This is extremely encouraging. Brandt grows nitrogen right on the farm,
using legumes. If he could also grow fuel for the tractor on the farm, his
operation could be fossil-fuel free.--Tom
In a message dated 11/12/2013 8:33:34 A.M. Central Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
Excellent article from an Iowa Sierran now living in Arizona (for the last
40 years maybe). Thanks Jon.
Donna
Begin forwarded message:
From: Donna Buell <[log in to unmask] (mailto:[log in to unmask]) >
Subject: Building a Movement
Date: November 12, 2013 at 8:28:14 AM CST
To: [log in to unmask] (mailto:[log in to unmask])
Reply-To: Donna Buell <[log in to unmask] (mailto:[log in to unmask]) >
Beyond Oil.
Donna
If all US farms adopted Brandt's methods, we could save as much carbon as
if we took 10 percent of cars off the road.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/09/cover-crops-no-till-david-bra
ndt-farms
One Weird Trick to Fix Farms Forever
Does David Brandt hold the secret for turning industrial agriculture from
global-warming problem to carbon solution?
—By _Tom Philpott_ (http://www.motherjones.com/authors/tom-philpott)
| Mon Sep. 9, 2013 2:00 AM PDT
_150_
(http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/09/cover-crops-no-till-david-brandt-farms#disqus_thread)
* *
Photos by Tristan Spinski
CHATTING WITH DAVID BRANDT outside his barn on a sunny June morning, I
wonder if he doesn't look too much like a farmer—what a casting director might
call "too on the nose." He's a beefy man in bib overalls, a plaid shirt,
and well-worn boots, with short, gray-streaked hair peeking out from a
trucker hat over a round, unlined face ruddy from the sun.
(http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/09/how-cover-crops-make-healthier-soil)
Also see: _How Cover Crops Make Healthier Soil_
(http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/09/how-cover-crops-make-healthier-soil)
Brandt farms 1,200 acres in the central Ohio village of Carroll, pop. 524.
This is the domain of industrial-scale agriculture—a vast expanse of corn
and soybean fields broken up only by the sprawl creeping in from Columbus.
Brandt, 66, raised his kids on this farm after taking it over from his
grandfather. Yet he sounds not so much like a subject of King Corn as, say, one
of the organics geeks I work with on my own farm in North Carolina. In his
g-droppin' Midwestern monotone, he's telling me about his cover crops—fall
plantings that blanket the ground in winter and are allowed to rot in
place come spring, a practice as eyebrow-raising in corn country as holding a
naked yoga class in the pasture. The plot I can see looks just about
identical to the carpet of corn that stretches _from eastern Ohio to western
Nebraska_ (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Corn_belt.svg) .
But last winter it would have looked very different: While the neighbors'
fields lay fallow, Brandt's teemed with a mix of as many as 14 different plant
species.
"Our cover crops work together like a community—you have several people
helping instead of one, and if one slows down, the others kind of pick it
up," he says. "We're trying to mimic Mother Nature." Cover crops have helped
Brandt slash his use of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides. Half of his
corn and soy crop is flourishing without any of either; the other half has
gotten much lower applications of those pricey additives than what crop
consultants around here recommend.
But Brandt's not trying to go organic—he prefers the flexibility of being
able to use conventional inputs in a pinch. He refuses, however, to
compromise on one thing: tilling. Brandt never, ever tills his soil. Ripping the
soil up with steel blades creates a nice, clean, weed-free bed for seeds,
but it also disturbs soil microbiota and leaves dirt vulnerable to erosion.
The promise of no-till, cover-crop farming is that it not only can reduce
agrichemical use, but also help keep the heartland churning out food—even as
extreme weather events like drought and floods become ever more common.
Tristan Spinski
THOSE ARE BIG PROMISES, but standing in the shade of Brandt's barn this
June morning, I hear a commotion in the nearby warehouse where he stores his
cover-crop seeds. Turns out that I'm not the only one visiting Brandt's
farm. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS)—a branch of the US
Department of Agriculture (USDA) that grew from _Dust Bowl-era efforts to
preserve soil_
(http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/about/history/) —is holding a training for its agents on how to talk to farmers
about cover crops and their relationship to soil.
Inside the warehouse, where 50-pound bags of cover-crop seeds line one
wall, three dozen NRCS managers and agents, from as far away as Maine and
Hawaii, are gathered along tables facing a projection screen. Brandt takes his
place in front of the crowd. Presenting slides of fields flush with a
combination of cover crops including hairy vetch, rye, and radishes, he becomes
animated. We listen raptly and nod approvingly. It feels like a revival
meeting.
"We want diversity," Brandt thunders. "We want colonization!"—that is, to
plant the cover in such a way that little to no ground remains exposed.
