The Soil Standard
The stark fact that appears now, and which wrote itself across the Roman Empire, is that debt and taxation increase as the soil declines.
—G. T. Wrench, from Reconstruction by Way of the Soil, 1936
All New Wealth Comes From the Soil
—title of a booklet by Carl H. Wilken, 1957
WAY BACK AT THE BEGINNING I’D MENTIONED that my interest in soil and its place in our lives was sparked by reporting about economics. During the 2008 economic downturn, it had begun to dawn on me that the economic system that framed our lives simply didn’t make sense. If huge sums of money—as in trillions—could be conjured up or disappear at the behest of a blip on a screen or the stroke of a pen, how could this reflect actual wealth? I started asking the question, What is money?—an inquiry that led me down many journalistic pathways I never expected to take.
One thing that continued to bother me is the very basic cognitive dissonance inherent in our assumptions about money, the disconnect between economics and the natural world. Take, for instance, the notion of growth. In every policy analysis, news report, and campaign speech, the answer to all economic problems—poverty and unemployment, income disparity, the national debt—is to “get back on a path to economic growth.” But there’s a problem: Further growth (expanding industry, adding population, bringing first-world consumption habits to third-world communities) will ultimately diminish the resources on which to base wealth. In other words, there’s nothing to grow on. The London-based New Economics Foundation (NEF) has an excellent report on this very topic called “Growth Isn’t Working: Why We Need a New Economic Model,” the cover of which depicts a hamster. The paper begins:
From birth to puberty a hamster doubles its weight each week. If, then, instead of levelling-off in maturity as animals do, the hamster continued to double its weight each week, on its first birthday we would be facing a nine billion tonne hamster. If it kept eating at the same ratio of food to body weight, by then its daily intake would be greater than the total, annual amount of maize produced worldwide. There is a reason that in nature things do not grow indefinitely.
Other NEF publications specify the point in the year at which the world breaches the limit of sustainable consumption, or, as they put it, the time at which we go into “ecological debt.” For example: If European Union residents ate only fish from European waters, as of July 6, 2012, stocks would be depleted and the continent would become “fish dependent” on distant seas. And September 27, 2011, marked the day “humanity exhaust[ed] nature’s budget for the year.” It’s been widely noted that if everyone in the world consumed resources at the level that Americans do, we would need several planets to sustain us, at least four or five.
We are all hamsters now.
While conventional economics is presented as “scientific,” as a set of universals, it’s actually based on a set of principles that made sense under particular circumstances, namely cheap energy, geographic expansion, rising population, and easily procurable natural resources. Barring these conditions, so as to maintain economic growth we’ve had to resort to some canny tricks, among them war (which kick-starts lots of economic activity), easy credit (low mortgage rates kept numerous industries bustling for a while), and financialization (folks have gotten very creative with carving up, trading, and betting on securities). Today the financial sector occupies a larger and still-increasing part of the overall economy; at this point more “wealth” is created by lending, trading, repackaging, and projecting funds than by producing goods and services. In today’s hyper-securitized financial environment we end up with abstraction built upon abstraction, so that an “investment” may be several degrees of separation from the entity (product, business, intellectual property) we are allegedly investing in. This is how the entire financial system can flirt with collapse and no one can explain why.
We’re now in a situation where we’re bumping up against the limits of what nature can freely give us, and the strategies we’ve used to sustain growth either don’t work (low-interest credit? ask those who’ve faced foreclosure) or are unpalatable to the public (we can only be involved in so many wars). The financialization of the economy continues apace—thanks to Wall Street’s impunity—but one wonders how long this can last. In part because more people are on to them (witness: the brisk mobilization of the Occupy Movement), and because the system isn’t working for many people (the huge numbers of unemployed, people who would like to retire, students and would-be students, et cetera). And yet growth remains the only prescription our experts can offer. As the late Kenneth Boulding said of his own profession, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
Perhaps the most revealing example of the skewed relationship between economics and the environment is the use of the word externality. This crafty term means that any environmental side effects that ensue in the course of business are essentially written off. Instead of companies taking a financial hit from any ecological damage they impose, they’re allowed to say “Sorry, not my problem” and walk away. If effluvia from Factory X pollutes the air, water, and soil in the area, the cost is borne by those who breathe that air and live downstream—the public—rather than the principals or stockholders of Factory X. This means that a huge amount of economic activity—the costs, say, of higher asthma rates or additional water treatment—is not accounted for in anyone’s business plan. It’s kind of an institutionalized cooking-of-the-books, or at least the leaving out of some important ingredients. As a result we get two parallel balance sheets moving in different directions: X Company looks better and better as profits rise while community expenses and liabilities mount. How can these two ledgers exist within the same reality? They can’t, really. But this fiction will persist until we correct that accounting.
