activity disrupts nature — but these innovative farmers are figuring out how to minimise the disruption and restore some of the natural diversity and complexity to their landscapes.

The principles for turning farmlands into living ecosystems basically subvert many of the practices used to simplify landscapes. First, farmers need to minimise disturbance, including biological disturbance, the physical disturbance of ploughing or tillage, and the chemical disturbance of fertilisers and the many ‘-cides’ — herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, nematicides, and so on.

The grossest form of biological disturbance is the monoculture. Farmers usually try to compensate for the biodiversity desert caused by monocultures by rotating crops — instead of growing acres of corn in the same fields every year, they alternate the corn with soybeans one year and perhaps another crop the next. Crop rotation was a practice encouraged in the early 1900s by African American scientist George Washington Carver, who wanted to help poor farmers overcome the debilitating effect of cotton plantation monocultures. Until the Nixon administration in the early 1970s, when the government began pushing farmers into industrial-style production, farmers often rotated many crops through their fields. Carver also urged the planting of cover crops, including the nitrogen-boosting peanut. Regenerative farmers now routinely plant cover crops on fallow fields or between the rows of the cash crop and even let non-bothersome weeds play their part in restoring and nurturing biodiversity above ground and below.

The physical disturbance of tillage damages the communities of mycorrhizal fungi that support and connect plant communities. While agricultural land doesn’t likely have the density of fungal life that ecologist Suzanne Simard found in forests — 300 miles of fungal strands under every footstep — tillage disrupts the fungal communities that are there and tilts the balance of the soil community toward bacteria. Bacteria are crucial partners in ecosystem health, of course, but soil dominated by fungi is even more vibrant and productive. ‘Fungi have this unique trait of providing both logistics and communication,’ says molecular microbiologist David Johnson. ‘They create a communication network as well as one that can funnel or ship goods, including all the elements that a plant needs.’

Then there is chemical disturbance. Those of us who aren’t farmers have an instinctive aversion to the -cides, probably because we are leery of those chemicals clinging to the foods we eat. And some certainly do, as one of the many studies of the ubiquitous herbicide glyphosate (Roundup) showed that more than 90 per cent of pregnant women in a small sample from Indiana had glyphosate in their urine and that higher concentrations were associated with earlier deliveries in pregnancies. Most studies tend to investigate these agricultural chemicals’ impact on human health, rather than landscape health, but there is evidence that they can disrupt natural processes in everything from the microorganisms in the soil to the microbiota of much larger creatures. For instance, researchers found that when exposed to nitrogen fertiliser for a number of years, the bacteria called rhizobia that ‘fix’ nitrogen undergo genetic changes that make them less beneficial for host plants. This not only affects the agricultural field where the nitrogen fertiliser is used, but also nearby areas that are subject to runoff. When agricultural lands erode and these chemicals leach through the watershed, they’re disrupting this basic and essential plant-microbe mutualism wherever they go.

‘Worldwide, the nitrogen cycle is off. We’ve changed it fundamentally,’ says University of Illinois plant biology professor Katy Heath, who led the study with Jennifer Lau of Michigan State University.

The chemical disturbance to our landscapes disrupts other mutualisms, too. When I was visiting Lundgren, he suggested I talk to his beekeeper friend. I had the idea that this was just some guy with a few backyard hives. But after I roared into Bret Adee’s driveway — he laughed when he saw my cheese-mobile and shouted, ‘This is every nineteen-year-old boy’s dream!’ — and I saw the custom stained-glass windows of honeybees framing his front door, I had an inkling that he might have a few more than that. Turned out he was the president of the Pollinators Stewardship Council until 2020 and the biggest beekeeper in America, with more than 90,000 hives that he dispatches around the country to pollinate one crop after another: first almonds, then broccoli, avocados, cherries, apples, and more.

Adee’s grandfather started the family bee business during the Depression, and the family was in it for the honey profits until the 1980s. Competition from Chinese and Latin American imports diminished those profits, and Adee shifted the focus of the business to crop pollination. He lost bees even back then — they range up to seven miles from the hive every day as they forage, so a beekeeper can’t control all the dangers they might encounter — but he lost only 5–10 per cent of his hives every year, which was in the historic range. Beekeepers in non-agricultural counties still have losses in that range.

But in 2007 — a year after another beekeeper lost 90 per cent of his bees and coined the term ‘colony collapse disorder’ — Adee lost 44 per cent. His bees continued dying the next year. There were other ominous developments: queen bees were living six months instead of two to three years, and the fall supersedure — in which an orange-sized knot of bees departs a robust hive with a queen to form a new colony — stopped happening. As Adee frantically conducted research into what might be causing the problems, he kept running into mentions of neonicotinoids and Lundgren’s work. Then he realised Lundgren lived nearby, and they became fast friends and collaborators, both chasing a solution to bee death and decline.

Adee agrees with Lundgren that landscape simplification — and, especially, the chemicals that are used to create and maintain these simpler landscapes — is the culprit behind the bee carnage. According to his reading of the scientific literature, fungicides kill naturally occurring microbes on flowers and plants. Those microbes would ordinarily be introduced to the hives by returning bees and help them digest pollen. ‘A lot of pollens have really hard shells,’ Adee explains. ‘Bees can’t break down the shells without these microbes, so you can have a whole hive full of honey and pollen but the bees will starve because they can’t access the nutrients.’

