Phil’s son Viggo, two, who we exchanged for Quilla at the house earlier, naps on the pickup seat, his head in his brother’s lap. We bounce across the prairie—sometimes we hit ruts so deep that my rear end leaves the seat—but Viggo sleeps for an hour or so. “Nothing like a bumpy ride across the prairie for napping,” Phil says. Indeed.
I remember pickup rides just like this one with my dad, mom, and siblings. On Sundays we would climb into the 1970s-era red and black crew cab Ford, another hand-me-down from my grandparents, and drive salt blocks and sacks of loose mineral to the cows. My siblings and I would wet our fingers and dip them into the mineral so it stuck, then lick the powder off. It tasted salty and metallic. Back then we had 150 or so cows and kept them in one pasture all summer, which we creatively called the summer pasture. We still call it that, even though it’s too small for the herd now and serves instead as a temporary pasture where they spend part of the fall before coming home for winter. We always hoped the cows were on the other side of a steep draw so we could gasp and cringe as Dad went off-roading. The cows gathered around the pickup as he filled the salt and mineral tubs, and by hand we fed the friendly ones cake, tasty pellets as round as cigars. When Dad parked the pickup truck by the stock dam, we leapt out and followed cow trails deep into the cottonwoods, tasted ruby-red buffalo berries and wild purple plums, smelled sunflowers and sweet clover.
Sometimes Dad would bring a long, black rubber tube filled with fly powder, which he slung from two poles so the cows could walk under and rub their backs on it, shaking the powder loose. Dr. Scratch, the device was called. When summer turned to fall, we brought creep feeders, boxy structures filled with pellets dispensed from two troughs that we pulled behind the pickup and left in the pasture, refilling as needed. Dad wanted to get a head start on fattening the calves before they got to the backgrounding pen. I loved climbing up the ladder and standing on top of the feeder, looking at the prairie that stretched forever. If I stood very still, a black calf would wander to the trough and start eating. When I went home a few months ago, Dad said he adds low-level antibiotics to the creep feeders now.
It’s amazing what we see when we reexamine our childhood. In college, when I would conjure childhood memories like these to write about in nonfiction workshops, I used to see the friendly faces of cows, the yellow coneflowers I picked for my mom, the blue, long-sleeved checkered shirts my father wore during the summer. When I look at the same memories now, I mostly see the parasiticide powder, the calves eating pellets instead of grass, the cattle scattered across the land. Conventional agriculture hasn’t just ruined the farm for me as an adult. It’s ruined huge chunks of my childhood as well.
It’s unlikely that will happen to little Viggo, his mouth dropping open as he sleeps. I envy him a little. When I retrace my family’s journey on the industrial path, I always come back to “get big or get out.” Since that infamous threat from Butz, the government has encouraged farms to get bigger and adopt conventional practices through tax incentives, subsidies, and other federal programs, weeding out small farms in the process. “Government involvement in agriculture has picked the winners and really picked the losers, too,” Phil says. I ask him to explain what he means and, in typical Phil fashion, he turns to a book: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
“The most efficient-sized business, it’s kind of a family-sized business, maybe a few employees. But once you get past a certain number of employees your efficiency goes down,” he says. Phil can’t remember the number offhand, but when I read Gladwell later, I learn Phil is referring to the Rule of 150. This rule says that roughly 150 is the maximum number of people we can have a real social relationship with. If groups, organizations, or businesses get bigger than that, it’s best to divide. This is what the Hutterites, a religious group somewhat similar to the Amish, do: when their colonies reach 150 people, they split up. At Gore Associates, a multimillion-dollar tech firm in Delaware profiled by Gladwell, manufacturing plants have no more than 150 people, even if that means building fifteen plants within a twenty-five-mile radius, as the company has done. Expanding a business beyond 150 people is a little thing that makes a big difference in productivity, worker morale, efficiency, and overall success.1
Phil brings up the Rule of 150 not to say that farms and ranches should have 150 employees—that would mean the operation is huge and industrial-sized—but to show that efficiency does not go hand in hand with size. Bigger is not necessarily more efficient. So why, he asks, have farms ballooned in size if efficiency is lost in the process? He answers his own question: “I would argue it’s because of the rules set by government that favor the large players over the little ones. Once you set the rules that favor the big guys, why should we be surprised that that’s what we get?”