While this venture into soil may have been sparked by economics, it’s taken numerous detours into, among other topics: the flow of carbon and water, the heroic behavior of fungi and worms, the missing minerals in our food, the enigmatic notion that a small number of cattle can harm soil while a large herd can heal it. Right now the theoretical musings over markets and policy feel far away. Yet soil, as we’ve seen, is intrinsic to many natural cycles, as well as to the production of food. Certainly, this venture into soil has much to bear on our understanding of wealth and commerce; it’s a matter of making the connections.
I’ll divide this exploration of soil and economics into two parts, one practical and one meta.
The practical comes down to this: A focus on soil health enhances production, and therefore earnings; it saves money, by eliminating expenses that problems with soil would cause; and it serves as an investment in the future by improving conditions for agriculture and infrastructure.
When it comes to practicality—and economy—North Dakota is a fine place to start. This largely rural, sparsely populated state is, incidentally, the only one to have enjoyed a large budget surplus over the last several years. This is due to several factors, including a robust agricultural economy and new energy production, but also the Bank of North Dakota, a public bank established nearly a century ago that keeps money in the state, drawing on public wealth to provide credit to citizens and local enterprises.
Jay Fuhrer, district conservationist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Burleigh County, also, perhaps jokingly, attributes this relative flushness to the habits and character of his fellow North Dakotans. The state is prospering economically, he says—“There’s no unemployment here, unless you choose not to work”—but the cultural norm is not to show it off. “People [are] living just the way they always have. Here the guy you see in a flannel shirt driving a very old Chevy is probably a millionaire,” he says. “And it’s likely he’s collecting cans for recycling in the back of his truck.”
We’re back in Bismarck, in the bright, uncluttered office of the Burleigh County Soil Conservation District (BCSCD). Jay, my guide to the area whom we met in chapter 6, has been giving me a glimpse into the North Dakota way of life. He has short gray hair and a tidy mustache and wears black jeans and a red shirt with the NRCS logo. There’s something deeply sane about him, a reserved, measured quality; he has a slow-release wit and a wry, colorful way of speaking, as when he refers to moving cattle out of feedlots as “giving the cows back their legs.” He rarely travels out of the region and says he feels little need to see any big cities, such as, say, New York. He and his wife have three grown children who live in the Bismarck area. North Dakotans don’t put much stock in glitter and glitz and the trappings of wealth, he says, quoting a rancher who once told him, “If I can’t stand on it or eat it, I don’t want it.”
North Dakota was one of the last states to be settled by Europeans, Jay tells me. Many pioneers were Germans or Norwegians lured by the Homestead Act: the chance for their “little piece of heaven,” 160 acres of untrammeled northern prairie, to make of what they could. One significant immigrant group—and Jay’s through his father’s side—is “Germans from Russia.” These are Germans who settled in Russia, mostly near the Black Sea in what is now Ukraine, when Catherine the Great, herself of German descent, made it attractive to do so. By the late nineteenth century those special privileges—notably the exemption from serving in the Russian army—were rescinded, leaving these choices: become Russianized, be shipped to Siberia, or leave.
“My grandmother was born on the ship coming over. I still have the homestead document,” says Jay. “The first winter was the hardest. People slept under their wagons or built sod houses. Others ordered houses from Sears, which were shipped out of Chicago by rail. People would take wagons pulled by horses or mules to get them and then had to put them together. There was a lot of self-sufficiency. Everyone was a farmer, butcher, carpenter. I remember as a kid we still butchered in the fall. Neighbors would get together to help butcher and make sausages.”
His father spoke German and his mother spoke Dutch in addition to English. “I went two miles to the one-room schoolhouse every day,” he says. “There was no town. It was just a building in the middle of the prairie. The teacher would stay at the houses of the students. There was a potbellied stove, and a barn where you could put your horse.” Area schools consolidated in the 1960s, but Jay has “nothing but good memories of the one-room school.” He attended high school in Strasburg, the home of Lawrence Welk. “He’d come to school once or twice a year and play polkas and dance,” he recalls.
The kind of small, diversified farm Jay grew up on has little chance of survival in the current economic climate, he says. “Someone can absorb another section of land and not even notice it. Here in North Dakota, the land tells you you’ll never get a tractor or combine big enough. That’s been the trend for so long.”
Jay studied agricultural economics at North Dakota State, and since 1980 has been with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (previously called the Soil Conservation Service). The NRCS, part of the US Department of Agriculture, was established in the 1930s in the bleak aftermath of the Dust Bowl to turn around our deteriorating farmland. In a bulletin to state governors, President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously wrote of the need “to conserve the soil as our basic asset. The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” Incorporated into the era’s soil-related legislation was the mandate to form soil conservation districts; this requirement remains, though many are linked to other departments and may have different names and functions. To Jay, these districts represent opportunities to bring the importance of soil health to the fore, to go beyond providing basic services to putting soil health and function at the center of regional environmental and economic enhancement. But before he could start making that happen in Burleigh County, he had to push past his own assumptions and training.
