Dirt

Dio-He-Ko

Corn Beans Squash

SO SANG THE MAIDENS of an Iroquois agricultural society. They worshiped a three-in-one goddess who appeared in the world under the guise of corn, beans, and squash, the three crops that were planted together in Iroquois village plots.

What were the virtues of this goddess? She was herself a community. As Dio, corn, she grew tall and sustained the people with her fruit. (A native farmer could sing the song that counted every leaf, every joint, every tassel in the order that it appeared on the plant from seedtime to harvest.) As He, beans, she twined about the corn stalk, making of it a living trellis on which to support the vine and its fruits. In return, as beans, she fed the roots of the corn and the squash. And last, as Ko, squash, she put out spiny leaves and stems to defend the plot from marauders.

This triple goddess—a kind of New World Hecate—is the founder of the Thanksgiving feast, and so it might be said she is ruling deity not only of the agricultural native peoples but also of the newcomers who survived their first winter only owing to her bounty. It is not just bad policy to reject her, as we have done over the past three centuries. It is sacrilege, and it is being avenged every day in farm fields across the continent.

I talked to an agronomist who’d tried the Dio-He-Ko system in Vermont during the 1980s, only to find that the raccoons were by no means sympathetic to this poetic association, devouring both corn and squash without mercy. To the cynical, this would be prima facie evidence that the Native Americans as farmers were not all they are cracked up to be. But remember that in the first place, raccoons were not so dependent then as they are now upon the leavings of man, nor were they hemmed in by roadways, nor had they multiplied beyond the capacity of the ecosystem to maintain them owing to the destruction of the larger mammals that preyed on them. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Native American horticulture was based on the principle of sharing, so that a portion of the produce was by right set aside for the likes of coons, woodchucks, and deer.

“Polyculture” is the name for this way of growing useful plants in associated groups. And it is not the pipe dream of backward-looking romantics. In fact, most nonindustrial agriculture even today is polycultural. Contrary to expectation, the difficulty that Dio-He-Ko experiences in our American landscapes is probably more the result of her degradation than of the impracticality of the idea.

Polyculture in the tropical Americas thrives wherever plantation or intensive systems of export agriculture have not been substituted. In the 1950s, the botanist Edgar Anderson studied a Honduran plot the size of a New York City backyard where a single family grew more than thirty different crops. Some were trees grown for their fruits or fiber, some were understory shrubs with properties useful in medicine rituals or bearing edible nuts or fruits, and some were herbaceous plants whose leaves, seeds, or tubers formed the staple of their diet. No fewer than three hundred species of animals—fifty of them ants alone!—cohabited on the same plot, and no one went hungry.

The same mixed culture is characteristic of the traditional slash-and-burn agricultures of the Amazon Basin. Burning out a section of forest, the cultivators would take advantage of the nutrient-rich ash to start crops, including seventeen species of manioc, all on the same acreage. As the plants exhausted the nutrients—aided by the torrential rains that sluice through the porous soils, carrying away anything soluble—the yields would decline. The farmers responded by ceasing to make new plantings.

Instead, in an act of real and millennial symbiosis, they would harvest both the survivors of the plants and the successor species that established themselves in the now-uncultivated gaps. Who knows what give-and-take over millennia might have resulted in this situation, where even as the farmer gives back the forest to itself, she is permitted to realize more use from its products. Eventually, the forest would close the gap, but by that time, the farmer would have moved on to a new plot, burning it off and beginning again.

The superiority of such a system, both spiritually and materially, over the monocrops of cattle pasturage that recently have been installed in these regions is obvious. To maintain a single species over time on the cleared ground requires constant inputs of fertilizer, in addition to the ash of burned trees. Without the fertilizer, the hungry pasture grasses won’t thrive. Even where the fertilizer is applied, however, the rate of leaching is often so fast that the grasses grow with less than their accustomed vigor. The cattle who eat them are therefore undernourished, particularly with respect to phosphorus. As a result, they break bones when they stumble.

The difference between the harmonious web of the polyculture and the Rube Goldberg mishaps of the monoculture is palpable, but one might well object that such a polyculture is impossible wherever land is not abundant. After all, the system does depend upon the ability to abandon one plot at will and quickly find another (at little or no cost) to replace it. It is not impossible to return to the original plot, but not for at least a decade.

Where populations are larger and land is a commodity, it seems clear that polyculture is not an option, unless some means can be found to replenish the soil in situ, without the humans’ departing for ten years. The native populations of New England, where the soils were poor and stony to start with, solved this problem in two ways. First, in the Dio-He-Ko group was a legume, beans. They knew nothing whatever about the molecular chemistry of nutrition or about the fixing of nitrogen by legumes, but their observations told them all they needed to know: A plot with beans grows stronger than one without. Furthermore, to provide corn, the heaviest feeder, with sufficient nutrients, they knew to throw a menhaden or another small fish into the planting hole.