When bees encounter fungicides along with neonicotinoids, Adee says the synergies between these two chemicals amplify the combined toxicity so that they become seventy times more toxic than DDT. But bees are exposed to far more than just these two chemicals: bee scientists at Pennsylvania State University have found residue from over 100 pesticides in hives, and these disrupt the bee immune systems in different ways.

The weedkiller glyphosate is doubly hard on honeybees (and bumblebees). The simplification of the landscape, often achieved through herbicides sprayed widely among crops bioengineered to resist these chemicals and along rural roadways, means there’s often not enough for bees to eat, making them forage more widely and work harder. And glyphosate sabotages them from inside, too. Monsanto (now part of Bayer), the company that makes this herbicide, has always claimed that animals from bees to humans aren’t endangered by glyphosate, as it targets an enzyme found only in plants and microorganisms. But honeybees, like humans and most other living things, have a mutualistic relationship with microbes that keeps them healthy. Evolutionary biologist Nancy Moran and her colleagues have found that glyphosate diminishes the presence of eight big players in the bee microbiota and that bees with impaired microbiota are more likely to die when threatened by a pathogen.

That’s why Adee is sceptical of one of the common hypotheses floated by government officials, industry, and some ag-school academics about the cause of bee death: the Varroa mite. This parasite lives on adult honeybees as well as on their brood, sucking away until the adults are weakened, causing malformation in emerging bees, and spreading viruses throughout the hive. But this pest has been around since at least the 1980s, and Adee says it never used to be the problem that it is today. Fifteen years ago, he recalls, he would test for mites by putting a cup of bees in a jar, adding a shot of ether, and shaking. The mites would fall off the bees and stick to the wall of the jar. Back then, he knew he needed to treat the hives if twenty to twenty-five mites stuck to the wall.

‘Now the bees are so weak that if you see more than five mites, you know a train wreck is in the works,’ he says. ‘The bees have lost a lot of immune function, so that a few mites carrying viruses that have been in the environment forever become problematic. Bees are like us: if there’s a cold going around, it might not be a problem for most people but it can be a death sentence to someone with AIDS.’

All this has turned Adee and his wife, Connie, into regenerative farmers themselves. First they stopped tilling their land, then they adopted the movement’s second principle: they keep their soil covered at all times with what North Dakota conservationist Jay Fuhrer calls a magic carpet of either living plants or plant residue. The point is to mimic natural areas, where bare soil is rare. The living roots and decomposing plant residue feed the soil microorganisms as well as protect soil from summer heat, which can be thirty degrees cooler underneath the cover. That difference in temperature is crucial for the survival of both soil microorganisms and beneficial insects.

‘Imagine shrinking to the size of a small beetle,’ suggests Mike Bredeson, one of the graduate students who was sucking up insects in the middle of Roger’s cornfield — he was the Polo to Lundgren’s Marco — and has since finished his PhD. ‘Without plant cover, you might be able to use that space during the night but not during the day. When that cover isn’t there, these critters can’t lay eggs, can’t survive, can’t perform the services we want.’ And though some farmers worry that planting a cover crop will rob their fields of the moisture that their cash crops need, Bredeson says that cover crops wind up saving moisture. Bare soil allows massive evaporation, which draws up salts in the soil — often these are artifacts of agricultural chemicals — and reduces soil productivity. Cover crops’ shade not only reduces evaporation, but the density of cover-crop roots creates millions of channels for water to penetrate deep into the soil.

The third principle of regeneration: farmers need to add as much diversity to their fields as possible — in other words, the greater the number of species in their cover crops, the better. Just as doctors advise us to eat from a wide variety of foods, having a wide variety of plants in a field offers a rich, diverse diet to the insects and soil microorganisms that rely on them. Regenerative farmers often maximise this diversity by making sure their cover crops have varied root depths as well as various heights.

The ultimate diversity — and the final principle of regeneration — comes from adding animals. All farms used to have animals, both for what they contribute in work and what they contribute in meat, eggs, and dairy, but farmers were prodded decades ago to adopt a factory model that encouraged them to concentrate on one or two commodities and ditch their other food-making enterprises. Of course, many landscapes have become degraded because of poorly managed animals (see chapter four about northeastern Nevada, for example). But regenerative grazing has the opposite impact. Farmers and ranchers move animals from field to field so that they have a beneficial impact on the land, with their microbe-rich dung and nitrogen-rich urine fertilising it, and their hooves pocking the soil surface just enough to maximise water penetration and push seeds into the soil. They leave the animals there long enough and in dense-enough numbers so they munch all the plants but not so much that they stop photosynthesis. This gives tired lands a biological jolt that leads to greater overall biodiversity.

That jolt can be profound, and research published in the journal Nature suggests it can last thousands of years. Scientists have recently concluded that wild African landscapes like the Mara-Serengeti were dramatically shaped by the work of ancient herders and their cattle, sheep, and goats. They demonstrate that wildlife hotspots in today’s southern Kenya were created by the accumulated nutrients from the Neolithic nomads’ grazing animals, which roamed the landscape by day and were kept in pens at night. Those formerly penned areas are now rich grasslands frequented by gazelle, wildebeest, zebra, and warthog, dense with the worms, dung beetles, and other insects that attract birds and reptiles. At least one species of gecko only thrives in these rich glades created by the penned animals.