Early on, one task was to help farmers work with the Highly Erodible Land Compliance requirements. “They needed to make conservation plans to be eligible for program payments,” Jay says. “It was a real uphill battle, to figure out how much soil loss you could have and still be eligible.” That was the standard approach, he says, “rather than repairing it to be stronger than before.” Over time, he says, he encouraged people to “move away from how much loss, and said, ‘Let’s not even look at the loss. Let’s have no soil loss.’ We were starting to see that farms with residue on the surface, minimal soil disturbance and high crop diversity had essentially eliminated soil erosion, which then resulted in improved soil health.” So he knew it was possible, and had an inkling of what it would take.
“The first half of my career I totally wasted,” he says. “I was busy treating symptoms. I hadn’t seen ‘the matrix’ yet. You start to see a few soil health dots. When you begin to connect the dots, an interesting thing happens: You see so many other dots that come into focus.” Seeing the folly of rewarding farmers for a reduced loss rather than for soil health improvements “was the aha moment for me,” he says. “What to a farmer has more worth than the land? When you come to a farmer with mineral support, biodiversity, ways to make it better, it’s a whole different thing.”
Another district program involved putting in sod waterways to prevent the formation of gullies. “Once you had erosion starting and you couldn’t use farm equipment, we would survey it, a contractor would build it and seed it to grass,” he says. “In retrospect, I see this as a symptom of problems with the soil—the water wasn’t getting into the profile. If we had focused on soil health to begin with, we probably wouldn’t have needed to intervene. One day we decided we needed to change. We focused on the holism of nature between livestock and crops and pollinators and cover crops. In the last ten years we’ve done exactly one waterway. Each one of these costs thousands of dollars. I look back and think of the money we could have saved. But I couldn’t see the problem at the time, only the symptom.”
Jay has it all planned out for me: Over the next two days he’ll take me to four farms/ranches, all regular stops on BCSCD’s annual Soil Health Tour, so I’ll see a range of landscapes and approaches to improving soil as a basis for a profitable operation. But first: a simple soil slake and infiltration demonstration. It isn’t enough to take notes; I should understand how soil works. Usually, he says, he sets this up on the gate of a pickup somewhere in a field. But, well, we were here.
Our experiment: Compare two cropland soils. In one, the land had high disturbance (tillage), low crop diversity, no cover crops, and no livestock; the other offers low soil disturbance, high crop diversity, cover crops, and livestock. The first demonstration is a slake test, and with the help of a “rain simulator” (a sour cream container punched with holes) we watch the water’s effect. After several moments the difference is evident: The high-disturbance soil breaks apart (“not enough glomalin or ‘glue,’” says Jay) and the water clouds up. The second part is the infiltration test, and when we check back a while later the high-disturbance soil has water ponded on the soil surface. In the undisturbed sample, water has slowly infiltrated through the soil and into the aluminum collecting pan below. Functioning soil has pore spaces that allow for water to move through. Without pore spaces, says Jay, “water sits on top and the farmer says ‘we gotta do something.’”
Next we measure nitrate leaching. Jay swipes nitrate strips through the distilled water as it infiltrates through the two soils. Both samples show evidence of nitrates, with the high-disturbance soil showing a higher release.
“It’s been our observation that as you tend toward a monoculture, your input costs go up and soil problems go up, too. As you move toward biodiversity, the input costs go down and symptoms go down. A monoculture grown every year with high soil disturbance reduces the role of the soil to just holding the plant upright.”
It seems so clear that it’s the wrong way to go. I ask, “Well, then why does everyone do monocultures?”
“There’s a natural human tendency to lean toward simplicity, which here means one crop,” he says. “When you’re profitable, you have a reluctance to move away from it. You’ll ride that camel a little further. And when that camel drops dead in the desert you’re going to kick him. Hard.”
The following day, Saturday, is overcast. It rained the night before and the air still has that heavy, laden feeling. We take the NRCS truck out to Menoken, about twenty miles from Bismarck, to Richter Farms, where Marlyn Richter, a burly man with blue eyes and a red baseball cap, greets us and says to me, “You want a pop?” He ushers us into the office, a large room in a barn with a long table and a row of green John Deere toy replicas lining a high shelf. “Nice rain, uh, Jay?” he says.
“Million-dollar rain. Real gentle too.” One of fourteen siblings, Marlyn co-owns and runs the dairy/beef/grain operation with his brother Patrick and their parents. He’s also of Germans-from-Russia descent. He and Jay remark on the shadow side of the industrious legacy they share. “I feel guilty if I’m not working,” he says.
“Every day at five I feel guilty because I grew up milking,” Jay counters. The two shake their heads.
