The More the Merrier: Biodiversity Starts in the Soil
“I hate being a worm!” he screeched, his tiny body trembling. “We’re the lowest of the low! Bottom of the food chain! Bird food! Fish bait! What kind of life is this anyway? . . . we never even go to the surface unless the rains flood us out! All we ever do is crawl around in the stupid ground. Oh, and how can I forget? We eat dirt! Dirt for breakfast, dirt for lunch, and dirt for dinner! Dirt, dirt, dirt!”
. . . A strange glint fell across Father Worm’s eye. “My boy, I think it’s time I tell you a story.”
—From There’s a Hair in My Dirt! A Worm’s Story by Gary Larson, 1999
[L]ong before [man] existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be ploughed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.
—From The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms by Charles Darwin, 1881
GENE GOVEN’S FARM IN CENTRAL NORTH DAKOTA produces diversified grains—sunflower, canola, flax, dried edible beans, field peas, oats, lentils barley, various wheats. He’s also in the custom grazing business, carrying about 180 cow–calf pairs this spring. (Custom grazing means hosting someone else’s cattle on your land, essentially offering them a twenty-four-hour forage buffet for a fee.)
But what he really farms for is species diversity.
Birds, beetles, butterflies; protozoans, mites, nematodes. Grasses, forbs (flowering non-grass broadleafs), and even scrubby or thorny plants that many farmers would look at and think, Weed. While many of the breeds he beckons to his land are buzzing, honking, and flying above the earth, central to Goven’s project is the life in the soil. A broad range of prairie grasses and other deep-rooted perennials nourishes microorganisms that cycle nutrients and help build fertile soil. At the same time, the richer and more varied the soil community, the more vigorous and diverse the plants that keep the cattle, native fauna, and pollinators happily sheltered and fed.
“Livestock eat more than just grass,” he says. “The native prairie clovers I have are 28 percent protein. Why do I need to plant alfalfa?” Since Goven began managing diversity with an eye toward soil health, the land’s productivity has taken a leap. The grain part of the business bumped up its profitability about 30 percent. As for cattle grazing, in terms of pounds of beef per acre the land was able to generate 3.48 times as much in 2010 compared with 1982.
The sweep of resident wildlife also increased more than threefold. “We’ve got more songbirds,” says Goven. “Some mornings it’s deafening outside. Visitors came up from the [nearby] Audubon national wildlife refuge, and in the quarter mile from the shoreline up through the grassy brushy woody draw and up over the hill into a prairie pot-hole, they counted 112 species of nesting birds.” (A “prairie pothole” is a shallow wetland area formed by the Wisconsin glaciation—which, at ten thousand years ago, was North America’s most recent glacial advance.) “I’ve been since told there’s few places in the world where there are that many. It’s because of the soil. What benefits livestock also benefits wildlife.” He says an occasional moose and elk visit, too. The night, he says, “is just flashing with fireflies.”
It hasn’t always been this way, says Goven. “I bought the land at age twenty. I was thinking, Oh, I want to be a farmer. A conventional farmer with all the inputs and equipment. I guess I wasn’t thinking, after all.” He embarked on a grain and grazing operation and after a while, he says, “Things just didn’t feel right.” He started rotating cattle in 1982, using cross-fencing to section off the animals, and when he heard about Allan Savory he helped arrange for him to come to Bismarck. Back then Savory was hardly a popular guy around the agricultural establishment. “A friend (in a government position) was threatened with the loss of his job if he actively participated in the workshop,” Goven recalls. “He took personal days with no pay to do it. He sat in the back, in the gallery, and couldn’t say a word, even ask a question.”
The week-plus course taught Goven how to orchestrate Holistic Planned Grazing, and, as important, offered a structure for decision making and goal setting. Here we’re back to the Sandhurst military college’s strategic planning guide, which Savory saw could apply to the North American prairie or the African savanna as well as to warfare. Goven’s current production statement, the working document that frames and articulates his intention, is to achieve sustained profits from crops and livestock, and to have a cultural and aesthetic surrounding all for a higher quality of life.
“That’s my road map,” he says. “If we have something defined, it will probably become. Here, the soil and land will tend to become what you’ve defined. It took me a long time to get there—I’ll never get there, it’s a journey—but once I had the goal things started hanging together. Now I’m managing diversity for soil health enhancement so that all nutrients are supplied by soil, life and the atmosphere. Livestock and people are also part of the diversity. I learned this from Mother Nature, from observing that in natural prairie.”