When Phil speaks of the “rules that favor the big guys,” he means the shaping of government policy by massive private agribusiness corporations to their benefit, and to the benefit of large farms that purchase their products. In Let Them Eat Junk, Robert Albritton outlines three reasons for this corporate shaping.2 First, people sympathetic to the corporations they are tasked with overseeing often control regulatory agencies. I hear a similar critique from Phil: “Have you ever seen the revolving door of chemical companies, Monsanto and whatnot, to government and back and forth?” he asks, disgusted. As Albritton notes, “In the case of GM seeds, they were approved by the U.S. government based entirely on research funded by the corporations who wanted to market the seeds. There was no independent government testing.”3 What oversight committee, except one composed of corporate executives standing to make money, would allow such one-sided research to prove the safety of a new product?
Second, Albritton points to costly election campaigns that force politicians to seek corporate money, making them beholden to corporate will. Agribusiness corporations are heavily involved in elections, particularly in rural states, and they are rewarded for their campaign contributions with friendly legislation. Third, corporate lobbies not only influence congressional members, but also write the legislation, which our representatives turn into law. Albritton’s fourth point is that corporations systematically silence their opponents, going after critics, media and farmer alike, with lawsuits. Monsanto is notorious for this. Corporations have also tainted agricultural research by funding studies with their own “organized groups of scientists and think tanks to influence public opinion and to provide Congress with supposedly ‘authoritative’ information which advances their short-term corporate profits even when the long-term social costs may be immense.”4 For independent researchers, coming up with the “wrong” scientific conclusion about seeds, chemicals, or fertilizers can be the end of their career, just as we saw in the early days of climate-science research that was at odds with oil companies.
All of this might appear too bizarre to be true. Could agribusiness companies really have created, as Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner puts it, “an Orwellian world of behind-the-scenes wire-pullers controlling a fundamental aspect of our lives—the food we eat—which operates in near total secrecy thanks to the fear it instills in people who know about it”?5 Well, yes. Consider today’s food libel laws, sometimes referred to as veggie libel laws. Thirteen states have food disparagement laws that make criticizing food products illegal, including South Dakota, where I grew up, and Florida, where I’m writing this book.6 In those states, critiquing food is illegal, even if that critique is fair and truthful. Make no mistake: the agribusiness lobby had a strong hand in creating these laws. If that’s not an Orwellian world of behind-the-scenes wire-pulling, I don’t know what is.
Even if food libel laws weren’t a reality, it’s unlikely most people would know what to say about food anyway, because agribusiness companies have been highly successful in preventing food labeling laws. The respected food writer Marion Nestle has written on this topic for decades. What’s funny is that corporations often argue that they aren’t accountable for the consumer’s health and that consumers bear responsibility for their food choices—but these corporations won’t give people the information they need to make educated choices in the first place.7 Genetically modified food isn’t labeled. Neither is meat from cloned animals. Today’s labels are hardly helpful anyway, written as they are in what seems to be a foreign language. Corn-derived food products often fly by many different names to disguise their corny origins. Maltodextrin, xanthan gum, and sorbitol are just a few examples of ingredients we scratch our heads over—What the heck is alpha tocopherol?—that are corn-derived.