The first change in the right direction, Marlyn tells me, was shifting to no-till farming in 2000. At least a third of US agricultural land is no-till. Often this is accompanied by heavier reliance on herbicides, but this needn’t be the case. Through using cover crops the Richters, for example, cut herbicide cost by half. “Especially with our sandy soils we needed to do something,” he says. “It tends toward erosion. Our sandy soils have low water-holding capacity. That’s the hand that’s been dealt.” The switch had several results. For one, using the tractor less meant significant fuel savings. Also, the land was spared the damage caused by tilling: turning the soil undermines ecological processes—all those microbes and fungi doing barter around the root zone—and disturbs pore spaces so as to impede the water cycle. Today, he says, water that does run off is clear, like the “good” soil in our demo, suggesting minimal erosion or chemical runoff.
The next change was adding a cover crop mix to create crop diversity, add nutrients, and build soil organic matter. In terms of day-to-day farming, cover cropping saves about $20 an acre in growing costs, Marlyn says. This mantle of green means that plants are working year-round on the land, harvesting sunlight and ferrying carbon down into the soil. “You can’t keep writing checks without putting anything in,” he says. “The homesteaders could get away with it for years. Soil organic matter was high then. Now we’re farmed out.” Over the last decade, soil organic matter on the farm has increased 2 percent or more.
The Richters also kept more residue—“armor” in Jay’s lexicon—on the soil, strategically moving the range cattle so they wouldn’t eat plants down to the ground. The grasses and forbs feed livestock while, below the ground, their roots give off exudates to feed the soil biology. Soil armor slows flowing water and stops erosion, and is pivotal to maintaining soil temperature (see the chart).
Armor maintains soil temperature.
This is important, because when soil temperature reaches . . .
From J. J. McEntire, WUC, USDA SCS, Kernville, TX, 3-58 4-R-12198. 1956.
Soil management has helped the Richters “deal with the peaks and valleys” of farming, Marlyn says. “We’ve increased our production by 40 percent by growing grain corn when we moved into the no-till cropping system with high crop diversity and armor on the surface. I used to think, the straighter the row, the better the farmer. Now the messier it looks, the better I feel.”
We take a long, muddy dirt road to our next stop, Black Leg Ranch in McKenzie. Jay tells me our host, Jerry Doan, is “English by way of Canada.” So when Jerry, a tall fellow with glasses, side-swept gray hair, and a hearty smile, strides out to us and starts chitchatting with Jay, I’m surprised by the ringing American accent. The Doans, I learn, came from England on the Mayflower. Family members migrated to Pennsylvania, where they generally wreaked havoc and became notorious as the “Plumstead Boys”; in 1783 the Pennsylvania General Assembly declared the Doans “robbers, felons, burglars and traitors.” The clan fled to Canada until 1882, when one George Doan ventured back and bought the land that would become Black Leg Ranch, so named because it was the first ranch in the area to feature Black Angus cattle. A century-plus later, the ten-thousand-acre ranch combines custom grazing and an agritourism business called Rolling Plains Adventures.
Jerry shows us one of the hunting lodges, an airy, cedar log house, which his two older sons and their wife and fiancée, respectively, are readying for guests. The main house, also cedar log, is filled with belt-buckle trophies (his youngest son is on the Montana State University Rodeo Team, and his daughter was Miss Rodeo North Dakota and third runner-up for Miss Rodeo America), impressive displays of taxidermy, and portraits of handsome youths with great teeth adorned in cowboy paraphernalia. Jerry has used Holistic Planned Grazing for a number of years, and says he’s seen “immense change” in the land.
“We’re very sandy,” he says. “When I was a kid we had lots of blow-outs. There’s still a spot here or there but a lot of that has been covered. The diversity has grown immensely. You can see it in the colors of all the blossoms. The diversity really attracts the wildlife.” For Jerry, wildlife diversity speaks directly to his business, as people sign onto Rolling Plains Adventures to fish and view and hunt pheasant, waterfowl, coyote, and deer. (During a typical deer hunt, your odds of seeing a buck of 100 to 150 inches: 95 percent.) “We’ve got more wildlife than ever and more livestock than ever,” he says, attributing this to cover crop mixing, more litter, and biodiversity starting at the level of soil. “You can adjust cover crops depending on what you want. For example, enhancing flowering species for pollinators.”
A modern rancher’s biggest expense, says Jerry, is the cost of feed during the winter. “We want to stop ‘feeding’ our cattle. We want to keep the cattle on the land,” he continues. “It never made sense to haul hay in and haul dung out. This year we made it all the way to March 1 on native range and cover crops. The savings was over $50,000 compared to our former system of feeding hay all winter. The savings could be a salary or family living as we add that next generation to the business. And we might be able to double that number. Aside from what this does to the soil health and water quality, including the creek, which is important for hunting.”
Sunday morning we go to see Gabe Brown on the outskirts of Bismarck. The weather has changed, and now that it’s sunny I sense the great horizontal boundlessness of the plains, a vastness that had been constricted by cloud. “We’re going to harvest sunlight today,” Jay says, looking up to the sky. “You can almost feel the cleanness, that everything’s green, as if it’s healing.”