I had the chance to visit Goven during a trip to the Great Plains to see some of the principles I’d been writing about in action. I drove the seventy-something miles from Bismarck, the state capital, past fields of high wispy green-yellow grasses and small pockets of the aforementioned prairie potholes. It’s a quiet landscape, animated by subtlety: a breeze that ripples across vast tracts of open country on into the horizon; the scarlet jolt of red-winged blackbirds dipping in and out of the grasses.
I’m greeted outside by Goven, a man in his late sixties with a brushy mustache and the slightly bulky forward-tilting shoulders of someone who’s worked outside for many years, and Faith, an alert and friendly Australian sheepdog. I’d dressed according to the weather report, but wind and clouds had come in and I was cold. We stop for a bit inside, where I meet Goven’s wife, Christine, and encounter some exemplars of nature’s assorted bounty I hadn’t expected to see: several caged and highly coiffed Standard Poodles in various sizes and levels of yippiness. Apparently, Christine breeds, grooms, and shows miniature poodles (her company: Pawfect Poodle). One of them, Ice, is a Canadian champion. She also breeds horses (beautiful horses, the soft noses of which I later have the chance to stroke) and barrel-races (a women’s rodeo event in which riders guide horses in a cloverleaf pattern around a set of barrels). Prominently situated in the living room is a cabinet filled with Christine’s silver belt-buckle trophies. Originally from Germany, she seems a westerner at heart.
Goven’s farm is fifteen hundred acres. “That’s small around here,” he says. “I used to rent land, too. But if I can build soil down, I don’t need more land. We get as much on fifteen hundred acres as I used to get on four thousand or five thousand.”
Goven has an earnest, low-key manner and a tendency to punctuate his speech with the word golly (which he pronounces gully). This gives a deceptive impression of his being somewhat unsophisticated and naive. But he’s sharp, enterprising, and plenty innovative. One long winter night, he tells me, he devised a reel contraption to make the process of electric cross-fencing less onerous. “I pictured it in my mind and built it.” The invention remains in the public domain, he says, because while an agricultural products firm wasn’t interested in buying, he feared the company might steal it. “Gully, if it cost $30,000 to patent it, I’d rather just make it available.”
He’s also constantly juggling complexity in new ways. For example, when he says he manages for diversity he means this on multiple levels, including chronology: “If I seed a field early this year, I will seed it later next year. That breaks up the weed cycles. I’m changing the timing all the time. It sort of keeps things in chaos. If I graze one pasture on June 1, I won’t come back at the same calendar time for ten years. The goal is to create the conditions for deeper rooting [of plants], which then creates conditions for building soil.”
He’s been monitoring the regrowth response, trying to figure out how much recovery time forage plants need before they can again be grazed without compromising their growth. It depends, he says, on what you’re trying to grow. “Everyone says thirty days. I say ninety-plus days. By waiting you get forbs: astragalus, vetches, clovers, and native legumes. If they’re conventionally grazed, you lose those. What you want is for cattle to get those plant secondary metabolites.”
In other words, for livestock to benefit from the immune-boosting, health-enhancing compounds embodied in the full diversity of plants. He says he doesn’t worry about invasive species, such as Canada thistle, a spiky plant often referred to as Lettuce From Hell Thistle and officially designated an “injurious weed”; I can attest to the aptness of those phrases after my own battles with it. “Are weeds a problem or a symptom?” Goven asks. “I’m managing for the natural plant community as a whole rather than managing for or against a specific species.” On his land, he tells me, the Canada thistle pretty much stop at the fence line. “Weeds are opportunists. If you have deeper rooting and diversity, the weeds don’t have an opportunity” to get established.
We go out for a ride around the farm, in a large white pickup truck with Faith alert and upright in the back. Goven scans the gently rolling horizon and says, “To me this is nothing spectacular. Just multiples of little things.” He points out a prairie pothole. “These are prime breeding grounds for migrating birds. They dry up during droughts. That’s part of nutrient cycling. The area dries up and revegetates. If it’s continually wet, it smells like a sewer—that’s a nutrient tie-up.”
As we drive he points out a blue-winged teal, a cliff swallow, a yellow-headed blackbird. I’m enjoying the sensation of being on a safari, with the windows down, off road on uneven terrain, pausing frequently to take in our surroundings, continually checking for signs of movement. Though it’s raining lightly we get out by a grassy hill. At first glance the ground is a reedy monotone, but once you focus in the variation pops out at you. Goven shows me wild onion, wild rose, prairie basket flower, old man’s whisker, and wild flax—the one plant he knows of that’s found worldwide, he says. “The spring flowers are pretty much done. We need a shot of rain to bring out the early-summer flowers.” This meadow hosts more than two hundred species. He kneels down and cups his hand around a patch of grass. “There are six species of broadleaf right here. Diversity working together.”