The colonists, who grew the crops not only for subsistence but for exchange value, truncated this system and so destroyed it. The picture of the devastation, as William Cronon describes it in Changes in the Land, is so frightening that it makes one wonder how people could go on behaving in just the same way for the nearly half a millennium since they destroyed New England farming.

Corn was the cash crop, the colonists perceived, so they grew it to the exclusion of beans and squash, which were relegated to separate, smaller monocultures. Nevertheless, they had observed that native success with corn was owed to the habit of applying a fish. In grotesque imitation of this practice, they fished out entire rivers, applying the stinking carcasses by the thousands to their cornfields. Country travelers spoke of an “almost intolerable fetor,” which, given the already powerful odor of the average colonial gentleman, must have been foetid indeed.

The results were fished-out rivers and dying soils. Efforts to revive the fields with wood ash resulted in deforestation. By the time someone hit upon the idea of using clover to regenerate the soils, many fields were already far gone. Today, from New Jersey to Maine, there are thousands of miles of stone walls that once marked the boundaries of farmers’ fields. Now they are hidden among forest trees. In the long run, the monocrop failed, the forest won.

Yet in the American experiment with massive monoculture, it was only a temporary setback. Farther west was fresh land that had been covered with native prairie for at least ten thousand years. It would take a long time to destroy those fertile soils! And so it has. A little more than a century. Only now are the modern equivalents of the New England abuser beginning to test the limits of the tolerance of the great brown mollisols of the Midwest.

Polyculture here is a laughable notion, though the fertility of the soils is owed largely to their ancient prairie cover. Mature prairie is among the most extreme herbaceous polycultures imaginable, 150 or more species growing together in a single association. For this, farmers substituted huge fields of single crops—corn, soy, or wheat—and stripped even these from the land during the winters, when wind and rain would erode and gully the soil.

This disastrous situation came near to ending American agriculture during the early 1930s. It was then, however, that the desperate remembered the old lessons of polyculture. The 1938 Department of Agriculture yearbook, Soils and Men, one of the great practical treatises ever published in this country, gave detailed and experimentally verified methods for restoring the soil by imitating polyculture. Indeed, this is what crop rotation and manure use amount to. In the polyculture, the green manure crop grows among the other crops at the same time, and the animals who share the meal pay for it with their droppings. On the farm field, the clover crop is separated from the corn crop by an interval of time, and the cows may be separated by miles of distance, but the principle is the same: return what you remove by the means that built the fertile soil to begin with.

These methods were well known to such venerable agricultural systems as the Roman and the Chinese. Perhaps the great statement of them comes from Virgil’s Georgics.

. . . when the seasons shift

Sow in the golden grain where previously

You raised a crop of beans that gaily shook

Within their pods, or a tiny brood of vetch,

Or the slender stems and rustling undergrowth

Of bitter lupine. Crops flax burn out

A field, oats burn it through, and drowsy poppies

Soaked in oblivious sleep will burn it too:

But still rotation makes you labor easy,

As long as you are not ashamed to drench

The arid soil with fertile dung. . . .

Thus will the land find rest in its change of crop,

And earth left unploughed show you gratitude.

The ideas reappeared in twentieth-century America just long enough for chemists to invent another grotesque shortcut. By learning to fix nitrogen from air, in a high-temperature industrial process, they expected to do away with the messy and inefficient use of cover crops and manures. That is just what they have done, and it is hard to believe that the results will not be at least as unfavorable as those in colonial New England.

Perhaps, however, there is a way out. A farmer might intentionally return his farm to an actual polyculture of perennial plants with more or less permanent roots in the soils. This was another system adopted both in Rome and its provinces and in premodern China: interplanted with and surrounding fields of herbaceous crops were to be found groves of olive or mulberry trees, and vineyards.

The trouble is, however, that Midwestern soils are not usually supplied with a tree cover, and virtually all crop plants that form our dietary staples are annuals, which set seed and die, roots and all.

Enter geneticist Wes Jackson, with an idea as powerful as it is bold. If we do not have any perennial crop plants, Jackson proposes to breed them. Never mind that the whole course of plant evolution militates against a good seed bearer also having perennial characteristics. Jackson exudes confidence. “In a generation or so we’ll have the problem solved,” he says. Having seen the limits of rotation and of manuring, he argues that we take natural systems as our standard, in order to regenerate the soils. Though trained as a geneticist, Jackson is a deep and reverent economist. He envisions farms that “run on sunlight"—making maximum use of energy derived from sunlight and minimum use of fossil hydrocarbons like oil and gas.

It will take more people on the land, more shared work, and more community to accomplish these ends, he believes. And though he has no wish to reestablish the Dio-He-Ko model itself, his vision of a new polyculture offers hope not only for agriculture but for the culture of towns and communities.