He and I wait in a field while Gabe talks on a cell phone nearby. “It’s a normal pose for him,” Jay says with mock annoyance. “He’s on the phone all day.” Gabe has become something of a celebrity in sustainable farming circles, especially since he was awarded a 2012 Growing Green Award from the Natural Resources Defense Council. In paying Gabe a visit, I am but one of more than a thousand a year who stop by. Jay digs into the earth with his spade—he’s rarely without it—and pulls up some soil. He rubs it with his fingers and lifts it to his nose. “This is prime soil,” he says. “It breaks into individual granules but you don’t get your hands dirty. It’s probably how soil used to be. We’re so used to degraded soil.” The “good” soil in our infiltration experiment came from Gabe’s farm, he says.
And the “not-good” soil?
Nowhere I’d know, he assures me.
Gabe saunters down the hill and pockets his cell phone, despite which it will ring multiple times over the next half hour. “Beautiful morning. Can’t beat it,” he says. Gabe is solid, broad in the jaw, and genial. I notice that when he refers to soil, he often uses the word resource. The farm, he tells me, is fifty-four hundred acres, “a little on the smaller side for the area. It’s getting smaller all the time. As we focus on the resource, we’ve found we need less acreage.”
Gabe bought the land from his in-laws in 1991, went no-till, and immediately hit a bad patch. Between 1995 and 1998 the farm lost four crop years in a row due to hail and drought, which put the family at the financial edge. “I couldn’t afford to buy inputs anymore, and I had to do something, had to figure out ways to provide nitrogen. I came to realize it’s all about the soil, and that you don’t need commercial inputs if you’ve got healthy soil. It’s about focusing on the resource with rotations, cover crops, and I really believe livestock need to be there, which is difficult because the management level needs to be higher.”
With its array of inputs, the agricultural industry offers means of “treating symptoms, not solving problems,” he says. “Usually, any problem I see out there I can address. If you ask me, why do people need to use commercial fertility? That’s easy: The soil’s in poor health. Here we no longer use fungicide on our long-term no-till. We no longer need chemical fertilizer and we haven’t used pesticides in twelve years. We still use herbicide when seeding, though we’ve brought it down 75 percent. When you’re switching a cropland field that’s been conventionally farmed to no-till, you can’t just cut it all out. You have to build it first.”
Gabe looks down at the ground and picks up a daikon radish nearly the size of a baseball bat. “Every crop we grow here has a purpose. This here improves infiltration and is a nitrogen storage tank. Radish will scavenge nitrogen and, when it breaks down, release it.” Here and there are turnips from the last season. Jay points out the first spinach-y potato leaves popping up.
As for finances, Gabe says that “it takes an average of twenty-one gallons of diesel fuel to plant, grow, and harvest an acre of corn. Here we’re doing it in five. If we can save 75 percent of our fossil fuel bills, we’re doing well.” While he’s looking to “shrink” the farm (“so we can manage it in a better way”), the trend toward bigger operations continues. “A lot of that is driven by economics. But I will disagree— economical does not have to mean big. We produce a bushel of corn for $1.21. Typically, it’s $3-plus. If you’re in the mindset of conventional agriculture, you’re still using the inputs.” Which means paying for them, which gets more expensive as oil prices rise. And dealing with the consequences in the soil.
Gabe doesn’t see change coming from the large producers—the agribusinesses. “The smaller operators are more able to ‘get it.’ The large ones are the last man standing.” Soil improvements are a kind of equity, he says. “At today’s fertilizer prices, each 1 percent of soil organic matter contains $650 per acre worth of nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, sulphur and carbon,” he told The Furrow, the monthly magazine published by John Deere in 2011. Since soil organic matter has gone from 2 percent to 4 percent, “this means . . . we have $2,600 per acre worth of those nutrients locked in the top six inches of soil. The trick, of course, is to make them available to plants, and that’s where spurring the soil’s biological activity comes into play. Instead of focusing on feeding the crop (with commercial fertilizer) we’re focusing on feeding our soil so it feeds the crop.”
We need to think differently about economics, he says. “We can improve the economy without growth. We can do it without more bushels. I get fed up when I hear, ‘We’ve got to increase production to feed the world.’ What’s the good of increasing production if it’s not healthy? Let’s look at wealth in the context of the human health crisis. If it’s a healthier product we’re growing, we’re lowering costs.”
The impact of weather-related problems shows the importance of soil health, he says. “Today, if there’s a drought, will I suffer? Some, but not as much as others. There’s an economic ripple effect: Every flood or drought adds costs down the line.” This includes, he says, the web of subsidies, incentives, and insurance programs intended to minimize the risk to growers. “They say farmers need a safety net. I think the soil should be our safety net. If you add up the dollar figure for improved health, carbon sequestration, lower fossil fuel bills, and resistance to weather extremes, it’s a lot. The real passion for us is: What are we leaving for the next generation? I don’t like the term sustainable. I don’t want the land to stay degraded. I like the word regenerative—we’ve got to regenerate the resource.”