He makes a point of the cultural heritage inherent in this multitude of plant types. “I’ve been volunteering in Minot with Alzheimer’s patients,” he says. “Some can’t remember their kids, but they’ll remember native prairie plants they learned seventy or eighty years back. They can even tell me the poisonous plants and the antidotes for the poison—which are always found one arm’s-length away.”
Most of Goven’s land, including this hill, used to be monoculture. Then in 1990 he started growing oats and field peas, both native, together. “I was getting up to an extra four times the rooting depth versus each alone,” he says. “Now I have lentils in with the sunflowers. People said I wouldn’t get anything because one would take moisture from the other. That’s not happening, and the lentils are pulling nitrogen out of the air for the sunflowers.” Conventional wisdom generally leaves him unimpressed. “I’ve found big bluestem and little bluestem together and they’re usually not in the same place,” he says. “But plants don’t read the books.”
For Goven, synergy is a tool for improved land productivity. “I like to get ten to twelve different things together,” he says. “Cover crops and crop mixtures are good because they release a variety of different sugars and energy sources, which are used by a range of organisms. This will have positive effects on soil fertility, especially with regard to making nutrients available—and for free! These sugars have a positive effect on growth. When we talk about getting the soil to warm up in the spring it may not be a function of temperature that’s important, but the function of biological activity.”
What about this invisible, underground activity, the life in the soil that Goven contends is what fuels his business? For one thing, there’s an awful lot of it. In the first installment of an Australian podcast series called Life in a Teaspoon, Christine Jones notes that one teaspoon of healthy soil contains some six billion living creatures—almost as many organisms as there are people on the planet. She says that soil in the rhizosphere—around the roots of plants—could actually contain trillions of microorganisms per gram. The most numerous by far are bacteria, of which there are thousands of varieties, many yet to be named and identified. According to a report published in Tasmania titled, somewhat ominously to my ear, Soils Alive!, that single teaspoon of soil we’ve been peering at could hold up to a billion bacteria. If we translated that to its weight in cattle, it’s the equivalent of a mass of more than two metric tonnes of livestock per hectare.
With data like that, it’s not surprising that ecologist Jill Clapperton, who now runs Rhizoterra Inc., a soil health consulting firm, on her ranch in western Montana, says the volume of living creatures below ground may well be greater than what’s standing on top. North Dakota–based soil microbiologist Kristine Nichols adds that we probably know of less than 1 percent of soil biology. “A recent study found that there are more than 1.6 million species of soil biota and another study found over a million bacteria species which is at least two orders of magnitude greater than previous estimates,” she writes.
The inner workings of the soil are often characterized as the soil food web, a concept developed by Elaine Ingham, a soil microbiologist and now chief scientist at the Rodale Institute. The soil food web encompasses the community of organisms that dwell in or engage with the soil and all the energy transfers inherent in those relationships. These living beings interact in numerous ways: eating one another, competing with one another, and sharing or trading resources such as carbon or water. In the crowded and bustling universe of soil there are predators and prey, opportunistic pathogens and defenders, shredders and tunnelers, recyclers of minerals and waste. They are named arthropods (which include insects, spiders, and millipedes), annelids (a group that includes common earthworms), bacteria, fungi, protozoans (single-celled animals with a nucleus—unlike bacteria, which have none), nematodes (really tiny wormlike things), plus yet more obscure—and when viewed under magnification, frankly surreal—arthropod critters like Symphyla (blind and weirdly translucent), Collembola (commonly called springtails), and Diplura (two-pronged bristletails).
For the vitality of the land the balance of all these organisms is important, Elaine Ingham has written, notably the ratio of bacteria and fungi. For example, bacteria are less effective at storing carbon. Therefore, if the proportion of bacteria is too high, it’s likely that more of the carbon in the soil organic matter will oxidize as carbon dioxide. In conventional agricultural land, bacteria generally dominate as tilling and chemical use inhibit fungi and alter the microbial population. Intensively farmed soil is also often compacted, which constrains the flow of air, water, and nutrients. The resulting stress and out-of-kilter microbial scenario create an open invitation to pests and crop diseases. As soil scientist William Albrecht has noted, the line between win–win symbiosis and marauding parasitism turns on minuscule margins.
