The muck soil is the Everglades Agricultural Area’s defining feature, the black gold that drew northern farmers like Ryan’s grandfather, Ray, to Florida and keeps their descendants here today.1 Muck, however, is an exceptional type of soil. Though the name might conjure a soupy bog, muck, or muckland, is so named because of its high percentage of organic matter, 20 to 30 percent by weight. Organic soil components include fresh plant residues, small living soil organisms, decomposing or active organic matter, and stable organic matter called humus. Muck forms under anaerobic conditions, which means little or no oxygen is present. Without oxygen, plant decomposition occurs slowly and organic material accumulates over time, forming soil. Where do such conditions exist? In wetlands, marshes, or other low-drainage areas, such as the Everglades, the draining of which formed the EAA. It takes about five hundred years for just thirty centimeters of muck to form.2 Though one can find muck in many states, it is not a common soil type, comprising less than 1.6 percent of U.S. soil. Globally, just 1.2 percent of the world is muck.3
It’s good that the world isn’t too mucky, though, because muck suffers from a debilitating problem: it disappears when exposed to oxygen (i.e., when drained). The scientific word for this disappearance is subsidence, meaning the soil subsides and becomes shallower. Subsidence occurs in muckland fields because the organic matter decays much faster when exposed to air than when submerged under water. Wind and water erosion and fire also speed up subsidence. Tillage doesn’t help either.4 It’s important to note that subsidence occurs in uncultivated wetland areas, too, like during the dry point of an annual flood cycle—anytime muck soil touches air, organic matter decomposes. But subsidence was minimal before humans drained the Everglades, and because human structures like canals have replaced water sheet flow and flood cycles, soil loss is a problem all over Florida. Because far less water reaches the Everglades today than in the past, subsidence is also occurring in Everglades National Park and other preserved tracts.
Wetlands drained for urban development are also paying the price of subsidence: buildings constructed at what was ground level decades ago and anchored in the bedrock now teeter several feet above the ground. Ironically, the buildings at the Everglades Research and Education Center (formerly the Everglades Experiment Station) outside of Belle Glade provide a wonderful visual of subsidence. Stairs now cover the distance from the front door of one building to the ground below, and a latticework cover skirts the gap beneath the structure.5 Nearby, a nine-foot concrete post measures the subsidence. Someone drove the post into the limestone bedrock in 1924, leaving barely any of the post visible above ground. Today, the post proves that about seventy-five inches of soil, more than six feet, have disappeared since.6
Driving across Roth Farms, I see white and gray rocks scattered in the soil. Underneath the Florida muck is a bed of carbonate rock composed of limestone and dolomite known as the Florida platform, the source of the rocks.7 I ask Ryan if it’s common to have so many rocks in the fields. He says no. “The muck is going away,” he explains. “It’s getting shallow.” He shows me a ditch bank that runs along the edge of a field. In this cutaway, I can see the layers of earth: muck, muck sprinkled with white rocks, and white bedrock. The space between the bedrock and the soil surface is about twelve inches. Ryan says this ditch bank illustrates how shallow the muck is becoming—subsidence at work. With fewer feet of soil covering the bedrock, tillage machines now dredge up rocks of all sizes, mixing them with the muck.
When Ray was growing vegetables in the 1940s, the farm’s muck was about six feet deep, Ryan says. “We’re probably down to about two here now,” he says, pointing to a field. On most of the farm, the muck ranges between one and three feet. On a bit of land nearer to Lake Okeechobee, it’s closer to six feet. “When you run out of muck, maybe you become a rock quarry, I don’t know,” Ryan says, only half joking. As much as nine feet of muck is gone in some parts of the EAA. Just over an inch of soil slipped away each year across the region until recent management practices slowed the rate.8 What’s the shallowest muck you’ve heard of, I ask Ryan later, after I’ve discovered these numbers. “There are farms that are scraping the muck off one block to put it on another to double the depth of that block,” he says. “They are dealing with less than six inches of muck.”