Corporate control over agriculture policy has worsened since the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case freed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on “electioneering communications” like TV commercials and mass mailings. Under the ruling, corporations funnel money into political action committees commonly referred to as “super PACs,” and these PACs are the official sponsors of the communication. Although direct campaign contributions to candidates are still illegal, we saw in 2012 how quickly these PACs materialized, flooding America’s televisions, airwaves, and mailboxes with messaging. Voters heard the voice of big business, including agribusiness that spent about $9.4 million (roughly $7.4 million on Mitt Romney, $2 million on Barack Obama), louder and clearer than ever before.8 In the 2016 election, the agribusiness sector donated less, roughly $2 million to Hillary Clinton and $2 million to Donald Trump.9
The problem isn’t voicing political messages. It’s how much control the promoters of these messages have over elected officials once the smoke of the election clears. If a corporation heavily supports a candidate, that candidate is beholden to protect and promote the business interests of that corporation, lest they abandon him or her in the next election cycle, launch a smear campaign, and throw company support behind the opposition. Of course, individuals can also support campaigns and super PACs and leverage their interests just like corporations can; think of casino owners Sheldon and Miriam Adelson’s combined $30 million donation to Mitt Romney’s super PAC or the Koch brothers and their numerous “investments” in public policy. But corporations and individuals are generally not equal in power. A famous (or infamous?) quote comes to mind here: during his 2012 presidential bid, Romney said to one reporter that “Corporations are people, my friend.” Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, and countless other philosophers, economists, and ordinary Americans, would likely disagree with that assessment. Stevens claimed in his summary of the court’s dissenting opinion on the Citizens United case that the majority committed a grave error in viewing corporate speech as equivalent to human speech.10 It’s easy to see why. Aside from the moneyed 1 percent, most Americans do not have the financial or political clout of corporations. Our voices are just not as loud. Unlike the speech of corporations, usually expressed through advertising, exerting pressure on politicians, and filing lawsuits, an individual’s speech rarely has the same wide-ranging impact on public opinion, laws, and choices consumers make in the grocery store.
Eric Schlosser predicted in his 2001 book Fast Food Nation that the twenty-first century “will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.”11 He reiterated this belief in the 2012 afterword, citing examples of individuals and groups rejecting and rebelling against corporately controlled food—a good sign, but proof that corporate control is still a major problem.12 The Citizens United ruling represents a reverse in the fight to end corporate control of public policy. It reaffirmed the entrenchment of corporate power in our political system, setting a precedent for future rulings that equate corporations with people or even favor corporate rights over individual rights. The election of Donald Trump, a man who represents big business at its worst and who has filled his cabinet with corporate executives and pro-agribusiness, anti-environment leaders, is also a reverse in this fight. Any headway that has been made against corporate control of agriculture is likely to recede under this administration.
Corporations have one goal: profit. Under conventional agriculture, so do farmers. It’s inputs versus outputs—except many farmers receive so much government assistance that the output part of the equation, the profit, isn’t accurate. “We measure success by profit, right? Well, if you throw in government payments then that skews what ends up being profit,” says Phil. These programs include subsidized crop insurance, payments when commodity prices fall below certain thresholds, aid if crops fail because of weather-related disasters, and low-interest loans. Tax loopholes allow farmers and ranchers to write off equipment purchases, buildings, and other agribusiness expenses. This assistance often hides the truth that farmers are spending more than they’re bringing in. So are they really succeeding and being efficient? Phil wonders. He answers his own question again: no.
I ask if Great Plains Buffalo participates in government assistance programs. Phil jokes that they use interstate highways, but that’s about it. “We were in the farm program up until about three or four years ago and then we got out of it,” he says. “It’s actually been a good experience, just not following their rules.” Rules are an understatement: participating in government aid programs involves heavy paperwork and regular trips to the local USDA Farm Service Agency office. For some programs, farmers have to plant crops by a certain date to qualify for aid. Phil doesn’t like being told what to do, like he didn’t appreciate having unannounced inspectors on his land. He abstains from aid programs on principle, to show that farmers and ranchers don’t need them.