Thinking about all this microscopic life brings you to this teeny world with layers and hierarchies of tininess. It brings to mind Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who, a book I know well because when my son was three, for several months he demanded we read it to him twice a night. I think of all the Whos in Whoville, and imagine multiples of mites and microbes and protozoans and fungi—those imperceptible specks—shouting out to Horton and his cynical jungle fellows, “We are here! We are here! We are here! We are here!” It’s a through-the-looking-glass alternative reality in which earthworms are considered “megafauna,” microorganisms in the topsoil that break down organic matter are called “soil livestock,” and microbes that colonize the plant rooting zone move together as “micro-herds.” This much activity in what looks like lifeless soil is so hard to fathom that it begs for metaphor.
Here’s another analogy that requires a metaphorical leap: John Kempf, the Ohio farmer-consultant we met in the last chapter, talks about how soil microbes act as a plant’s digestive system. He says, “Soil is to the plant as the rumen is to the cow.” While this reads like some mystifying koan that transcends rational thought (just say that again to yourself), Kempf means this: In the same way that a cow’s rumen is the first stop for the digestion of forage, soil provides the function of predigesting carbon compounds and other nutrients into forms (soluble amino acids and liquefied carbon) that the plant can assimilate. In this way, he says, the plant is essentially “outsourcing” the task of digestion to the soil.
Christine Jones highlights the similarities between mycorrhizal fungi in the soil and ocean krill, the small crustaceans that are integral to the marine food chain. The fungi, she says, perform a similar function in the soil to that enacted by krill in the oceans, linking photosynthesizers to the rest of the food chain. In soil, the photosynthesizers are green plants, while in the ocean it’s phytoplankton, which krill feed on. “Almost everything in the ocean depends on the links between phytoplankton and krill,” she says. “Vast tracts of marine life would die without the ‘krill bridge’. And so it is with soil. Much of the soil food web depends on mycorrhizal fungi transporting the sun’s energy, via green plants and the ‘microbial bridge’, into the soil ecosystem.” She notes that, under a microscope, many soil microorganisms do in fact look a lot like krill.
I’ve ushered you through this underground micro-tour so as to lead into a discussion of the relationship between biodiversity in the soil and biodiversity above ground. Certainly, soil biodiversity can be seen as a microcosm of the wildly varied life that fills the visible world. But the relationship goes beyond that: The diversity aboveground is a reflection of diversity in the soil. If the community of life in the soil is limited in scope, the variety of plant life that springs from that soil will also be limited. Which, in turn, will limit the animal, avian, and insect life that can thrive there. While charismatic threatened species like polar bears and penguins get most of the press, biodiversity actually begins in the soil.
This is crucial to acknowledge because biodiversity loss is an urgent threat to the continued stability of life on earth. We’re losing species at a rate of hundreds a year, the result of such factors as habitat destruction, warming temperatures, and overharvesting. It’s now being said that we’re in the throes of a sixth “mass extinction,” the first since the dinosaurs met their demise some sixty-five million years ago. The listing of familiar and beloved creatures either gone or at serious risk is heartbreaking: orangutans, mountain gorillas, jaguars, snow leopards, white rhinos, trumpeter swans. But this is not just a matter of sentimental attachment. You see, we don’t even know what we’re losing—we’re still discovering so many new species of life on earth; who knows what’s slipping away before we can label them or the extent to which species are interdependent. Whenever a light goes out on a particular species, the ecological balance is thrown out of joint in a way that can affect food chains, resistance to disease, and the dynamics of any given habitat. Also of concern is the loss of genetic variation within individual species, which is important for remaining resilient to stress, disease, and climate variations. Many scientists see biodiversity loss as potentially more catastrophic than climate change. (Though the two are inextricably linked: Climate change is forcing species to adapt or change habitat, which affects the mix of species in specific ecosystems; biodiversity loss limits an area’s resilience to climatic changes.)
Much, then, rides on the backs of microscopic biota that most of us don’t even know exist. This is true, says ecologist Steven Apfelbaum, even in ecosystems that don’t appear highly diverse, above- or below- ground. He offers the example of peat bogs, with their unique, highly acidic soil chemistry that supports neither microbial nor very high plant diversity. “But what’s present are often rare plant and wildlife species that are only found in such unusual settings,” he says. “This emphasizes that much of the diversity on the planet is also dependent on unique soil settings that may not in themselves have high diversity but that contribute to overall diversity. This encourages us to think in terms of systems: low-, medium-, and high-diversity soils have been found everywhere on the planet and this mix fosters the diversity of life on earth. Now, many of the more diverse settings have been converted to industrial agriculture or urban landscapes with very low soil micro-organism diversity. This in part helps explain the declining diversity of life on earth. When one considers that around 45 million acres of the US are either low or devoid of soil microorganism diversity—broadly distributed, as this is the urban lawn acreage of the USA—it is even clearer why biodiversity on earth is declining.”