Soil loss on farm ground is a national problem, not just a Florida problem. While muck recedes like the tide, other soils blow or wash away. Iowa, one of the most heavily farmed states, had in the nineteenth century fourteen to sixteen inches of topsoil (not total soil, but the upper layer with a high percentage of organic matter and nutrients above the densely packed subsoil). Today Iowa has six to eight inches of topsoil, even less in heavily eroded areas.9 It’s fair to say most of Iowa has half or less of the topsoil it did 160 years ago.10 Soil loss has occurred far more rapidly in the EAA, with a higher percentage of soil—roughly two-thirds of the original muck—vanishing in just sixty years. At least the muck loss here isn’t as bad as in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta in California, the country’s other major muckland. Three inches of soil vanish in that delta each year—more inches lost annually than in the EAA, but the delta started out with up to sixty feet of muck, while the EAA never had more than twelve.11 The bottom line: the EAA is shrinking dangerously close to the carbonate bed underneath. Once the muck is gone, there will be only bedrock left.
When soils of any type subside, they lose nutrients and require more fertilizer every year. Farmers once used little or no synthetic fertilizer because of the soil’s nutrient-rich organic matter—but heavy fertilizer use is now required on most conventional farms. Ryan gives me an example of how practices have changed as soil subsides: “You never used to side-dress cabbage. Side-dress means putting liquid nitrogen fertilizer into the bin when planting. You used to not ever do that with cabbage. Cabbage is a very low-maintenance crop. You used to just plant the cabbage; you put on dry fertilizer at planting, and then you would grow the crop and take care of it as needed for disease or pests. But fertility was not an issue. Well, they started having issues; the cabbage wouldn’t head up properly. It was having nitrogen deficiency. Well, in this nitrogen-based soil we’ve never had this problem before. Sometimes you have to break free and say, ‘It doesn’t matter what you used to have, this is the problem of today.’” Farms bear new costs like this, says Ryan, because buyers don’t increase their prices if the farmer’s input costs are higher. “It doesn’t matter to the consumer that you have to [side-dress cabbage] now, and you can’t say, ‘We have to charge more for cabbage.’ No, cabbage is market price. If the market is eight dollars a box yesterday and today we have to put nitrogen fertilizer on, it could still be eight dollars. It could be seven dollars. It could be cheaper and cost us more. You have no control over that whatsoever.”
Farmers are doing what they can, Ryan believes, to make the muck last. EAA farmers have employed best management practices (BMPs) to reduce subsidence, such as maintaining a higher water table by pumping less water from fields, incorporating rice and sugarcane into crop rotations (these crops tolerate flooded conditions, which helps slow subsidence), and tilling less often. These BMPs have slowed subsidence from a traditional average of one inch per year to roughly half an inch per year.12 A few years ago, Roth Farms started collecting radish, bean, and corn culls into a spreader machine and scattering them across the blocks. Eventually the culls break down into the soil, providing more organic matter. “We don’t know how much we’ll gain by doing that, but we’re going to do it,” Ryan says. That’s probably a good strategy, because if the muck is only twelve to thirty-six inches deep, as on Roth Farms, it will be gone in just twenty to sixty years at the current subsidence rate.
Spreading culls, growing rice, and eliminating turfgrass production definitely help—those are sustainable practices—but such measures only go so far. One or two well-intentioned acts, done in isolation rather than as part of a holistic philosophy of sustainability, barely mitigate the damage caused by other decisions. For example, the cattle manure my father scatters on his wheat fields once a year, while beneficial, isn’t enough to make nitrogen fertilizer unnecessary because he doesn’t employ a range of sustainable farming processes, such as cover crops and diverse crop rotations. Such is the situation on Roth Farms. Farming conventionally automatically means they take more from the land than they return, no matter how closely they follow best management practices. It’s not that they want to take more, or take more because they are greedy or uncaring—they have to in order to survive.
