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"As long as I live I'll hear the birds & the winds & the waterfalls sing. I'll interpret the rocks & learn the language of flood & storm & avalanche. I'll make the acquaintance of the wild gardens & the glaciers & get as near to the heart of this world as I can.

As so I did.

I sauntered about from rock to rock, from grove to grove, from stream to stream. Whenever I met a new plant I would sit down beside it, hear what it had to tell, make its acquaintance for a minute or a day.

I asked the boulders where they had been & whether they were going. And where night found me there I camped.

I took no more heed to save time or to make haste then did the trees or the stars. This is true freedom. A good practical sort of immortality."

John Muir




 
 
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Big money gathers eagerly around short-sighted concepts, never bothering to notice the long-term suffering it can cause.  Or maybe that’s an easy way to see the messy collection of hubris, lofty goals, corporate influence and cultural ignorance behind  the announcement that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are calling for a second Green Revolution. They are donating $10.4 million to alleviate hunger using methods including the promotion of genetically modified crops.

The first Green Revolution was not regarded as a success by those “lucky” recipients of First World largess. Their carefully cultivated (often perennial) plantings were torn up and traditional methods well suited for local conditions (rocky hillsides, monsoons, lack of irrigation) ignored. Farmers were provided hybrid seeds which produced astonishing yields on test plots using high quality irrigation and modern intensive farming methods. But these seeds could not be saved to replant the next year. These crops had to be coddled with petroleum-based fertilizer and pesticides. The farmers needed to use equipment no one could afford to repair or fuel.

This first Green Revolution was considered a success by much of the First World. But it failed because it didn’t address, perhaps made worse the larger issue. As Food First explains, the Green Revolution imposed industrial farming methods without addressing unequal access. In South America per capita food supplies went up 8% while the number of hungry people increased 19%. 

Today yields continue to improve around the world. As Sharon Astyk notes in her brilliant blog Casaubon’s Book,“We presently grow enough food to feed 9 billion people.  That’s an astonishing realization for most people – that the world produces about double the number of calories we need.”   

Yet people starve while grain rots in warehouses and famine-struck regions export food. Why? Because it’s not as much about the volume of food as it is about who controls it.

Now, another Green Revolution. This time it’s not just hybrid seeds but genetically modified (GM) crops. These crops are highly profitable to Monsanto, DuPont and other mega corporations.  Typically they require the timed use of specifically matched herbicides and pesticides. But the extra cost of these seeds (and their chemical companions) are a waste because they don’t increase crop yield, despite what the slick PR might allege. Let’s repeat. GM seeds are not the hope of the hungry because no they don’t magically make more food than the seeds nature designed.

The Union of Concerned Scientists  “…reviewed two dozen academic studies of corn and soybeans, the two primary genetically engineered food and feed crops grown in the United States. Based on those studies, the UCS report concluded that genetically engineering herbicide-tolerant soybeans and herbicide-tolerant corn has not increased yields. Insect-resistant corn, meanwhile, has improved yields only marginally. The increase in yields for both crops over the last 13 years, the report found, was largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.”  

In fact, organic farms produce consistently high yields with good pest resistance.

And big surprise, traditional farming methods are much more suited to the areas where they've been used. Maybe, just maybe respecting methods that honor the life of the land makes more sense than imposing industrial agriculture. You’d think we humans would have noticed the We Know Better Than Nature approach hasn’t worked out too well. 

A paper  in the African Journal of Food and Nutritional Sciences noted,
"Viable agro-ecology models have been reported in widely disparate places like the United States and India [20]. In the United States, a landmark study by the prestigious National Research Council found that “alternative farmers often produce high per-acre yields with significant reductions in costs per unit of crop harvested, despite the fact that many federal policies discourage adoption of alternative practices”. The Council concluded that Federal commodity programs must be restructured to help farmers realize the full benefits of the productivity gains possible through alternative practices [20].

In South India, a 1993 study was carried out to compare “ecological farms” with matched “conventional” or chemical-intensive farms. Ausubel found that the ecological farms were just as productive and profitable as the chemical ones [21]. He concluded that if extrapolated nationally, ecological farming would have “no negative impact on food security,” and would reduce soil erosion and the depletion of soil fertility while greatly lessening dependence on external inputs."

One would think the world's richest man might put money into solving world hunger through equal access to justice, education and cultural understanding.










 
 
 

 

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The sight of Ron’s farm is like a quiet blessing. I wait for my first glimpse of it over the rise of a hill each time I take the dogs for a walk down our street. The house and several outbuildings are in shambles, but that’s because Ron puts his energy into keeping his small dairy farm going. 

His herd of around fifty Ayrshire, Holstein, Guernsey and Brown Swiss graze on pasture so that the grasses sway in the wind. Many of the old fence posts surrounding the fields are wire-wrapped osage orange and hickory trunks, since farmers a few generations ago knew these durable woods would serve while alive and long after.   

Ron puts his cows out on pasture each spring by a calculation that remains a mystery to me, something to do with phases of the moon. He adheres to other timeworn methods that aren’t fancy enough to be termed eco-friendly or green. For example, Ron drives his old car back to the hayfield before it’s time to cut. He walks through the field handpicking weeds that aren’t good for his cows. He doesn’t confine his cows year round, dose them with production-boosting hormones or follow any other agricultural trends.

Ron’s back is bent; his face is weathered and creased into a permanent smile. Already he looks like his father, Herb, who died a few years ago, probably already in his nineties. We asked Herb’s advice back when we first started farming. Herb told us he’d walked over to see our cows a few times, meaning he’d hiking through fields and woods to reassure himself that all was well.

How many of us can still benefit from the benevolent instinct of a neighboring farmer? How many are lucky enough to learn from examples of those who are deeply rooted, as Lisa Hamilton’s wonderful new book Deeply Rooted is aptly named?

Dairy farms all over the country are selling cows, selling land and going out of business. The price they are being paid is about the same as it was in the 1970’s, although feed and fuel is much higher. Government aid under consideration for small farms is steered to prompt farmers into selling cows, meaning even more milk will come from huge confinement agricultural operations.

Losing small farms also means that the wisdom of farmers like Ron will be left behind at an ever faster pace. This includes specific wisdom about the land and wider wisdom about ways to live. 

Authentic connection to the land is so easily crushed beneath the weight of society’s pressing demand for immediate gratification and quick profits. But then, much is lost. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “This palpable world, which we are used to treating with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association, is a holy place."

Perhaps most obviously, common sense is lost. Small farms are actually more efficient.  The Institute for Food and Development Policy amassed the available data from every country to compare productivity of smaller farms versus larger farms (total output of agricultural products per unit area -- per acre or hectare.)  Their research showed that smaller farms are anywhere from 200 to 1,000 percent more productive.

Ron’s son-in-law and grandson help on the farm, but his family talks to him about getting out of the business. They know he’s losing money. Ron says that he watched his father go through hard times and he learned that the way you stay farming is to hang on. So he’s hanging on. 

Ron’s rootedness to his farm and his land is part of who he is, like the farmer Gene Logsdon describes:“…he is a last member of an ancient tribe—the genuine traditional farmers who committed themselves lovingly to a piece of land and husbanded it from generation to generation, carrying in their memories a lifetime of their own experiences and that of their fathers and grandfathers on that land.”

So today I will walk in his direction, grateful for Ron’s farm. I’ll pay attention to the sight of cows resting in tall grass and the sound of a slack board on the house creaking in the breeze, hoping perhaps each thing we look upon with love somehow is more likely to endure. 


 


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