This Blessed Earth

by Ted Genoways

  Of course, when a plant self-pollinates, the progeny very closely resembles the parent, because you don’t have DNA introduced from other individuals. In nature that kind of inbreeding would be detrimental, because it could lead to reinforcement of undesirable characteristics (like the Habsburg jaw or Romanov hemophilia among the intermarried royal families of Europe). However, if you are selecting for a desirable characteristic and forcing progeny to self-pollinate for multiple generations, you eventually wind up with a plant that is so genetically pure that the desired trait can be reliably passed from one generation to the next.

  Wallace worried, however, that planting inbred varieties was a dead end, because undesirable traits were often transmitted along with the desirable ones—so you might end up with a cob with consistently dense kernels, for example, but the ear itself turned out to be underdeveloped or the plant didn’t grow to full height. But then, in 1920, Wallace found a paper by Donald Jones, a chemist at the Connecticut Agricultural Station’s experimental farm, describing how he had successfully inbred two separate varieties of corn and then crossed them to produce a durable, high-performing hybrid. Wallace recognized that this was the key to creating seed corn with consistently higher yields. You could build a stockpile of inbred seeds with desirable characteristics and then, year in and year out, plant one inbred variety side by side with the other. Just before flowering, the tassels of one would be removed to make a silk-only “female parent” to receive the pollen from the intact tassels of the “male parent” rows. This crossbreeding produced outstanding kernels to use as seeds for the following year.

  This is still essentially the crossbreeding technique employed by all major seed producers, but it’s not quite so simple as planting two varieties in the same field. To achieve proper pollination, farmers have to calculate the “nick”—the period when each plant will be sexually mature. But because they are separate varieties, the plants reach maturity at different rates, requiring different planting dates for the silk parents and the pollen parents to ensure that the silk emerges at the same time that the pollen is shed. To hit that narrow window, seed corn farmers use a final piece of knowledge about corn.

  The plants mature according to the approximate amount of heat they receive, starting from planting. “It all goes by growing degree units, GDUs,” Dave told me. One GDU is added for every degree the average daily temperature exceeds 50°F. So, for example, a day with an average temperature of 65° would be counted as 15 GDUs. “And they know how many GDUs it takes for the female hybrid to get to pollination and how many GDUs it takes for the male to get to pollination, so that nick happens at the same time,” Dave said. “If you put them all in at once, your male could shed pollen before the female has started to silk, and you get no pollination. If that happens—and it has—you can lose a whole crop.”

  “That’s why weather is such a big deal,” Dave continued. “You plant your males and females days, maybe weeks, apart—all depending on the temperatures. You get a string of days like we just had, where it never gets above fifty degrees, and you just have to wait.” On days like those, there’s an even greater complication. Several times Rick had described to me the bizarre growing season of 1991—when, halfway around the world, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines and, in his words, “put a whole shitload of ash in the upper atmosphere.” In Nebraska, temperatures climbed like normal in July and August, but the solar radiation that causes corn to grow was diffused. “That was the first year that I’d ever read of a measurement called Langleys,” Rick said. Instead of just measuring heat, Langleys measure the density of energy distribution, capturing the difference between a muggy overcast day and a cloudless day when the sun is beating down. “It was cloudy that year, just like this year’s been,” he said, “and everybody got into their fields at harvest, and it was twenty bushels off what they were expecting.”

  “When it gets overcast,” Dave explained to me, “it can be a crap shoot on getting the weather right.” As he reset the planter and got us headed south again across the field, he said that there were practical concerns beyond the problem of estimating the nick. “This field over here,” he said, pointing to the neighboring quarter section. “They wanted us to plant last week, but we kept looking and, God, they were calling for rain all week. What if it heated up and the corn matured, but it was too muddy to get in to plant the other rows? So we had to wait—especially with that field, because that was male put in first. You know, my male row planter I can pull around in the mud a lot easier than this thing.” He pointed a thumb back at the rows of hoppers, all heavy with seed and bouncing as the planting blades sliced into the loose soil behind us. “If it’s wet, I can’t do anything with this.”

  When Henry Wallace had seen how complicated creating reliable seed corn would be, he started to envision a nonprofit organization, run with government cooperation and potentially even public funding, that would distribute his seeds to midwestern farmers for free. He was a man of unusual commitment to the common good and wrote a friend that he did not consider himself a corn breeder but rather “a searcher for methods of bringing the ‘inner light’ to outward manifestation.” In 1921, Wallace’s father was appointed secretary of agriculture by President Warren G. Harding and might have spearheaded such an effort. But barely two years later, his father died unexpectedly at age fifty-eight, and Calvin Coolidge, Harding’s successor in the White House, soon settled into the laissez-faire years of our nation’s history. Seeing little chance of an ambitious national program gaining traction, Wallace started the Hi-Bred Corn Company, the world’s first hybrid seed producer, as a private business in May 1926. But the path to fortune was anything but swift.