Phil realizes that conventional farmers often can’t make ends meet without government support, so he understands why people enroll and doesn’t hold it against them. It’s hard to turn down free money when you’re trapped in a system that requires you to buy inputs. But when practically everybody receives assistance, it can be tough for people who don’t to compete. “We go to a bull sale or a land-lease auction and see who the winning competitive bidders are, and then look back at the farm bill and who’s funding them,” Phil says. “Using your own tax dollars to bid against you, basically.”
Phil would like to see profit defined differently—not in monetary terms, but in environmental terms. “Profit is our measure of success, but what if we chose something else to be our measure, like soil carbon levels?” he says. “We have a history of less and less carbon in our soils. We’ve farmed that out or grazed it out in exchange for paper dollars and called it a success. It’s not a long-term, sustainable practice. Carbon in the soil is what allows soil to have water storage. So when we remove carbon, all the sudden we don’t store the water, our droughts get more frequent and more intense. Our wet times lead to flooding and soil erosion that way.”
Money won’t help us farm forever, but carbon will. So will clean water, symbiotic relationships, and fertile soil. The truly successful farmer isn’t the one with the most money, but with the healthiest land. Conventional agriculture doesn’t see farming this way, though, and neither does the government, which, as dictated to by agribusiness, essentially pays farmers to continue unsustainable practices. “Those of us on the land, who are responsible for desertification, don’t realize we are, don’t have a stake in it, are being paid not to [stop desertification] through our commodity programs and whatnot, and it’s extremely profitable for corn and soybean farmers who are making money like they’ve never made it before,” Phil says. “At the same time, the organic matter has been farmed out of the soil. You have to put all that nitrogen and phosphorus into the soil in order to grow that crop. Once the organic matter was farmed out of the soil, now it’s just basically a medium to hold the plant up, and all the nutrients, all the nitrogen, is added in the form of inputs.”
Just a medium to hold the plant up—that’s exactly what soil is in the conventional model. There’s no need to worry about organic matter or carbon when synthetic fertilizers provide artificial nutrients, or to use natural processes to control pests or disease when you can reach for a chemical. Years of these easy fixes have deadened the soil. Phil provides an example, a farmer friend from “East River,” the corn- and soybean-growing side of South Dakota east of the Missouri River. The friend grows high-yielding corn, around 180 bushels per acre.13 Phil once asked his friend how much he might get if he were to stop putting on fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides. “He said, ‘I don’t even think we’d get 50.’ All the nutrition that’s in that corn is what was put on the field. I’m not sure that anhydrous and whatever else they put on is really all that good.”14
Farms buy energy, that is, fertilizers such as anhydrous ammonia, at a high cost instead of producing it themselves for free, as farmers did before the advent of synthetic, oil-based fertilizer. They essentially dump oil on their fields to make up for the carbon and organic matter that’s gone. And they dump on a lot: it takes 230 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer to grow an acre of conventional corn, 50 pounds of which ends up in the environment instead of in the plant.15 Synthetic nitrogen is the most-used fertilizer. Nitrogen is one of the three macronutrients, along with phosphorus and potassium (abbreviated NPK, respectively), that virtually all plants need for growth. Most fertilizers, even the most basic garden enricher, contain some balance of NPK. Nitrogen, however, is a special case, first because all life depends on its existence, and second because it’s not readily available, at least in a form plants and animals can use:
Nitrogen is extremely plentiful—it makes up nearly 80 percent of the air we breathe. But atmospheric nitrogen (N2) is joined together in an extremely tight bond that makes it unusable by plants. Plant-available nitrogen, known as nitrate, is actually scarce, and for most of agriculture’s 10,000-year-old history, the main challenge was figuring out how to cycle usable nitrogen back into the soil. Farmers of yore might not have known the chemistry, but they knew that composting crop waste, animal manure, and even human waste led to better harvests.16
In nature, plant and animal decay and waste return NPK and other nutrients to the soil. Other nitrogen becomes plant-usable through a process called “fixing,” which means that nitrogen atoms split and join with hydrogen atoms. Soil bacteria residing on the roots of legumes—such as alfalfa, soybeans, or peas—fix that nitrogen so more plants can grow the next season. Legumes fixed most of the earth’s nitrogen before synthetic fertilizers appeared.17 Farmers incorporated legumes into their crop rotations to keep their soils nitrogen-rich. This is how soil wealth came from the sun: plants, powered by photosynthesis, provided nitrogen for life.