While the cash crop brings in money and feeds people, he tells the agents, the
off-season cover crops feed the soil and the hidden universe of microbes
within it, doing much of the work done by chemicals on conventional farms.
And the more diverse the mix of cover crops, the better the whole system
works. Brandt points to the heavy, mechanically operated door at the back of
the warehouse, and then motions to us in the crowd. "If we decide to lift
that big door out there, we could do it," he says. "If I try, it's going to
smash me."
For the agency, whose mission is building soil health, Brandt has emerged
as a kind of rock star. He's a "step ahead of the game," says Mark
Scarpitti, the NRCS state agronomist for Ohio, who helped organize the training.
"He's a combination researcher, cheerleader, and promoter. He's a good old
boy, and producers relate to him." Later, I find that the agency's website
has recently dubbed Brandt the "_Obi-Wan Kenobi of soil._
(http://www.airquality.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/oh/newsroom/features/?cid=stelprdb111
8640) "
One government agency website called Brandt the "Obi-Wan Kenobi of soil."
Soon, we all file outside and walk past the Brandt family's four-acre
garden. Chickens are pecking about freely, bawk-bawk-bawking and getting
underfoot. In an open barn nearby, a few cows munch lackadaisically. I see pigs
rooting around in another open barn 30 or so yards away and start to wonder
if I haven't stumbled into a time warp, to the place where they shot the
farm scenes in The Wizard of Oz. As if to confirm it, a cow emits a plaintive
moo. Brandt's livestock are something of a hobby, "freezer meat" for his
family and neighbors, but as we peer around the barns we see the edges of
his real operation: a pastiche of fields stretching to the horizon.
Before we can get our hands in the dirt, Brandt wants to show us his farm
equipment: the rolling contraption he drags behind his tractor to kill
cover crops ahead of the spring and the shiny, fire-engine-red device he uses
to drill corn and soy seeds through the dead cover crops directly into the
soil. As some NRCS gearheads pepper him with questions about the tools, he
beams with pride.
Finally, we all file onto an old bus for a drive around the fields. An ag
nerd among professional soil geeks, I feel like I'm back in elementary
school on the coolest field trip ever. An almost giddy mood pervades the bus as
Brandt steers us to the side of a rural road that divides two cornfields:
one of his and one of his neighbor's.
We start in Brandt's field, where we encounter waist-high, deep-green corn
plants basking in the afternoon heat. A mat of old leaves and stems covers
the soil—remnants of the winter cover crops that have kept the field
devoid of weeds. At Brandt's urging, we scour the ground for what he calls
"haystacks"—little clusters of dead, strawlike plant residue bunched up by
earthworms. Sure enough, the stacks are everywhere. Brandt scoops one up, along
with a fistful of black dirt. "Look there—and there," he says, pointing
into the dirt at pinkie-size wriggling earthworms. "And there go some babies,"
he adds, indicating a few so tiny they could curl up on your fingernail.
Then he directs our gaze onto the ground where he just scooped the sample.
He points out a pencil-size hole going deep into the soil—a kind of worm
thruway that invites water to stream down. I don't think I'm the only one
gaping in awe, thinking of the thousands of miniature haystacks around me,
each with its cadre of worms and its hole into the earth. I look around to
find several NRCS people holding their own little clump of dirt, oohing and
ahhing at the sight.
Then we cross the street to the neighbor's field. Here, the corn plants
look similar to Brandt's, if a little more scraggly, but the soil couldn't be
more different. The ground, unmarked by haystacks and mostly bare of plant
residue altogether, seems seized up into a moist, muddy crust, but the
dirt just below the surface is almost dry. Brandt points to a pattern of ruts
in the ground, cut by water that failed to absorb and gushed away. Brandt's
land managed to trap the previous night's rain for whatever the summer
brings. His neighbor's lost not just the precious water, but untold chemical
inputs that it carried away.
ASIDE FROM HIS FONDNESS FOR WORMS, there are three things that set
Brandt's practices apart from those of his neighbors—and of most American
farmers. The first is his dedication to off-season cover crops, which are used on
just _1 percent of US farmland_
(http://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2013-march/while-crop-rotations-are-common,-cover-crops-remain-rare.aspx#.UeYGuIWeDX
R) each year.
The second involves his hostility to tilling—he sold his tillage equipment
in 1971. That has become somewhat more common with the rise of corn and
soy varieties genetically engineered for herbicide resistance, which has
allowed farmers to use chemicals instead of the plow to control weeds. But
most, the NRCS's Scarpitti says, use "rotational tillage"—they till in some
years but not others, thus losing any long-term soil-building benefit.
Brandt is "a combination researcher, cheerleader, and promoter. He's a
good old boy, and producers relate to him."