Our usual strategy for safeguarding biodiversity has been species by species. A species is identified as endangered, the alarm is sounded, and the creature (usually an animal, preferably cute even if in an ugly way) becomes a focus for litigation, a media star, or a political flashpoint—or all three—with the goal of bolstering its population. This is costly and the results have been mixed; while there have been some successes (the bald eagle, giant pandas), the list of species in peril continues to grow.
Could zeroing in on soil health help maintain or even build biodiversity? Apfelbaum says that soil can be a catalyst for restoring ecosystems in a way that promotes a flowering of diversity—and he’s seen this happen rapidly (within a few years) even on land degraded by intensive agriculture or mining. He attributes this to certain characteristics of soil microorganisms. First, their mobility. The spores of soil fungi are carried on the wind; microbes may be carried on the feet, fur, or feathers of wildlife. “Think about woodchucks or ground squirrels and the soil particles their digging brings to the surface,” he says.
Another is that many soil microorganisms are “cryptobiots,” a word that reads like what you might encounter in the next PG13 release in 3-D. Apfelbaum explains: “There are species that can encapsulate themselves and enter a suspended life period there and simply wait in the soil for proper conditions.” In other words, they hibernate: But rather than waiting for a change in season, they ride out their time until the setting is more congenial. This adds another layer of resilience to soil systems, a kind of “insurance policy” for tough times. It’s worth noting, however, that cryptobiotic behavior is hindered by soil chemical treatments.
Yet one more factor is the redundancy among microfauna and microflora species diversity. “Instead of one big mammal predator like, say, the timber wolf in a land ecosystem, there appears to be dozens of top predator species in soil systems,” says Apfelbaum. “This redundancy within the foodweb, and thus the complexity of the food chains, lends resilience, responsiveness, and durability to the restoration of soil system health.”
The agricultural industry’s penchant for monoculture has curtailed soil biodiversity, but this can be reversed. “We know that [following] the conversion of former diverse native landscapes into agricultural monocultures, particularly row crop corn, soybeans, wheat and other crops typically grown conventionally using industrial agricultural techniques . . . soil condition, quality and health decline,” says Apfelbaum. “Studies that have examined these changes have suggested that the diversity of organisms in the soils has declined, or ceased to function as effectively or at all. Some of what we know about this declining condition has been learned by restoring such settings from the row crops back to restored prairies, wetlands and other ecosystems that grew in the same soil prior to the industrial conversion. In such reversion studies, the soil life, condition, health and chemistry balances return, usually after three to five years, ten years in the most disturbed settings.”
First, he says, the soil tilth comes back once annual crops are replaced by deep-rooted perennials. Then soil organic matter begins to rebuild, as does soil structure. Studies have shown that after a few years the biological life—microbes, fungi, springtails, the whole menagerie—returns as well.
The domino one-thing-after-another pattern of change is well articulated by Australian climate change activist Tony Lovell in a talk from TEDxDubbo: “If you reduce [soil and plant] biodiversity you reduce biomass (plant cover), which reduces photosynthesis, which reduces carbon uptake and oxygen creation, which disrupts nutrient cycling, which reduces fertility, which reduces infiltration and retention of rainfall, which changes soil moisture, which changes relative humidity, which changes weather, which changes climate.” However, a focus on soil biodiversity gets the cycle running in the other direction. Once we’ve got it set in reverse . . . increasing soil biodiversity leads to increased biomass, which increases photosynthesis, which increases carbon uptake and the manufacture of oxygen, which leads to an accumulation of organic matter, which restores nutrient cycling, and so forth. And ecologically, things start to look a lot better.
Hans Herren, president of the Millennium Institute and winner of the 1995 World Food Prize for using biological methods to stave off the cassava mealybug, saving an estimated twenty million lives in Africa, tells EarthSky.org that while we know a great deal about the genetics of crops like rice and maize, “we know almost nothing about the medium in which they live.” The soil research that’s done, he says, is “mostly on the physical properties—fertilizers, how minerals move in the soil. That’s one thing. But when it comes to soil biology, we know very little. And you know why? Because it’s extremely complicated. Now we have molecular tools with which we can differentiate organisms, and see what role they play in the soil, and what do we do when we mistreat our soils.” He says it’s imperative to study the mix of insects, bacteria, and microorganisms in the soil because “the longer we wait, the more difficult it will be to regenerate some of this system.”