The last site is Menoken Farm, 150 acres purchased in 2009 by the Burleigh County Soil Conservation District as a demonstration farm for soil health programs. We exchange the (by now well-mud-spattered) white van for a small utility vehicle and Jay takes me out into the fields. From the bounce in his step I can tell this place is special to him, that this is where he gets to try out his own ideas, not just offer supporting advice. “That darned Gabe!” he says as he pulls a sharp turn onto a narrow greenway between crop rows. “Always gotta get a potato up ahead of me.”
The fields are richly green with some gold from old growth; mostly I’m looking at cover crop. But Jay’s eye is trained to see the potential. “We’re experimenting with cover crop mixtures,” he says. “We have ten fields. One has commercial fertilizer. That’s our control field. The first year we didn’t use fertilizer I got withdrawal. Because I grew up with it.” Rather than fertilizer, they amend with compost and compost tea (a biologically rich concentrated liquid derived from compost), and have sheep and cattle graze at different points in the year.
When the vehicle stops the air is calm but busy, full of birds and bird sounds, butterflies and insects. “We’re measuring the complexity effect,” he says. “On each field, we add a cover crop. I’d like to add a biannual. That way you can plant in the spring and not have it go to seed.” For the 2011 season, the farm was part of a program through the Hunger-Free North Dakota Garden Project, a community effort that yielded a bounty of produce, including fifteen hundred pounds of potatoes, for local food banks. Menoken Farm has been getting high bushel-per-acre rates, particularly where full-year cover crops were used. But yield alone isn’t enough for Jay. “I want to start taking measures of the quality of the food,” he says.
Back when I was planning my trip, Jay had warned me that spring wasn’t the best time to see North Dakota farms—there’s much more to see in the fall. Unfortunately, I could only go in the spring. Later in the season I look for Menoken Farm on the Internet and find a picture of Jay surrounded by vivid green corn plants, dwarfed by their height and abundance. In a video he tells the camera, “This corn is run totally off the energy of last year’s cover crop.” A photo from last year’s Soil Health Tour shows a group of people standing in one of the fields. You can hardly see the men, the plants are so high: corn, sunflower, something with a purple flower. I was beginning to understand: soil health, soil biology, plant diversity, resilience to weather fluctuations, fertility, quality, and economic vitality all go together. As Jay would put it, I was beginning to see “the matrix.”
Back to economics. Upon posing for myself that deceptively simple question, What is money?, one topic I started writing about was alternative forms of currency. Most of us accept that money is that green paper we carry in our wallets, and that this arrangement—paper bills keyed into a centralized monetary system—is sacrosanct. However, currencies can take many forms. Nor is there any reason to stick with one currency. In fact, you could argue that dependence on one currency is like total dependence on one crop: There’s always the risk that crop failure or a cutoff in supply will topple the whole system. Out in the world today you’ll find all sorts of currency experiments, from local currencies like the Brixton Pound in London and Berkshare Dollars in the southern Berkshires in Massachusetts to Time Bank exchanges based on the hour to computer-driven setups like BitCoin. There are theoretical reasons behind various micro-currencies, such as keeping wealth in the community and enhancing the velocity of money—an example of this is the Chiemgauer Regional Currency in Germany, which incorporates a penalty for hoarding so that money continues to circulate. A local currency can also provide feedback to suggest weaknesses or imbalances in the economy, a function that a broad-scale fiat currency like the dollar cannot perform with the same regional precision. (We see how this has played out with the euro.)
For me, it was the very notion that you could create your own currency that threw it all wide open. If the money we organize much of our lives around is not, as I had thought, inviolable, then what is the nature of wealth? Why should we accept the inequities inherent in this particular system, in which monetary wealth flows to the money centers regardless of who provides the material or performs the labor? Might there be better ways to store, measure, or exchange value? These were some awfully big questions to sit with on my own, so I linked up with the E. F. Schumacher Society (now the Schumacher Center for a New Economics) nearby, and learned of others grappling with these themes. The field of New Economics, which sees the purpose of the economy as serving people and the environment, provided a frame for inquiry. In conventional economics, too often people and the environment seem to be regarded as subsidiaries of the economy. Economically speaking, then, people are expendable and interchangeable, accorded value to the extent that they contribute economically. And the environment is a storehouse of potential wealth, wealth that’s dormant until it’s removed or developed.
Which brings us back to that disconnect between the economy and the natural world, a fantasy that we continue to believe at our peril. “The only true economies are nature’s ecosystems,” says Wes Jackson, founder and president of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, which is exploring agricultural models in harmony with ecological systems, with an emphasis on perennial grains. He means “economy” in the sense of “thrifty management of resources,” for this is where ecological systems excel: self-sustaining and self-regulating, responsive to change, nothing is wasted (in contrast with our industrial, capitalist economy, where waste is rife and unchecked). The decidedly unnatural ecology of industrial agriculture is often justified in terms of “economies of scale.” Yet as we’ve seen, the practices that achieve scale—monocultures, high inputs, feedlots—are ecologically unsound; the benefits of the system, therefore, are ultimately an economic fiction. Whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, the economies that we create are embedded in the natural economy.