  Initially, the company saw little in the way of profits. After all, Wallace was asking his seed representatives to try to convince farmers that his seeds were superior to any of those they had been using for years. So Wallace’s lead salesman, Roswell Garst, came up with a daring plan. He went from one farm to the next, across sixteen counties in western Iowa, giving away enough eight-pound sample bags of Hi-Bred seeds for farmers to plant half their fields. Whatever additional yield the hybrid corn produced, he would split fifty-fifty with the farmer. After several years, farmers realized that they would see greater profits by simply buying the bags of seeds, rather than sharing the surplus yield with Garst.

  Those shared harvests generated income for the young company, but they also produced something more important: they returned a fount of information about how Wallace’s seeds performed under different growing conditions. Now renamed Pioneer Hi-Bred, the company turned a sizable chunk of its revenue back into research, hiring a team of new corn breeders to devise still more hybrids that would show improved performance under tough growing conditions, such as the shortened seasons of cold-weather climates or in dryland areas where farms were without irrigation. In the early 1930s, Perry Collins, one of Wallace’s researchers, developed Hybrid 307—the first corn specifically designed and marketed for drought resistance, hitting feed stores just as the country spiraled into the Dust Bowl. And when Wallace was, like his father, appointed secretary of agriculture by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, he finally had the resources to nationally evangelize for hybrid seed, which he believed had the potential to rescue the nation from the Great Depression.

  The transformation that followed was staggering. When Wallace joined Roosevelt’s cabinet, less than 1 percent of America’s corn came from hybrid seeds. A decade later, more than three-quarters of all corn was grown from hybrids—and Pioneer seeds steadily produced the most impressive results. To keep record yields from depressing corn prices, Wallace created the “ever-normal granary,” under which the government would establish a federal grain reserve. In years of high production, the Department of Agriculture would buy corn and store it to keep prices up. In years of crop loss, the government would release the reserve to keep prices down. Wallace’s plan was hugely popular, stabilizing American food prices—and winning him a spot as FDR’s running
mate in 1940.

  As vice president, Wallace convinced Roosevelt to go even further. To prevent runaway production and the overplanting that created many of the Dust Bowl conditions, Roosevelt signed the Soil Conservation Act, establishing subsidies for farmers to restore native grasses and trees, rather than planting commercial row crops that reduced groundcover and depleted soil nutrients. At virtually the same time, FDR authorized employing federal foresters to plant more than 200 million trees at the perimeters of farm fields in a hundred-mile-wide zone from the Canadian border to the Brazos River. The idea was to create a national windbreak—what was termed the Great Plains Shelterbelt—to reduce the velocity of dust storms and the loss of moisture due to evaporation from windswept soil. And, in fact, soil loss had been reduced by 80 percent by the end of World War II, even as crop production soared.

  But Wallace’s remarkable Hi-Bred Corn had one significant drawback: it consumed far more nitrogen compounds from the soil than ordinary corn—more, in fact, than almost any other crop. During the war years, the government solved the problem of depleted soil by simply putting more acres into production, but after World War II, the Department of Agriculture found a different solution. Giant chemical manufacturers, like DuPont and Monsanto, had secured wartime defense contracts to produce ammonium nitrate and anhydrous ammonia to make bombs and other munitions. Now, they argued to the USDA, those chemicals could be used as fertilizers.

  THE MILLER NITRO sprayer, a cherry-red colossus on 6-foot-tall all-terrain tires, rolled up to the edge of the freshly planted field of corn. The twin booms of the spray rig were spread out in either direction, like a pair of enormous dragonfly wings, unfolded and lowered by a system of hydraulics. The corn was just tall enough that the first sprigs of green were showing, and Kyle was preparing to spray them with a soup of liquid herbicides to wither any weeds that might compete for nutrients and sunlight. But before Kyle turned on the sprayer, he wanted to reassure me. “The cabin is completely sealed,” he said. A pressurized ventilation system with built-in charcoal filtration and a secondary in-cab filter would make sure that none of the chemicals in the sloshing 1,000-gallon tank behind our seats, which Kyle was about to turn into a low-pressure mist, was going to make it inside. “I’m not going to fumigate you,” he said with a laugh. “I promise.” With that, he flipped on the sprayer and started bouncing across the field, much faster than I’d imagined.