Let’s zero in for a bit on the soil megafauna, in particular that charismatic creature of the dirt: the earthworm. The great naturalist Charles Darwin certainly zeroed in on earthworms, devoting some of his last years to their study; his book The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (London: John Murray, 1881) came out just a year before his death. He conducted experiments on worms, keeping them in pots in his study. He was interested in their habits, their apparent ubiquity throughout the world, and the fact that they “do not possess eyes, but can distinguish between light and darkness.” He determined that while completely deaf, common earth-worms are sensitive to vibration. Of his worm investigations he wrote:
They took not the least notice of the shrill notes from a metal whistle, which was repeatedly sounded near them; nor did they of the deepest and loudest tones of a bassoon. They were indifferent to shouts, if care was taken that the breath did not strike them. When placed on a table close to the keys of a piano, which was played as loudly as possible, they remained perfectly quiet . . . When the pots containing two worms which had remained quite indifferent to the sound of the piano, were placed on this instrument, and the note C in the bass clef was struck, both instantly retreated into their burrows.
Darwin observed evidence of intelligence in the way earthworms use leaves, bits of wool, feathers, and the like to plug up their burrows. Their efficiency was particularly impressive to him: “In many parts of England a weight of more than ten tons of dry earth annually passes through their bodies and is brought to the surface on each acre of land; so that the whole superficial bed of vegetable mould passes through their bodies in the course of every three years.” The common earth-worm was not native to much of the northern United States, including North Dakota. It was inadvertently brought here by settlers in flower pots. Kristine Nichols says that presumably insects and other soil organisms filled that ecological niche.
My sister-in-law Carin Schwartz is a Master Composter and gives lectures on worms in Scotland near where she and my brother live, for a time in a grant-funded position as regional compost coordinator. Scotland is not a bad place to be a worm; the Scots are looking out for their welfare. There are a number of state- and nonprofit-supported efforts (Zero Waste Scotland; Scottish Allotments and Gardens Society) to keep worms happily fed—meaning to shift compostable waste out of landfills and into worm boxes. For four years compost bins were government-subsidized.
Carin was drawn to vermiculture after hearing Ron Gilchrist, known to many in Scotland and abroad as “the worm man,” give a rousing talk on worms and wormcasts—the end product of worm digestion that’s particularly high-nutrient-quality for plant growing. She began to organize community composting and ordered ten kilos (twenty-two pounds) of worms (red wigglers, which are prime composters), which Gilchrist personally transported, several hours by car from Fairlie in North Ayrshire. Explains Carin: “He didn’t want to send the worms by mail because he didn’t want them distressed.” On a recent visit to Scotland I had the chance to visit a few compost-savvy community gardens in picturesque towns like Forres (where my brother’s family lives), Bothwell (in the shadow of an ancient castle, and where we were treated to beetroot-and-cheese sandwiches), and Fairlie (a picturesque village on the Firth of Clyde and Gilchrist’s home base). The sign welcoming visitors to Organic Growers of Fairlie reads: PROMOTING GLOBAL WORMING.
Now for a cameo of another underappreciated creature of the soil (which will conveniently bring us back to North Dakota): the dung beetle. While admittedly not the most glamorous of our native bugs, dung beetles—which come in thousands of variations, and are generally identified as rollers, tunnelers, or dwellers, depending on what they do with animal dung—fill an important ecological niche. The scarab, considered sacred in ancient Egypt, was a dung beetle. The female beetles lay their eggs in a ball of rolled dung. Because of the young scarabs’ seemingly spontaneous emergence from the earth, they were associated with transformation and manifestation. The Egyptians also associated the beetle habit of rolling balls of dung far larger than themselves with the daily movement of the sun.
To Gene Goven, dung beetles are a valued part of the diverse life on his farm. “For fly control with the cow pies, many people spray ivermectin or permethrin,” he says, referring to broad-spectrum treatments against parasites. “But dung beetles do the job in three days. They’re my ultimate no-till drill. In the process of putting dung and urine into the soil, they’re also burying seeds with their tunneling. Some seeds have to be scarified [in order to germinate] and so when beetles bring seeds down deeper, that’s my seed bank.”
Strategically timed grazing bolsters Goven’s pest control. “I leapfrog and skip paddocks a minimum of a quarter mile from where livestock had been. I leave the fly larvae and eggs behind. If I have active dung beetles, that’s an unfavorable environment for flies. In five days’ time I have over 90 percent fly control.” However, he notes, “A lot of people think dung beetle are another fly, and use insecticide. If cows stay in the same place, they will keep infecting themselves with parasites. It’s better to work with the parasite life cycle and manage where the livestock are and for how long.”