When you come down to it, money is a metaphor—actually, a metaphor many times over. We accept that money isn’t in itself wealth, but its symbolic stand-in: The twenty you hand your teenage son or the deposit that shows up electronically in your checking account represents a tiny fraction of the vast pool of national wealth. (Before 1971, when we ditched the gold standard, this would have meant an actual, albeit infinitesimal, quantity of shiny metal.) On an emotional level money is metaphor in that it inevitably carries some personal meaning—security, nurturing, temptation. The word metaphor comes from the Greek metapherein, which means “to transfer.” Ultimately this is the essence of money. If you can’t transfer with it, if in some way it fails to yield up something you want or need, that piece of crinkly green paper or mark on a screen isn’t worth a thing.
Which raises the question, metaphor for what?
As it turns out, money and wealth have often been described in terms of soil. In An Agricultural Testament, Sir Albert Howard talks of industrial fertilizer as “transfer of the soil’s capital to the current account.” Agronomist William Albrecht wrote, “All the capital in all the banks cannot substitute for the soil of the land. We know of no bank with all its money that could by means of that wealth have a litter of pigs, lay an egg, or give birth to a calf.” He alluded to the geopolitical implications of this natural capital, calling war a “result of the global struggle for soil fertility.” To Albrecht, the ongoing work of nations, whether conducting war or building and sustaining an economy, consists of “mobilized soil fertility.”
And here’s a quote from Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food International, in his foreword to Woody Tasch’s book Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered: “At the base of the economy is soil fertility. If we use money like synthetic fertilizer, we will get artificial growth, which can only last for awhile, but which lacks sustaining relationships with the earth.”
In The Solutions Journal, ecologist John Todd takes the analogy yet farther and proposes that carbon—specifically the carbon found in the soil—serve as a form of currency:
Humanity has always been carbon based. The carbon that supported us through most of history was slow carbon embodied in trees, other plants, and animals. Since the Industrial Revolution we have shifted to using fast carbon in the form of oil and natural gas. Fast carbon is mainly finite and nonrenewable. What if we used carbon as a universal currency? What if people around the world were paid to capture and sequester carbon, particularly in soils? What if enterprises that emit carbon into the atmosphere, including, for example, coal-fired power plants, had to pay for the right to pollute based upon every ton of carbon they emitted? A tectonic shift in the way the world conducts its business, from farming to aerospace, might ensue. Let’s continue the conversation. The stakes are too important not to.
He could have been channeling Christine Jones, who has said: “Carbon is the currency for most transactions within and between living things.”
What “slow” and “fast” carbon have in common is that they are the products of photosynthesis: the conversion of the sun’s energy into chemical energy, a process that fixes carbon. Our dominant energy sources (coal, gas, and petroleum) are essentially fossilized solar energy by way of the fixing of carbon. Right now our economic system depends on running through carbon rapidly without fixing an equivalent amount.
In other words, basically what we’ve got now is an oxidizing economy. We’ve been undoing the photosynthesis of the past, a process that releases heat and sends carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. From the standpoint of land, our oxidizing economy dries soil in such a way that plants and microorganisms cannot be sustained, creates conditions in which water doesn’t infiltrate and aquifers are not recharged, and disrupts the climate. The other direction—photosynthesis—promotes plant growth, creates conditions for soil to absorb and hold water (thus building freshwater stores), supports microbial life, cools the air, moderates the climate, and sequesters carbon dioxide.
Remember our bumper sticker from the first chapter? oxidize less, photosynthesize more. We can apply that to our economy as well as to our ecology. The present economy is ripping through the wealth of photosynthesis. We need, instead, to build that wealth—because that is the wealth upon which all other wealth depends. The ecological ideal would be a balance between oxidation and photosynthesis, but we’re so off kilter that this is a long way off.
How feasible is it to shift in the direction of photosynthesis? This book is filled with examples of people who are making this happen by promoting ways to: build carbon stores in the soil; keep water on the land; stop and reverse desertification; focus on ecological systems rather than individual species; reduce chemical inputs; and maintain diversity in crops, native plants, and microbial life. And—we can’t forget our cows—bring herbivores back onto the landscape.
In a 2005 talk at The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State titled “The Farm as Natural Habitat,” Laura Jackson, Wes Jackson’s daughter and professor of biology at the University of Northern Iowa, said: “In most areas of the Upper Midwest, land in agricultural production is barren dirt for nine months of the year. Because of our corn/ soybean rotation, we’re looking at a system of collecting solar energy about three months of the year. The rest of the time the land has very little cover on it, very little green leafy cover to collect solar energy . . .” Jackson included a slide that depicted, via satellite imaging, the “greenness index,” or plant cover, over a period of two weeks in June. She said: “The maximum amount of solar energy comes to Iowa on or around June 21, and Figure 2 shows that a big chunk of the Corn Belt is virtually bare, brown to yellow, on the same days that solar energy is at its maximum. What a waste, right?”