Lundgren’s research focuses on farms and ranches that are on the regenerative path — some embrace all these principles, others are making progress on some — and compares them with nearby farms and ranches practising conventional agriculture. When I visited, he was in the process of publishing a study conducted with his graduate student Claire LaCanne, now an extension educator in agricultural production systems at the University of Minnesota. The study followed ten cornfields per farm on twenty farms over two growing seasons. Half the farms were regenerative — they used a diversity of cover crops, never tilled or applied chemical insecticides, and grazed animals on their crop residue — and half were conventional. Of the latter, eight practised tillage, and they all used seeds genetically modified to resist insects and/or used seeds treated with neonicotinoids, while leaving their soil bare after they harvested their cash crop. The study tracked soil carbon, insect pests, corn yield, and profits.

The results, published in 2018 in PeerJ, a journal of life and environmental research, gave the imprimatur of science to the kind of success many regenerative farmers have reported for years. Lundgren and LaCanne found that there were more pests in the cornfields that were treated with insecticides and/or used GMO seeds than in the pesticide-free fields, presumably because the cover crops attracted battalions of prey insects that decimated crop pests — and because insecticides weren’t killing off those beneficials. And while the regenerative farms used older, lower-yielding corn varieties with less fertiliser and had lower yields, their overall profits were 78 per cent higher than the conventional farmers’. Partly, this was because the regenerative farmers’ costs were so much lower, with no cash outlays for costly insecticides and GMO seeds. They also ‘stacked enterprises’ and had two or more sources of income on the same acre — in this case, they grazed their cattle on corn residue after harvest and got a premium price for pastured beef. What was the primary factor correlating with farm profitability? The amount of carbon and organic matter in the farmers’ fields, not their yields.

‘The study really showed the benefit of thinking of your farm as an agricultural ecosystem,’ Claire LaCanne told me.

Other studies are yielding similar results. In California, regenerative and conventional almond growers joined a more recent study conducted by another of Lundgren’s students, Tommy Fenster. Before his connection to Lundgren and Ecdysis, Fenster was working for the Alameda County Waste Management Authority, teaching people how to make and use compost and learning about regenerative practices on urban farms. When he started a master’s in biology at California State University, East Bay, he reached out to ask Lundgren to be his offsite adviser.

Fenster’s is also a two-year study, following four regenerative orchards and four conventional orchards for one year, then tracking different sets of orchards over a second year. It was hard to track down regenerative orchards — the new certification for Regenerative Organic had not yet been extended to orchards — so Fenster cold-called growers around the state. He queried them about a list of regenerative practices for orchards that included avoiding synthetic fertilisers or pesticides; using compost, diverse cover crops, grazing animals, and hedgerows to attract and harbor biodiversity; and keeping the soil covered most of the year. Any orchardist who followed more than four of these practices was considered regenerative. All of the orchards that qualified were certified organic, although that wasn’t a requirement for the study. Fenster then set about examining all of the orchards for insect crop damage, quantity of soil carbon and nitrogen, effectiveness of water infiltration (how quickly water penetrates the soil), composition of the invertebrate population (insects, spiders, and worms) and the soil microbial community, almond nutrient composition, crop yield, and profitability.

Many almond growers are hesitant about trying some of these regenerative practices for food safety reasons, Fenster told me. They worry that having any sort of vegetation between trees, much less letting animals wander through the orchard, might increase their exposure to Salmonella and E. coli. The regenerative perspective is just about the opposite. ‘We think a healthy orchard floor with a diversity of plants, microbes, and insects will decompose the manure, and a diverse microbial community will keep the pathogens in check while also cycling nutrients more effectively,’ says Fenster. He points to a study in Germany showing that children who grew up on farms with animals had more robust immune systems compared to those who grew up in urban areas without pets. In regenerative thinking, biodiversity gives the land a similarly robust immune system.

Because almonds are such a notoriously thirsty crop, many orchardists also worry — like conventional farmers everywhere — that cover crops will siphon away the water needed by their cash crop. Again, regenerative agrarians hold the opposite view. The management of cover crops in arid California will definitely be different, Fenster says, from that in the rainier Midwest: the orchardist needs to either plant cover crops that naturally die down during the hottest months, mow them, or move animals through to chew and stomp them down. But cover crops, they argue, will actually make more water available to farmers. Cover crops not only reduce runoff during the rainy winter months, but they also build up the organic matter in the soil, which, in turn, boosts its water-holding capacity. They also diminish the amount of dust kicked up by harvesting, a boon to the lungs of everyone living nearby — already taxed by heavy pollution in California’s Central Valley.

In the first year of the study, three of the regenerative orchardists were bringing different animals onto their property: broiler chickens, egg-laying chickens, and sheep. The orchardist welcoming the latter animal, Brian Paddock of Capay Hills Orchard in Esparto, California, is definitely having a good time with it. The sheep belong to his neighbour. Paddock is always eager to avoid the drudgery and fuel expense of mowing the cover crops in his orchard. He doesn’t want to let them go to seed because that’s a nitrogen-heavy transition, and he wants that nitrogen to stay in the ground for the almonds. Now, when the cover crops flower, he just announces to his wife that he’s off to mow the orchard. Then he gets a beer and watches the sheep fertilise and mow at the same time.