Not anymore, though. Today, synthetic nitrogen fertilizers have replaced naturally occurring nitrogen, thanks to a German scientist named Fritz Haber who in 1909 discovered how to create plant-available nitrate using the Haber-Bosch process. The Haber-Bosch process involves taking hydrogen gas from oil, coal, or natural gas and combining it with nitrogen gas from the air under extraordinary heat and pressure provided by copious amounts of electricity. Hence, synthetic nitrogen is derived from fossil fuels and fossil fuel–created electricity.
Creating plant-usable nitrogen with fossil fuels represents a major change in the nutrient cycle—or, rather, it made the nutrient cycle irrelevant. As Michael Pollan observed about the creation of synthetic nitrogen, “The basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel.”18 Oil also powers the massive equipment found on conventional farms and the creation of pesticides. All told, it takes the equivalent of a quarter to a third of a gallon of oil to grow one bushel of conventional corn, or fifty gallons per acre.19 Producing a calorie of food requires more than a calorie of fossil-fuel energy, a net loss of energy. As Pollan writes, “From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum instead.”20 Using costly, nonrenewable oil energy to grow food at a net energy loss is inherently unsustainable, because the oil will run out. But using the sun’s free, limitless energy preserves and creates wealth in the soil, which would be a more efficient approach to agriculture—a regenerative approach.
Since the first settlers came to the prairie, though, the model has been extraction instead of regeneration. “We know some folks where, when they first came out and dug that virgin soil, there was grass wagon-high,” Phil says. “Well, they dug that soil and planted in it, and it wasn’t necessarily that hard to grow a crop because what you were doing was transferring that carbon and that energy in the soil to the wheat seed or whatever it was you were producing, like corn. But all it was, was a transfer of wealth. It wasn’t making new wealth with the sun necessarily.” Making wealth from the sun—making wealth from nature, for free, instead of using wealth from oil. That’s what truly regenerative agriculture should do.
Until farmers understand this, though, they’re unlikely to stop seeing conventional agriculture as the most efficient way to farm. After all, 180 bushels per acre is much better than 50 if you have chemicals, GM seeds, fertilizers, and equipment to pay for. Money is also the only measure of success in capitalism—and Phil, a self-described capitalist, sympathizes with the farmer’s need to make money. Still, he doesn’t think money is the right indicator of success for agriculture. “When we use a different measure such as soil carbon,” he asks, “are we moving forward or are we going backwards?”
So what direction are we moving when it comes to agriculture, forward or backward? Is forward progress higher yields, better technology, and more control over nature? Or is it our ability to work with nature to produce food? Is progress related to the economic and social health of rural communities, or the financial health of corporations connected to agriculture? And who is the “we” anyway? Is it farmers? Consumers? Human society as a whole? In Phil’s estimation, the “we” of the question is mainly the land, and by extension the animals, plants, and people who depend on it—all of us, as one whole, including consumers, in keeping with his holistic approach to grazing. That’s one reason he believes consumers can and should help change agriculture, because they have a stake in the system just as much as farmers do. “I think it’s going to come from supply and demand, when the consumer demands real food,” Phil says. “It isn’t going to come by passing a law or making a new farm bill.”
Phil expects individuals to take responsibility for their food choices and be educated about how their food is produced. “Right now there are not enough people who care what they put in their body,” he says. “A lot of consumers don’t even ask what the price is.” There’s weight behind the words what the price is. Phil means the price paid by the land, livestock, water, community, and people who eat the food. Consumers see a dollars-and-cents price on a food item and think that is what it costs, but the hidden costs stretch beyond money. We only have the illusion of cheap food in America: the dollar price might be low, but the social and environmental cost is high.