Finally, and most simply, Brandt adds wheat to the ubiquitous corn-soy
rotation favored by his peers throughout the Corn Belt. Bringing in a third
crop disrupts weed and pest patterns, and a _2012 Iowa State University
study_
(http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0047149#abstract0) found that by doing so, farmers can dramatically cut down on
herbicide and other agrichemical use.
The downsides of the kind of agriculture that holds sway in the heartland—
devoting large swaths of land to monocultures of just two crops, regularly
tilling the soil, and leaving the ground fallow over winter—are by now well
known: ever-increasing loads of pesticides and titanic annual additions of
synthetic and mined fertilizers, much of which ends up _fouling drinking
water_
(http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20130706/OPINION03/307060035?nclick_check=1) and feeding algae-smothered aquatic "dead zones" from
_Lake Erie_ (http://www.pnas.org/content/110/16/6448.full) to the _Gulf of
Mexico_
(http://agecon.ucdavis.edu/people/faculty/aaron-smith/docs/Water_quality.pdf) .
But perhaps the most ominous long-term trend in the Corn Belt is what's
known as peak soil: The Midwest still boasts one of the greatest stores of
topsoil on Earth. Left mostly unfarmed for millennia, it was enriched by
interactions between carbon-sucking prairie grasses and mobs of grass-chomping
ruminants. But since settlers _first started working the land_
(http://www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/IAN104.pdf) in the 1800s, we've been
squandering that treasure. Iowa, for example, has lost fully _one-half_
(http://boingboing.net/2011/05/04/visualizing-iowas-to.html) —and counting—of its
topsoil, on average, since the prairie came under the plow. According to
University of Washington soil scientist David Montgomery, author of _Dirt:
The Erosion of Civilizations_ (http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780520248700) ,
it takes_between 700 and 1,500 years_
(http://www.motherjones.com/documents/745245-no-till) to generate an inch of topsoil under natural conditions.
Cornell agricultural scientist _David Pimentel reckons_
(http://www.motherjones.com/documents/745272-soil-erosion-1) that "90 percent of US cropland
now is losing soil faster than its sustainable replacement rate." Soil, as
_Americans learned in the Dust Bowl_
(http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/about/history/) , is not a renewable resource, at least on
the scale of human lifetimes.
Then there's climate change itself. Under natural conditions—think forests
or grasslands—_soil acts as a sponge for carbon dioxide_
(http://ohioline.osu.edu/aex-fact/0510.html) , sucking it in through plant respiration and
storing a little more each year than is lost to oxidation in the process of
rotting. But under current farming practices, US farmland only acts as what
the USDA has deemed a "modest carbon sink"—sequestering 4 million metric
tons of carbon annually, a tiny fraction of total US greenhouse gas
emissions.
The good news, says eminent soil scientist Rattan Lal of Ohio State
University, is that if all US farms adopted Brandt-style agriculture, they could
suck down as much as _25 times more carbon than they currently are_
(http://www.motherjones.com/documents/745281-soil-carbon-amp-challenes-to-policy-make
rs) —equivalent to taking nearly 10 percent of the US car fleet off the
road. (Lal, a member of the Nobel-winning International Panel on Climate
Change, is so impressed with Brandt's methods that he brought a group of 20
Australian farmers on a pilgrimage to Carroll two years ago, he tells me.)
If all US farms adopted Brandt's methods, we could save as much carbon as
if we took 10 percent of cars off the road.
In the middle of his cornfield, holding a handful of loamy, black soil,
Brandt explains that he habitually tests his dirt for organic matter. When he
began renting this particular field two seasons before, its organic
content stood at 0.25 percent—a pathetic reading in an area where, even in fields
farmed conventionally, the level typically hovers between 1 and 2 percent.
In just two years of intensive cover cropping, this field has risen to
1.25 percent. Within 10 years of his management style, he adds, his fields
typically reach as high as 4 percent, and with more time can exceed 5 percent.
Building up organic matter is critical to keeping the heartland humming as
the climate heats up. The _severe drought_
(http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/07/consumers-face-droughts-long-price-shadow) that parched the
Corn Belt last year—as well as the _floods_
(http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/05/mississippi-river-flooding-explained) that have roared
through in recent years—are a harbinger of what the _2013 National Climate
Assessment_
(http://www.motherjones.com/documents/745285-national-climate-assessment-draft-2013) calls a "rising incidence of weather extremes" that
will have "increasingly negative impacts" on crop yields in the coming decades.
As Ohio State soil scientist Rafiq Islam explains, Brandt's legume cover
crops, which trap nitrogen from the air and store it in nodules at their
roots, allow him to grow nitrogen right on his farm, rather than importing it
in the form of synthetic fertilizer. And the "complex biological systems"
created by cover crops marginalize crop-chomping bugs and disease-causing
organisms like molds—meaning fewer insecticides and fungicides.
