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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.
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. 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.
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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—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."
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 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 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 and feeding algae-smothered
aquatic "dead zones" from
Lake
Erie to the
Gulf of Mexico.
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 in the 1800s, we've
been squandering that treasure. Iowa, for example, has lost fully
one-half—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, it takes
between 700 and 1,500 years to generate an inch of
topsoil under natural conditions. Cornell agricultural scientist
David Pimentel reckons that "90 percent of US
cropland now is losing soil faster than its sustainable replacement rate."
Soil, as
Americans learned in the Dust Bowl, 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, 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—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 that parched the Corn Belt last
year—as well as the
floods that have roared through in recent years—are a
harbinger of what the
2013 National Climate Assessment 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.
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 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.
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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 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."