Until the consumer demands change, capitalism will insist that farmers, meatpackers, and food processors continue their incessant march toward higher profits. Values, ideologies, common sense, consumer and environmental health—none of these concerns matter to the rational capitalist:
A rational capitalist’s loyalty cannot be to the material or ideological qualities of a thing (that is, use-value), but must always be to profit as pure quantity. For example, a truly “rational” capitalist, no matter how religious, would shift production from bibles to pornography purely in response to profit signals. . . . In terms of food, a “rational” capitalist will produce unhealthy food if it is more profitable than healthy food, and will utilize polluting and toxic chemical inputs as long as profits are increased by doing so.21
Most conventional farmers and ranchers are rational capitalists. Like Ryan Roth said, you can’t love your crop. They have to be rational capitalists to survive—unless we find a way to make it more profitable to farm regeneratively. A possible step is making it unprofitable to continue producing food the way we do now, which consumers can do by not buying conventionally produced food and voting for representatives who will promote regenerative agriculture. I agree with Phil that laws alone can’t solve our agricultural problem—but I do think we can take away the laws and programs that create a mandate for conventional farming and the “get big or get out” philosophy.
Farmers and ranchers also have to take responsibility for the environmental destruction caused by conventional agriculture, particularly desertification and climate change. “Over the course of history agriculture has been the biggest polluter, if you will, putting carbon in the air,” Phil continues. “We dig up the soil and right away within days you have a huge amount of carbon put into the air. We do the same thing over time when we take productive grasslands and turn them into bare ground. We just do it slowly over time, so we don’t notice it. Those of us out on the land aren’t taking responsibility for that. The ones in the city are. We are the ones who have the ability to change it and capture carbon, the ones on the land. The ones in the city who think they can by not using plastic bags and using paper, for example, really have a negligible effect on any carbon cycle. The ones who think they can can’t, and the ones who think they can’t can.”
Making change is, of course, hard intellectual work. Phil is out to change the stereotype of the “dumb farmer,” the uneducated, plodding, backward simpleton so often portrayed in the media. To him, agriculture is joyfully complex, like nature. There’s some truth in the dumb farmer stereotype, though: conventional agriculture dumbs down farming to synthetic solutions. Farmers don’t have to practice complex thinking to apply pesticides or use GM seeds. The farmer and rancher who can produce healthy, sustainable food in concert with nature, using the sun’s wealth, is the farmer of the future in Phil’s eyes. That stereotype of the dumb farmer, he says, will go away as more producers turn to regenerative systems. “And I think that guys that can produce real food are going to get handsomely paid for it someday,” he says.
Phil sees the country’s food producers as the nation’s foundation, the stepping-stones on which society is built. Abundant, healthy food encourages a stable society, allowing people to devote their lives to other pursuits besides food production. But if we destroy the land, we have no food and therefore no society, which Phil demonstrates with an example. He mentions two artists who came to the ranch a few months ago to photograph the buffalo. Their art is not necessary for human survival in physical terms, but it helps us be better human beings on so many other levels—and they have the freedom to pursue that kind of job in part because our food supply is stable enough for the time being. “All jobs are important,” Phil says. “Like the guys who were out here taking photographs, right, making a living selling photographs to magazines and photo galleries and whatever else. Those are good things. But it all comes back to food and land—and I’m not saying our job is more important—but if we don’t do our job right, there isn’t room for others.”
In other words, food allows humans to flourish to their fullest potential. We know that conventional food production is inherently unsustainable, that someday the system will collapse. If it does, we will have to reconsider how our society functions. Or we can prevent the collapse by creating a new system, one built on the sun’s wealth and that values the health of the land over paper dollars.