Three years ago, he recalls, a customer brought some cows in to graze, and suddenly the dung beetles disappeared. “I said to the guy, you put on Ivomec [a pesticide],” says Goven. “He said, ‘That was in March. This is May. The label says it lasts only thirty days.’ Those cows were only clean after 140 days. Yet the meat can be eaten after thirty days. Makes you ask, ‘What am I eating?’ I also lost some of the butterflies. Yet less than 10 percent of cows on the land were treated.”
When Goven stopped using insecticide on livestock back in the ’80s, some five to seven years later a variety of wildflowers started coming up. He says, “I’m not a scientist. But I observe. If a seed is on the surface of the soil, it’s vulnerable to surface predation. Dung beetles are bringing seeds down. We’ve got cycles and cycles within cycles, and it’s all about soil health. Sprays are nonselective [in what they kill]. Why would I want to kill something that’s good for the soil?”
Somewhat surprising for an area that’s rural and flat and hardly known for social diversity, central North Dakota is a high point for building soil-driven biodiversity. This is a place where one sunny Sunday afternoon in Bismarck I was alone on the capitol’s vast parklike lawn doing yoga when a young guy with long hair saw me and turned around his red VW to come over and greet me and say how happy it made him to see someone doing a warrior pose on the green. I asked him a question that had been much on my mind: What do you do in Bismarck if you’re different or weird? He shrugged and said, “Do yoga.”
But soil-wise, these North Dakotans are getting it down.
And word is getting out. From all over the country and the world, people interested in soil enhancement have made a pilgrimage to the modest offices of the Burleigh County Soil Conservation District on a nondescript street on the north side of Bismarck. I, too, made the trip, and met with district conservationist Jay Fuhrer, a trim native North Dakotan who appears to be guiding spirit of this unusual program (though he continually reminds me that it’s a team). One program the BCSCD has been experimenting with is mixed cover cropping, which might be described as “applied biodiversity” on the farm. “One thing we’ve learned about cover crops,” he tells me, “is that when you apply cover crop combinations to your cropping system, you can accelerate biological time. You can improve the soil health, feed a balanced diet to soil microorganisms, store carbon, improve water infiltration—all this faster.”
Nurturing diverse soil biota is a cornerstone of the effort, says Fuhrer. “What do all organisms need? They need a home, food, and a balanced diet. Natural prairie has probably two hundred different species going on. If we put just corn in there, nature’s probably looking at us and going, ‘You can do a lot better.’” Marlyn Richter, a third-generation farmer and rancher in nearby Menoken, says that from a soil microorganism point of view, a crop monoculture is akin to junk food: “If there’s just wheat or any one thing, it’s like us eating doughnuts all day.”
Fuhrer says, “if you have low crop diversity, you will run into problems and require inputs, which means more technology. In the meantime, nature’s going to try to do a lot of things to heal you: weeds, pests, et cetera.” These scourges of farmers, he says, are nature’s attempt to fix the land, return it to equilibrium. “Cover crops continue to harvest sunlight and give off root exudates—sugars—that feed soil life. If you harvest plants [without putting new plants in] you’re telling the soil biology, ‘Sorry, we’re not feeding you. But we’ll be back in the spring.’”
On our way out the door to visit a farm, Fuhrer pauses by a photo of prairie grass and flowers, noting that this is what I’d be seeing had my visit been early fall or late summer, rather than in the spring when the floral display is less dramatic. “A dozen Argentinian farmers were here a while ago,” he said. “They used to do no-till cropping systems with high crop diversity and cover cropping. Then the Chinese offered to contract their soybeans. Now it’s just soybeans. They looked at our soil health work and they said, ‘This is how our land used to look.’”
This last anecdote and Gene Goven’s dung beetle tale point to the challenge of maintaining biodiversity at a time when success is measured strictly by yield and technologies are rolled out before we know the consequences. Including the effects on microbes and insects, corners of the ecosystem that, for the most part, have no one to speak up for them. The often devastating consequences to biodiversity on the farm is something that pains Goven greatly.
“It’s hard to find open-pollinated corn anymore,” he says. “The other day I had eleven flat tires on a drill on 220 acres for a neighbor. That’s because of the GM corn—its tough cornstalks. It’s slow to break down, it’s not being incorporated into the soil.” This reminds him of another recent situation: “I was out with [biologists] Pat and Dick Richardson from Texas. We said, ‘What’s wrong with that wheat field?’ Something was definitely not right. We walked into that field and didn’t hear insects. The soil looked dead. It had been sprayed twice with fungicide. That was it—there was no soil life. It killed off the good fungi, too.”