Farmers in the EAA often find themselves at the receiving end of people’s outrage over runoff pollution, wetland drainage, and soil loss, which puts them in the strange position of being hated for their practices but loved for the cheap food they produce. While enduring withering public scrutiny, these farmers have watched as urban construction creeps—rushes, in many cases—closer to their farms, bringing with it water-hogging golf courses, houses, shops, and swimming pools, pesticide-laden lawns and golf greens, and pollution-causing traffic. They’ve seen Florida’s beaches erode and its wildlife and sea life populations plummet because of damage to dunes and reefs, all while construction continues on beachfront mansions and resorts. They’ve heard of city officials granting Celine Dion permission to build a private water park on Jupiter Island just up the road when water supplies in Florida are critically low and their own water use is under the public microscope. The double standards aren’t lost on Ryan. Part of the problem, he says, is that most people don’t actually know much about agriculture, but they criticize anyway. “It’s interesting to me that people have no training, no education in agriculture, and no experience, but they have a ton of opinions about agriculture and how food should be produced,” Ryan says. “It’s fine; I don’t have a problem with it. But most people don’t know a farmer.”
“Though all professions have their problems, I think farmers are in a tough spot,” Ryan adds later. “We have suppliers—fertilizer, fuel, seed, crop protection materials, packaging and labor—that can name the price you must pay for the products they supply, and we have no ability to charge a price for our products that will be guaranteed to pay all of our bills. There are days that we sell our crop for less than the cost of harvesting. And for the privilege, we are criticized around every corner for being Big Ag, lining our pockets with cash while destroying the environment. Farming is a struggle in every sense of the word: we can’t control the freeze or the flood, can’t name the price we want for our crop, and have to fight to keep doing it.”
Ryan sees large operations and industrial practices as the only way to supply consumers with the cheap food they demand. “Everybody seems to want smaller local producers,” he says. “But they can’t keep up. It’s unfortunate. I think it’s not the best development for agriculture operations to get bigger, but it is what we’re dealing with.” There’s a note of helplessness in his words. This is the heart of America’s agricultural problem: conventional farmers feel that they have no choice. It’s get big or get out. Many were born into the system and don’t know how to farm without inputs—they’ve lost ten thousand years’ worth of agricultural knowledge in a couple of generations. Regaining it doesn’t happen overnight. Agribusiness dogma has made them believe that organic, sustainable agriculture is at best a trend, at worst a threat to humankind’s survival. They are misinformed about their practices and how to measure efficiency. Many believe, in their heart of hearts, that what they are doing is good and safe.
These farmers don’t go industrial, use agrochemicals, or grow GM crops because they are bad people who want to hurt others and the environment. Rather, most are good people trapped in a bad production model, like my father and many of the men and women I interviewed for Tri-State Neighbor. Like Ryan, who is beyond a doubt a good man who does not want to harm anyone. I hear it in his voice, and I see it in his life. Like the car seat in the back of his Ford for his daughter, Ella. “She likes the tractors and the big trucks,” he tells me. “It’s funny that she likes the heavy equipment the most. As she gets older, I’m sure she’ll be more interested in the crops, but not today.” A picture of her smiling is his cell phone’s screen background. “She’s amazing,” he says. “She’s perfect.” Ryan is a good father who works hard for his daughter’s sake. He’s a conventional farmer, but he’s not the demon critics might make him out to be.
This is why fixing our broken agricultural system is at once extremely complex and completely doable. It does no good to blame conventional farmers entirely or write them off as evil. It’s much better to include them. They should be held responsible for change, but given the tools and support to achieve it. Our agriculture should use empathy and approaches tailored to individual people and environments, because there is no one-size-fits-all agricultural solution. We have tried that approach and it has failed. We also know that changing hearts and minds is possible. That’s why I believe we can create a new system—rather, we can continue creating a new system, because a number of people have already started blazing a trail forward.