Paddock tries to bring nature into his orchard in other ways, too. He stakes out owl boxes so that a larger owl population will snatch up the moles and voles. He’s expanding his hedgerows — which provide habitat for native bees and other beneficial insects — and hoping to attract a fox for other animal pests like squirrels. He always knew he wanted to be organic because he never wanted to employ poisons or other dubious chemicals to control pests.

‘You can go on YouTube and watch videos of people watching the nuclear blasts out in the desert,’ Paddock told me. ‘They didn’t know at the time how dangerous that was. Why take the risk on these chemicals? My family and I live where we farm, so I knew I wanted to be organic.’

The results from Fenster’s study — published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems — echo those of Lundgren and LaCanne. Fenster found six times as much invertebrate biomass (insects, spiders, and worms!) at the regenerative orchards, compared to the conventional ones, as well as a significantly greater amount of diversity. The amount of crop damage by pests in conventional and regenerative orchards was the same, although for different reasons: the former minimised damage with chemicals and the latter’s success was tied to their rising levels of invertebrate biomass and diversity. Fenster also recorded an average of 3.88 per cent organic matter in the regenerative orchards versus 2.39 per cent in the conventional ones — a significant difference, as studies show that for every 1 per cent increase in organic matter per acre, the land will hold an extra 19,000 to 25,000 gallons of water, depending on soil type. Sampling to a depth of sixty centimetres, Fenster’s study found that the regenerative orchards hold 30 per cent more soil carbon, with his models indicating that regenerative orchards are building soil carbon while conventional orchards are losing soil carbon. Finally, Fenster found twice the microbial biomass in the soil of the regenerative orchards. While there was no difference in yield between the regenerative and conventional orchards, the regenerative orchards were twice as profitable due to the premium paid for their product.

The regenerative approach is spreading around the country, even among people who haven’t come from and then broken with the conventional, commodity-production background — a background that has produced some of the world’s leading spokespeople for regenerative agriculture. Through social media, Buz Kloot met an organic farmer in South Carolina who incorporates many regenerative practices on his land, many of which he just figured out on his own.

Even though he comes from a family with deep farming roots, Nat Bradford only began farming in 2012, when he was thirty-four — although not for lack of early interest. He was eager to go into farming when he was a student in his rural high school, but his agriculture teacher scoffed at the idea. ‘He told me that unless I already had 2,000 acres of land and $2 million in equipment — already paid off — I’d always be in debt,’ Bradford tells me. ‘That’s the dilemma of the modern farmer. I have friends in their twenties and thirties who don’t want to do the same thing their fathers are doing, but they’re stuck in the system. I’m trying to come up with a new model: making a living, making a positive impact on the land, and trying to figure out a way to help other farmers get into this new approach.’

Instead of going into farming when he got out of college, Bradford went into landscaping. He had a lot of ideas about improving on the conventional model of urban landscaping, in which plants are widely spaced on heavily mulched plots — what he calls mulch deserts — that require people to use Roundup to enforce their pristine weedlessness. ‘Over 25 per cent of chemical pesticides are in backyards, schools, and municipal sites,’ he says. ‘I wanted to design landscapes that didn’t necessitate Roundup in great expanses.’ So his designs all incorporated various groundcovers that kept bare soils to an absolute minimum.

But Bradford still pined for farming. His grandfather had been a part-time farmer and made enough money doing it to send a son through law school and another son through medical school, and Bradford had ‘fallen in love with produce early on’. He finally bought ten and a half acres that had been conventionally farmed in cotton, corn, and soybean monocultures, and began raising watermelons, collard greens, and okra. He committed early on to not using any chemicals and to bringing back the soil’s health and fertility using only cover crops and manure. It took several years, but his results are impressive.

Key to Bradford’s success is a carefully timed mix of cover crops that flower, go to seed, and die back just before it’s time for him to start his market crop, which he plants directly into their matted, decomposing biomass. By the time his market crop is a foot high, those cover-crop seeds have already begun to grow again, enriching the soil, and attracting beneficial insects. Bradford is mimicking nature in two ways: he keeps a live root in the ground year-round, and he relies on the fact that soils are full of seeds that will sprout when conditions are right. Some seeds last in the soil for hundreds of years or more; in the soil of one dry lake bed, people have even found viable lotus seeds carbon-dated back 1,200 years.

‘I’m trying to build a self-regenerating seed bank of cover crops in the soil,’ Bradford says. ‘I hate buying seeds and taking the time to replant them every year when I know they’ll go to seed. That’s what nature does! You don’t have to replant a forest — you just walk away for fifteen years and the forest has regenerated, because the seed bank is there.’

Collards are Bradford’s winter crop, grown on a single acre and swaddled in clovers and vetch. When the rains fall, the drops never strike bare ground, but splash onto the plants and then trickle down into the soil. (I’m an irreligious person, but I nonetheless think of this as God’s drip-irrigation system.) The cover crops protect the soil from both rain and wind erosion, and the collards never get splashed with mud — a minor point, except to the chefs who buy Bradford’s produce and say they hardly have to wash it. After the collards are finished, he puts in a crop of okra.

I spoke to Bradford in March 2019, when it was still the winter growing season, and he had been harvesting $22,000 worth of collards per acre since the previous December. When I spoke to him again in 2021, his crop yield had more than doubled to 13,500 pounds and $50,000 per acre, which he attributes to the continuing improvement of soil ecology. His okra production from the previous season had been likewise dazzling. Until production stopped because of a hurricane, he and his family were harvesting 22,000 pounds of okra per acre on each of their seven acres in production.