This is where we can make the shift: on the expanses of land in our country and around the world that, photosynthesis-wise, are under-performing, or where, to use Peter Donovan’s terminology, we’ve got improvident “sunshine spills.” We can make the shift by reinvigorating our soils, which serve as a hub for so many of the ecological cycles that support life and sustain and build natural wealth.
We can proceed as we’ve been going, abiding by an economic structure divorced from the natural world that functions according to its own arbitrary and increasingly illusory rules. Or we can work to develop economic models that invite us to rejoin the ecological systems on which we depend. Because when we have a system in which wealth depends on processes that destroy natural capital, we’re only kidding ourselves. As the late ecologist Howard T. Odum has said, “Inside the human system, money can expand exponentially, but ‘real wealth’ remains limited by energy, materials, and biophysical processes.” In her talk, Laura Jackson cautioned us about “the vast veto power of nature over what we would like it to do.” For in contrast with the flexibility inherent in our economy, nature is non-negotiable.
There are people thinking this way. One person who well articulates the link between natural and human economics is filmmaker John D.Liu, who left network news in the mid-1990s to focus on environmental media and education. He writes:
From the study of natural ecosystems comes an economic answer that goes to the fundamental question of ‘what is wealth?’. Although everything that is produced and consumed comes from the bounty of the Earth, according to current economic thinking, the value of ecological function is zero. We now calculate the economy and money as the sum total of production and consumption of goods and services. By valuing products and services without recognising the ecological function from which they are derived, we have created a perverse incentive to degrade the Earth’s ecosystems.
One of Liu’s projects has been documenting the ongoing rehabilitation of the Loess Plateau in China, where coordinated projects have slowed the erosion of soil. One YouTube clip called “The Stupifyingly Simple Solutions to Preventing Drought and Flooding” (on the “whatifwechange” channel) draws on his observations:
The problem has been that we’ve been looking at the soil only from the perspective of increasing productivity. If we look again at this with the goal of increasing ecological function we can employ millions in actively fighting against drought and flooding and simultaneously increase productivity. The key is that we all need to work together. We need to revegetate the degraded parts of the earth and employ ecological principles in our agriculture, industrial and urban areas. We need to realize that wealth is not coming from manufactured goods and from commerce. Wealth is coming from natural ecological function. If we understand this we can base our monetary systems on ecological function. And to do conservation of the earth will be to protect wealth. And to restore degraded areas will be to increase wealth.
The Slow Money movement, inspired by Woody Tasch’s 2009 book, challenges an economic structure that’s too fast (as much “wealth” consists of electronic blips shuttling from screen to screen in speculative transfers), is disengaged from the natural world, and fails to serve the needs of communities. The Slow Money Alliance has begun its “from the ground up” efforts with helping to “seed” small, locally based food enterprises; upward of $20 million has already been distributed this way. Inherent in Slow Money’s critique of our current economy is that we’ve been heedless of a crucial generator of real wealth—the soil. From the web page articulating the group’s vision: “The soil teaches us that we must put back as much as we take out to ensure long term health and a strong, secure, restorative economy . . . When we erode our soil, we erode our social capital, we erode community.” One new funding vehicle, called the Soil Trust, “will pool a large number of small donations to create a permanent, philanthropic investment fund dedicated to small food enterprises and soil fertility.”
Slow Money exemplifies what Peter Donovan refers to as “managing for,” in this case managing for local economic vitality grounded in soil fertility. Right now, people are not economically rewarded for this kind of management. In the agricultural sector, for example, our subsidy structure is such that farmers and ranchers are essentially rewarded for mucking up the soil rather than building it. The emphasis on scale creates incentives to grow single commodity crops, such as corn, wheat, and soy. And yet soil is part of the commons—a resource that every single one of us has a stake in sustaining.
All this may seem a far cry from our strolls through the fields in North Dakota, encountering Marlyn with his John Deere miniatures, Jerry and his hunting lodge, Gabe with his nitrogen-scavenging giant radish, and Jay with his custom crop blends. But what people like Marlyn, Jerry, Gabe, and Jay are doing is “managing for” photosynthesis over oxidation in several ways: encouraging diversity, avoiding tillage, using cover crops, and generally improving the soil. Our agricultural and economic policies can reflect this. Not that we have to change all our currency to the “soil standard,” but we should certainly take it into consideration.
I’ll leave you with Kurt Vonnegut’s iconic comment: “We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.” But you see, it wouldn’t be so expensive. It’s just that up to now, we—collectively— have tried to pretend that we could proceed with an economic model in which we ignored earth’s natural cycles, and the role in those cycles played by soil. We simply took our eyes off the books.