The topic of crop spraying comes up again as we head back to the house after touring the land, on our passage by Crooked Lake and serial patches of wild rye, bulrushes, western wallflower, cattails. The rain has stopped and the air is cool, gray, and humid, a static kind of sky with a breezy hint of recent drizzle. Goven stops the truck and gazes out the lowered window. “People here are getting cancer,” he says. “They’re asking questions. With obesity, there’s a theory that 40 percent of the time it’s nutrition-related. Our bodies are craving micronutrients.
Glyphosate is a chelator of mineral nutrients.” This means that with many herbicides, nutrients like iron, calcium, and zinc are locked up, bound to the glyphosate molecule. “The nutrients are tied up and not available in the food so people keep eating. Is glyphosate also tying up micronutrients in the soil? We’ve been led to believe that it dissipates. But in New Zealand, research found it has a twenty-two-year half-life. Bees, too, are having problems. I’m wondering whether it’s from the Bt factor [the toxin Bacillus thuringiensis, bred into GMO crops to resist pests] in GMO crops. It’s shown that GMO corn is a contributor to bee colony collapse. With GMOs even the pollen in the air is affected.”
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, and the most-often-used herbicide in the United States. Some estimate that more than two hundred million pounds are applied annually in the US. (The next chapter will address this in greater depth.) As for the New Zealand study, I couldn’t find that reference and neither could Goven. He says he regretted not printing it out when he found it because such information often inexplicably disappears. “Where does that information go? Why does it disappear? A twenty-two-year half-life means that in forty-four years there’s still 25 percent remaining. And more would have built up in the meantime.”
I don’t get the impression that Goven has planned to talk about this with me. Clearly the effects of chemical inputs on nature weigh on his mind. I have the sense that Goven sees himself as affable, and this topic triggers anger and disillusionment at a pitch of intensity that challenges this comfortable identity. It’s hard to be genial and laid-back when you’re watching the land, wildlife, and vocation you love take a beating from the industry intended to serve them.
“The major Corn Belt areas are having a decline in bushels per acre,” he continues. “Two years ago in South Dakota, the yield of sunflowers was half of what was expected. Now they have micronutrient sprays so they can be foliar applied. ‘Have a problem?’” he asks rhetorically. “‘Easy—I call the chemical companies to ask what I can do.’ The plant is falling over so they breed [firmness] back into it. It’s a vicious cycle. When does it end? When is the point of diminishing returns?
“I project: The problems from Roundup and ivermectin will ultimately be more devastating than DDT. Something else to be aware of: There’s a lot of off-label mixing. Maybe five to seven things or more. How do you keep chemicals separate? If they start linking together, those are new compounds [being created]. Twenty miles from here, there are no invertebrates. This is in an Audubon preserve adjacent to fields. The maximum fine for misapplication of farming chemicals is $200. If it’s windy or there’s an inversion, the most that can happen is that the sprayer gets a fine. I lost a half mile worth of butterflies. The neighbors noticed, too. Less than twenty minutes after I made a call to a regional EPA director, an executive at Monsanto was notified of what was going on. And the next morning the state pesticide coordinator for the state agriculture department of North Dakota called me and said, ‘What hornet’s nest have you stirred up?’” Two months later, this coordinator was told to take early retirement or his position would be terminated. Goven then made the effort to document the losses on his fields due to spray drift. When he went to follow up on his query, he was informed that his file had been purged.
Relying on chemicals, ignoring warning signs, and silencing anyone questioning their usefulness: That’s one route we can take. And this is the road we’ll be riding on if we continue to focus on production rather than the processes that underlie all the goodies we get from nature. The agrochemical road is lonely (if you’re cheered by birdsong), bumpy, and beset by one crisis after another. But we don’t have to go that way. There’s an alternative course, which I glimpsed one cool spring day in rural North Dakota: a path lined by prairie grasses and flowers, graced by butterflies and skippers, lit by fireflies. Here the diversity of living things functions synergistically, as opposed to operating in isolation, species by species, in a kind of biological zero-sum game. Organisms we can’t see are accorded the same respect as those that are big and flashy or promise to give a nice immediate kick to the economy. Soil is viewed not as an inert granular medium for growing things, but as a hub for valuable activities, interactions and exchanges.
Think we can make that turn? The forces of expediency are aligned against it, but there are some hopeful signs. First, look at how through tending to the soil, land such as Gene Goven’s farm can be returned to its biologically diverse splendor.
There’s also the fact that more of Goven’s peers are beginning to think the same way. He recalls the isolation he originally felt upon applying Holistic Management and questioning conventional views on farming. “Back then, I had to go a long time before I could find someone to rub elbows with.” Now that his neighbors are venturing into cover cropping and attending seminars, he says, today “I can rub elbows with someone across the road.”