‘That’s close to four times the commercial yield for okra,’ he says. ‘I can’t even imagine how many chemicals they’d need to use to match that. Organic farmers have to be honest in that conventional agriculture is our competitor. And with this kind of production, I can compete with them on yield, flavour, quality, soil health, and price.’

And watermelons! Bradford uses seeds that have been carefully passed down through his family for 170 years. Every year, the family went through the fields and identified the healthiest and most resilient plants with the most flavourful fruit and saved those seeds, which became the seed stock for the following year. Planted into his healthy soil and surrounded by cover crops, his watermelons are also going gangbusters. Bradford pointed to the cold, wet summer of 2013, when then governor Nikki Haley requested federal disaster aid in South Carolina after heavy rains devastated crops. The cucurbit industry — squash, cucumbers, and melons — suffered an outbreak of downy mildew. Many farmers lost their entire crop, but Bradford had over 100 per cent yield that year, as some of his vines surprised him with two huge melons, not just one.

Bradford knows that he is extraordinarily fortunate to inherit these seeds that have been grown for generations in the same area, interacting with the same soils, ecological community, and microclimate for so many years. His family saved seeds in hot, dry years as well as cold, wet ones. They likewise saved seeds from plants that thrived in years when there were insect onslaughts and disease. They grew the melons without the help of fertiliser and pesticides, so these plants know how to forage for nutrients and fight pests and disease without chemicals. Their genetics are a vast bag of tricks the plant uses to thrive, no matter how many challenges they face.

Most farmers in the United States — and other countries in the thrall of industrial agriculture — no longer have seeds that are adapted to their local conditions, much less seeds with the buff genetics to thrive in an organic system. They had them back in the days when all farmers used to save seeds from their best crop plants for the next season. They still had them in the last century, although to a lesser degree, when there were hundreds of regional seed companies that sold varieties that grew well for local farmers and pleased the palates of their families and customers. But the craftsmanship of seed saving was gradually lost among the vast majority of the nation’s farmers, as industry took control of this most basic and precious agricultural resource.

Before that, almost all seeds came from plants that were open-pollinated. In a field of open-pollinated corn, for instance, pollen from one tasselling plant blows around to other tasselling plants and they fertilise each other in a marvellous swirl of cross-pollination and genetic possibility. Even if the field is planted with a variety for which farmers have carefully selected seed, resulting in big sweet ears and some other shared characteristics — height, maybe, or time of maturation or colour variation — there is still a massive amount of genetic differentiation from one plant to another.

In an open-pollinated field, those genetic differences offer farmers thousands and thousands of options for the future. Over the millennia, farmers exercised those options, creating distinct varieties in subregions around the world, with plants continually adapting to the desires of the various humans who grew them and to the places where they were planted. Each microregion, even each farmer, could boast a unique variety. And every year, the genetics of the variety would shift a bit as the environment and humans made their selections.

‘When was America great?’ Winona LaDuke, Native American activist and farmer, tossed the audience this question during her keynote address at a Portland conference called Organicology, where plant breeding and seed saving were on the agenda. ‘America was great when we had 8,000 varieties of corn.’

In the early twentieth century, professional plant breeders began to shift this reliance on open-pollinated crops in favour of plants with much more limited genetic possibility. They developed hybrids, which were crop varieties bred from two inbred parents, themselves created by generations of self-pollination. Seed companies were able to distinguish themselves and build their businesses with their own proprietary hybrids, guaranteeing farmers that they would get exactly the same result with every planting. Those uniform, widget-like fruits and vegetables fit well with the needs of the nascent food industry, ensuring farmers a market. But farmers could not save seeds from the hybrids, because the next generation would be genetically unstable and revert back to the qualities of the inbred parents — not, usually, what the farmer wanted. They had to buy new seeds every year.

‘With open-pollinated crops, there is enough genetic diversity from one season to the next that the crop continues to evolve and adapt to environmental conditions,’ says Micaela Colley, program director of the Organic Seed Alliance. ‘But the hybrid has a different goal: it’s the fixed endpoint of a variety with certain qualities and traits. It’s not meant to evolve.’

After the advent of biotechnology in the late twentieth century and the patenting of living things including seeds, giant chemical companies began gobbling up those regional seed companies. Now, four massive monopolies — Corteva (a merger of Dow and DuPont), ChemChina (which swallowed Syngenta), Bayer (which swallowed Monsanto), and BASF — are estimated to control over 60 per cent of the world’s seeds. Because these chemical conglomerates are vacuuming up smaller seed companies to make a healthy profit, not to promote healthy agriculture or landscapes or people, they have ‘retired’ thousands of the smaller seed companies’ proprietary hybrids — meaning, they no longer breed the parent lines that create the hybrids and grow them out for distribution. In the year 2000 alone, more than 2,000 hybrids disappeared from the marketplace when Seminis — at the time, the world’s largest vegetable seed company — bought several smaller companies. Instead of continuing to offer seeds for thousands of crop varieties, it is more profitable for the conglomerates to prune their portfolios down to a smaller offering of seeds with big markets: either ones that grow reasonably well everywhere or ones that are tailored for the major commercial growing areas — think California for tomatoes and the Midwest for corn. The conglomerates then target some of the most profitable hybrids for genetic tinkering, in almost all cases so that they can increase farmers’ reliance on their chemicals. According to Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, GMO varieties comprised 93 per cent of the US acreage planted to five major crops — corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, and sugar beets — in 2020. Ninety-eight per cent of these GMOs are engineered for resistance to glyphosate and other herbicides. Most of the GMO cotton and corn is also engineered for insect resistance.