(http://adserver.adtechus.com/?adlink/5443/2863578/0/170/AdId=4885184;BnId=1;itime=264779628;key=Climate_Change+Environment+Food+and+Ag+Top+Stories+env
ironment;)
_Advertise on MotherJones.com_
(http://www.motherjones.com/about/advertising/contact-form)
Nor is Brandt any less productive than his chemical-intensive peers, Islam
says. Quite the opposite. Brandt's farm regularly achieves crop yields
that exceed the county average, and during last year's brutal drought, his
yields were near the normal season average while other farmers saw yields drop
50 percent—or lost their crop entirely.
THE MORNING AFTER OUR FIELD TRIP, we reconvene in Brandt's barn to take in
a series of simple soil demonstrations. I don't say "we" lightly—by now,
I've been more or less accepted into the NRCS crew's soil geek club. At a
table at the front of the room, an NRCS man dressed in country casual—faded
jeans, striped polo shirt, baseball cap—drops five clumps of soil into
water-filled beakers: three from farms managed like Brandt's, with cover crops
and without tillage, the others from conventional operations. The
Brandt-style samples hold together, barely discoloring the water. The fourth one
holds together too, but for a different reason: Unlike the no-till/cover-crop
samples, which the water had penetrated, this one was so compacted from
tillage that no water could get in at all. The fifth one disintegrates before
our eyes, turning the water into a cloudy mess that the NRCS presenter
compares to "last night's beer."
Other demos are equally graphic—including one that shows how water runs
through Brandt's gold-standard dirt as if through a sieve, picking up little
color. In the conventional soil, it pools on top in a cloudy mess,
demonstrating that the soil's density, or compaction, can cause runoff. The
presenter recalls a recent _Des Moines Register article_
(http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20130701/NEWS/307010028/Nitrate-spike-tests-Des-Moines-water-
supplies) about how a wet spring caused a torrent of nitrogen runoff into
the city's drinking-water sources, prompting health concerns and expensive
filtration efforts.
As I watch, I imagine the earnest agents fanning out across the Midwest to
bring the good news about cover cropping and continuous no-till. And I
wonder: Why aren't these ways spreading like prairie fire, turning farmers
into producers of not just crops but also rich, carbon-trapping soil resilient
to floods and drought?
While 66 percent of farmers polled believe climate change was occurring,
just 41 percent believe that humans had a hand in causing it.
I put the question to Brandt. His own neighbors aren't exactly rushing out
to sell their tillers or invest in seeds, he admits—they see him not as a
beacon but rather as an "odd individual in the area," he says, his level
voice betraying a hint of irritation. Sure, his yields are impressive, but
federal crop payouts and subsidized crop insurance buffer their losses,
giving them little short-term incentive to change. (For his part, Brandt refuses
to carry crop insurance, saying it compels farmers "not to make good
management decisions.") Plus the old way is easier: Using diverse cover crops to
control weeds and maintain fertility requires much more management, and
more person-hours, than relying on chemicals. And the truth is, most farmers
don't see themselves as climate villains: _Iowa State sociologists found_
(http://grist.org/climate-energy/why-dont-farmers-believe-in-climate-change/)
that while 66 percent of farmers polled believed climate change was
occurring, just 41 percent believed that humans had a hand in causing it.
Longer-term, though, Brandt does see hope. Over the next 20 years, he
envisions a "large movement of producers" adopting cover crops and no-till in
response to rising energy costs, which could make fertilizer and pesticides
(synthesized from petroleum and natural gas), as well as tractor fuel,
prohibitively expensive.
The NRCS's Scarpitti concurs. He acknowledges that in Brandt's corner of
Ohio, the old saw that the "prophet isn't recognized in his own hometown"
largely holds, though a "handful" of farmers are catching on. Nationwide, he
adds, "word's getting out" as farmers like Brandt slowly show their
neighbors that biodiversity, not chemicals, is their best strategy.
Sure enough, during the NRCS meeting, another local farmer stops by to
pick up some cover-crop seeds. Keith Dennis, who farms around 1,500 acres of
corn and soy in Brandt's county, and who started using cover crops in 2011,
says there are quite a few folks in the county watching what Brandt's
doing, "some of 'em picking up on it." Dennis has known about Brandt's work with
cover crops since he started in the 1970s. I have to ask: If he saw
Brandt's techniques working then, what took him so long to follow suit? "I had
blinders on," he answers, adding that he saw no reason to plant anything but
corn and soybeans. "Now I'm able to see that my soil had been suffering
severe compaction," he says. "Because it wasn't alive."
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