In the United States and other countries where seed-saving is almost a lost art, farmers now have a hard time finding the older varieties they used to rely on. Farmers growing commodities like corn, soy, and canola often can’t buy anything but GMO seeds precoated with the conglomerates’ pesticides. If they’re trying to farm ecologically, they find these seeds problematic. If they’re planting cover crops to attract beneficial insects, they often find their hopes thwarted, as the insecticides that coat these crop seeds can taint the nectar, pollen, and tissues of the cover crops and leach into the water table.

‘Are we poisoning the well for these beneficial insects?’ asks Mike Bredeson, Jonathan Lundgren’s former grad student, who’s studying this. ‘Yes, it appears we are.’

Lundgren’s research casts doubt on whether these costly pesticide-coated seeds are actually helping farmers with their pest problems, and research from University of Idaho biologist Mary Ridout suggests the same. Ridout compared corn seeds treated with fungicides to untreated corn seed, putting one cup of each into jars partially filled with water. Four weeks later, there was far more fungal growth — especially among three or four species of fungus — on the treated seeds than the untreated ones, where there was greater fungal diversity. The fungicide hadn’t eliminated fungal growth, she concluded; it had only altered the diversity of the fungal community and eliminated the competition that might have held those three or four more aggressive fungi in check.

Even the commercially produced seeds that aren’t coated with pesticides are a feeble simulacrum of the kind of robust seeds Nat Bradford inherited. The adage among plant breeders is that plants should be bred in the environment of intended use, but the environment where most commercial crop varieties are bred is high on chemicals and low on diversity. They’re bred with industrial expectations: that they will be goosed with chemical fertilisers, protected from insects with applied pesticides, saved from disease with applied fungicides, and relieved of competition with weeds by herbicides. Because of the environment in which they’re bred and raised, these varieties may lack the genetic wherewithal to thrive in an organic system — or even one in which farmers are either trying to save money or save the rest of nature by applying fewer chemicals.

Like humans and every other complex organism, plants have a dynamic microbiota. When we look at a plant, we see only the visible part of an entire ecosystem that includes bacterial, fungal, and other partners in the soil as well as microscopic organisms tucked into the plant’s tissues. Each plant’s relationship with these partners begins in the seed, which hosts a small population of microorganisms. According to research looking at the domestication gradient from corn’s most ancient ancestor, teosinte — a grass from southern Mexico — to modern corn, each iteration seems to host the same core microbiota in their seeds as the wild varieties.

Scientists are still working on what those core symbionts do for the seed as it germinates, which Ridout says is the most vulnerable time in the life of the plant — it’s fatally susceptible to lack of water, nutrients, hard soil, harsh environments, and pathogens. So far, research suggests that the symbionts confer better germination, faster growth, and increased biomass both above ground and below. In addition, they seem to act as the plant’s gatekeeper, protecting it against pathogens and helping it form connections with microbial partners in the outside world.

As the plant continues to grow, it needs a genetic toolkit to fight pests and disease on its own; it also has to know how to muster a handshake with these new microscopic partners to feed and defend the ecosystem. Microbes boost the growing plant’s defence in at least three ways: they can produce chemicals that protect plants, they can outcompete hostile organisms around the plant, and they can trigger what’s called an induced systemic resistance, where even the very presence of a beneficial microbe can put the plant on alert and ready to mount a defence against pathogens if needed.

Scientists are just starting to probe whether and how much plants have lost their ability to work with their microbial partners as a consequence of centuries of domestication and plant breeding. In 2019, Lori Hoagland — a Purdue University plant breeder and soil microbiologist who is trying to breed tomatoes with these ecosystem considerations in mind — travelled to Colombia, where tomatoes originated and still grow wild. She hiked into the mountains to collect root tissue from the wild tomatoes as well as the soil surrounding them. Back in her greenhouse, she’s studying how the microbes in this soil help these ancestor plants survive stress from pathogens and drought, compared to how much they help modern plants. ‘If these microbiomes turn out to be important, we could try to breed these relationships into our modern varieties using traditional breeding techniques [i.e. not GMO],’ Hoagland tells me. ‘We might also be able to manage our soils in agricultural systems to be sure that these types of microbes are present to help our modern tomatoes.’

It’s possible that modern plant breeding has basically turned most crop plants into idiots — my hyperbole, not Hoagland’s — that no longer have the wherewithal to seek out their friends and thrive. Instead, the farmers who plant these seeds are forced to buy a multitude of costly products to stand in for the services these ancient mutualisms would otherwise provide for free. No wonder the USDA forecasted that debt among the nation’s two million farmers would soar to $441.7 billion in 2021. No wonder farmers are among the populations most likely to commit suicide.

‘It’s huge money for a few,’ says Idaho organic potato breeder Clyde Bragg. He was once a vice president with Green Giant in charge of developing new varieties and found that the best potatoes came from organic seed, but he couldn’t convince the Giant to convert to organic. So he quit and began breeding and raising his own potatoes, saving the $800–$1,000 in chemicals per acre that conventional potato farmers pay. ‘We’re losing farmers, but the chemical companies keep getting bigger. I don’t know one person in the chemical industry who’s lost their livelihood, but I know lots of people who have lost their farm.’

But just as there is a grassroots movement to restore ecological wisdom to farming, there is a complementary movement underway to restore the lost art of plant breeding and seed saving as it’s been practised for thousands of years.

Organic farmers realised the need for such a movement back in the 1980s. They were making do with a handful of commercial hybrids that worked for them, as well as with the so-called heirloom seeds — varieties that had been around for at least fifty years and are either open-pollinated or self-pollinated — that began to appear in seed catalogues like Johnny’s Selected Seeds in the 1970s. They preferred the heirlooms for a number of reasons. Many found hybrids philosophically objectionable and wanted independence from the big seed companies, which increasingly focused on creating varieties that suited the standards of agribusiness — crops that ripened at the same time, transported better, and lasted longer, but often lost the flavour, texture, and beautiful colours of the older varieties.

But the heirlooms also weren’t a perfect solution for organic farmers who actually wanted to make a living. ‘The heirlooms tasted great, but they often cracked and didn’t ship well,’ recalls John Navazio, who became an organic farmer in the 1970s and then went back to school in the 1980s to learn traditional plant breeding. For a while, he was Organic Seed Alliance’s senior scientist and the organic seed extension specialist for Washington State University, but he is now working at Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Maine. ‘You could hardly even pack those heirlooms on a truck and take them to town to sell them. Conventional tomatoes didn’t crack, but they didn’t taste good either. I started to wonder if we could put those characteristics together and soon realised there was no one breeding varieties for the farmer marketing high-quality organic produce on a local scale.’

By the early 1980s, organic farmers had begun to conference about their need for improved varieties and well-produced seed. Frank Morton — now the legendary plant breeder and seed seller behind Wild Garden Seed in Philomath, Oregon — recalls going to a meeting in 1984 where a molecular biologist known as Mushroom (named, Morton says, because he claimed ‘my friends keep me in the dark and feed me shit’) stood up and announced, ‘If you grow organic crops, you need organic seeds. Those seeds don’t exist, and we have to create them.’

‘It blew my mind,’ says Morton, who was growing organic lettuce for upscale restaurants back then and now sells seeds for the more than eighty new organic varieties he’s created. ‘But my real epiphany came when I realised that if I kept saving my seeds, I’d find accidental crosses and could grow them out and get a genetic rainbow.’

The Organic Seed Alliance (OSA) was organised in 2003 and now includes both farmers interested in developing their own varieties — pushing the evolution of existing varieties so that they fare better against pests and climate challenges — as well as several professional plant breeders from public universities. Because of cuts in government funding to these universities, there aren’t many of these breeders left, and not all are dedicated to organic. But the ones working with the OSA believe that neither agricultural abundance nor a healthy planet are going to come from the genetic-manipulation tools of biotechnology, which change varieties in the narrowest of ways, one or two genes at a time. Instead, they favour making selections from open-pollinated plants grown organically, a practice that engages the entire genomes of the plants.

‘If we want to have a truly sustainable future,’ says Michael Mazourek, a plant breeder from Cornell University who’s an OSA stalwart, ‘we need plants that are robust and resilient intrinsically, from their genetics. There are tens of thousands of genes in two plants, and most plants also have different forms of the genes, called alleles. When we do a cross-pollination, we’re working with all that diversity, well beyond what we will be able to define and characterise for a long time. It’s underappreciated how powerful that is.’

The OSA has developed a model for breeding, similar to Lundgren’s model for agricultural research. Called participatory plant breeding, it takes place on farms with the active engagement of farmers, often to address a need voiced by growers in that region. ‘It’s the way plant breeding should always work,’ Mazourek says. ‘When most breeders develop a variety, the next step is to get farmers to try it. But with participatory plant breeding, the beneficiaries are the co-developers of that variety and as soon as it’s ready to be used, it’s already been adopted by them.’

By participating in the breeding process — or by taking one of the many classes the OSA and some of the public plant breeders offer — farmers also learn how to make selections and save seeds themselves. This wonderfully democratising development allows farmers greater freedom from the chemical conglomerates and also helps them craft — along with eaters, chefs, and others — stronger local food systems.

An example: the OSA is a member of a partnership called the Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative (NOVIC), which works with farmers across the northern tier of the United States to breed crop varieties that meet their particular needs. An organic farmer near the Twin Cities named Martin Diffley mentioned a concern to them. He had been raising an older commercial sweet-corn hybrid called Temptation for many years, and a big chunk of his income came from selling it to a public hungry for local corn every summer. No other variety grew well in this part of Minnesota, where spring arrives late and soils remain cool. Most sweet-corn seeds don’t germinate quickly enough there to shoot out of the soil and start photosynthesising; instead, they break down and microbes start to chew on them. But Temptation performed like a champion and was a foundation of his business.

However, Monsanto now owned Temptation and announced that it was coming out with a GMO version. Past experience suggested that Monsanto would discontinue the original, and Diffley worried that he wouldn’t have a usable variety anymore, as certified organic farmers can’t use GMOs. So NOVIC turned to public plant breeder and OSA ally Bill Tracy, at the University of Wisconsin, who had been breeding sweet corn for years, and asked him to look through his vast collection of varieties for traits that might work. Tracy’s grad student Jared Zystro — now the OSA’s assistant director of research and education — planted Tracy’s offerings on over a hundred breeding plots on Diffley’s land, and the farmer himself selected the traits he wanted: vigorous plants that tolerated cool soil and resisted disease, tasted great, and had large ears with husks tightly wrapped at the end (which protects the ear from insects). Tracy then grew out Diffley’s picks at his winter nursery in Chile, and the best of these were planted the next year back on Diffley’s land. This process went on for four more years, and in 2014 NOVIC released Who Gets Kissed? — an open-pollinated, organic sweet corn for farmers with cold, late springs.

The name harkens back to the days when ‘regional farming’ was an oxymoron, because all farmers were primarily growing for their families and local communities. ‘Back in the old days when the corn would ripen, communities would come together and have a husking party,’ explains Micaela Colley. ‘If you found an ear with a red kernel, you got to pick who you wanted to kiss in the circle. Naming this new variety Who Gets Kissed? was our way of saying that it’s not the end of the world if you find a red kernel! We’re trained to want uniformity, to want our crops to be identical little tin soldiers. But that’s part of the reason we don’t have the resilience of biological diversity in our food system.’

Then the OSA continued the evolution of sweet corn for a different group of northern farmers. Colley and others from the OSA were meeting with a food co-op in Washington State about how they might help local farmers provide fresh produce year-round. It turned out that farmers in the northwest had also been using Temptation successfully and were worried that it would disappear, but Who Gets Kissed? wouldn’t cut it for them — Minnesota and the Pacific Northwest share cool, late springs, but the summers in Minnesota are much hotter and the farmers can bring Who Gets Kissed? to market in a few months. In the Pacific Northwest, they might not be able to do so until Thanksgiving. So with a grant from the food co-op, the OSA and Bill Tracy began trialling a new assortment of sweet-corn varieties with Nash Huber, a local organic farmer who markets directly to Seattle and sells to wholesalers from Portland to British Columbia, and other organic farmers. The selection process went through the same stages as Who Gets Kissed?, although this time the OSA and the farmers were looking for the same big-eared, flavourful, open-pollinated, organic sweet corn — tolerant of cool soils and late springs and resistant to pests and disease — as well as one that matured early enough, even in a cool climate, to harvest in late summer.

I’ve attended two OSA conferences — they take place every other year — and I’m always dazzled by the range of people I see there. There are, of course, the senior statesmen of farming and plant breeding, and theirs are the faces called up by the alarming news bulletins about the ageing of our agrarian population and agrarian scientists — white, male, and over sixty. But at the OSA and other innovative ag-related conferences, young people, women, and people of colour swamp their demographic. I keep waiting for the news bulletins to catch up with what I’m seeing.

At my first morning at an OSA conference, I plopped myself at a table with two women and asked about their connection to farming and seeds. One was in her early thirties, a graduate from a prominent liberal-arts college, and had been farming — and was now starting to produce seeds as well as crops — since she graduated. She works hard, she told me, but it’s her own business and she loves it. Her friends who are employed on Wall Street and in law firms envy her. The other woman was older, maybe in her forties. She was the third generation in her family to farm; she also confessed to working hard but loving it. They and many of the people around me had the eagerness and zeal of converts to a new religion.

There’s not as much to love about conventional farming, with its rigid schedule of chemicals and tillage while — over your shoulder — you see the greater landscape’s biodiversity dwindle to dust. That’s what Mike Bredeson told me, back in Roger’s cornfield, back when he was still a PhD candidate. We started off talking about the research he was doing there, how he hoped it might someday lead to greater plant and insect diversity in America’s cornfields. He praised the special role of sunflowers as part of a cover-crop mix: they have extrafloral nectaries (meaning, sources of nectar that are outside the flower, along the stems and leaves) and feed beneficial insects whether they’re blooming or not. Then he bent down and pointed to a white dot bobbling alongside a corn leaf, like a balloon tugging on a tiny string. A green lacewing’s egg, he told me, which the mother tethers to the plant with silk to protect it from ants, which are trying to protect their aphid livestock from predation. Once the egg hatches, the lacewing larvae — called aphid lions or aphid wolves and resembling tiny brown alligators — will gobble thousands of aphids and other crop pests.

And then he said something really surprising. After he finishes his PhD and he and his wife settle down somewhere, he wants to be a farmer. ‘The farmers I’m working with give me hope,’ he says. ‘They have the most interesting and important job on the face of the Earth, and that’s to be [a] steward of the land.’

Before meeting Lundgren, Bredeson didn’t want anything to do with farming. He had grown up on a conventional farm himself and wanted to get as far away from that life as possible. He had been pre-med and, after his sophomore year, decided a summer job doing some kind of biological research would make him a more appealing applicant to medical school. He heard that a local entomologist needed summer help, and he wound up getting a job with Lundgren.

His first day changed the course of his life. Lundgren started him off doing the kind of work I had observed, sucking up insects from the soil. ‘I had lived on a farm for nineteen years and never once got down on my knees and pushed back the soil surface to see what was happening there,’ Bredeson says. ‘Jeez, I never saw anything so interesting in my life! There are alliances and wars being waged beneath our feet on a daily basis. At that moment, I thought, humans are way less interesting than this.’