  Before getting to this stage, Kyle had made a pass just before planting with the same machine, applying liquid nitrogen for the N-hungry corn hybrids. When Henry A. Wallace created the first inbred corn varieties, he hadn’t anticipated one problem: uniformly healthy corn plants that experienced rapid growth—going from knee-high to shoulder height in as little as two weeks—swiftly and voraciously converted nitrogen from the soil to proteins needed for green tissue growth. As new hybrids yielded taller stalks, now growing as much as 10 feet tall, and were bred to be tolerant of tight planting, allowing farmers to plant more seed per acre, the natural nitrogen content of the soil proved too little to sustain a crop through a full growing cycle. Thus, the application of nitrogen compounds has become central to modern, industrial-scale farming, but the discovery of its importance was the result of a bizarre happenstance.

  As early as 1910, the DuPont Powder Company, a munitions manufacturer so large that they are estimated to have provided half of all the gunpowder used by the Union Army during the Civil War, had sought to expand its business by encouraging the use of its explosives on midwestern farms. Company representatives distributed a free pamphlet, entitled Farming with Dynamite, which promised to simplify the tasks of removing stumps, clearing land, and breaking up hardpan. Two years later, Edward Lewis, a DuPont representative addressing the Nebraska State Horticultural Society, acknowledged that “the name of DuPont suggests something rather scary,” but he said that a farmer in Thayer County, Missouri, who had dynamited his entire field had made a discovery exciting enough to ease their fears. “He planted his corn in the land that he had dynamited,” Lewis reported, “and it doubled his crop the first year.”

  Of course, it wasn’t the breaking up of the soil that was promoting rapid growth but the nitrogen compound contained in gunpowder. In 1913, Fritz Haber, working at the Oppau plant of the German chemical company BASF, succeeded in developing a less destructive way of achieving the same result: “fixing” nitrogen from the air by combining it with hydrogen into ammonia and then catalyzing it. The resulting nitric acid remains the basic building block for the manufacture of all modern fertilizers—but Haber’s process also ushered in a new era of chemical weaponry. During World War I, Haber not only devised more powerful explosives but also poison gases, such as ammonia, then chlorine, and eventually the Zyklon B gas used on Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.

  By that time, the use of chemicals against humans had been outlawed under the Geneva Protocol, so American companies like DuPont found other ways of refocusing their laboratory know-how on the war effort. The herbicide 2,4-D was developed as a potential destroyer of enemy crops. The insecticide DDT was manufactured to prevent the spread of typhus-carrying lice among GIs. But as soon as the war was over, DuPont turned to marketing those same chemicals as DuPont Garden Dust and DuPont 5% DDT Insect Spray. Company advertisements touted these products as “Better Things for Better Living . . . Through Chemistry.” But gardens were just the tip of the iceberg. DuPont, along with other giant chemical manufacturers like Dow and Monsanto, teamed up with the old grain cartels, including Cargill and ADM, to lobby for congressional support for producing these compounds as large-scale agrichemicals.

  In 1953, the industry found its greatest ally, when Ezra Taft Benson took over as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture. (Wallace, by then, had retired from public life after making a failed bid for the presidency in 1948.) Benson, a high-ranking member of the Mormon Church and a fanatical Red Scare Republican, immediately informed Eisenhower that he was philosophically opposed to the government price supports developed by Wallace, because, to his mind, they were tantamount to socialism. He publicly referred to small farmers as “irresponsible feeders at the public trough” and vowed to return to a system where the greatest profits went to the largest producers. Small farmers hated him for it, but Benson was unflagging. In 1957, at the National Corn Picking Contest in South Dakota, he delivered a speech on the evils of federal farm aid despite a hail of eggs from angry farmers.

  Foreshadowing today’s aggressive, pro-corporate agricultural policies, Benson argued that the only way to outcompete the collective farms of the Soviet Union and Red China was to use our superior corn and chemical technology to the fullest. The United States could, if it chose, overproduce corn to drive down international prices, and it could use the surplus as a tool of diplomatic leverage in the form of foreign aid. Instead of guns, the United States began to give our allies grain—transforming, for the first time, a food product into a weapon in the national arsenal.

  When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States at President Eisenhower’s invitation in 1959, the Cold War for food dominance started to heat up. Khrushchev specifically requested to see only one man: Roswell Garst, the former Pioneer seed salesman for Henry A. Wallace, who was then head of Garst & Thomas Hi-Bred Corn Company. Khrushchev had met Garst once before, when he visited the Soviet Union, and had become obsessed by the potential of hybrid corn. Khrushchev and his wife spent a day at Garst’s farm near Coon Rapids, Iowa. In his memoirs, Khrushchev later wrote, “Garst gave me an entire lecture on agriculture,” in which he earnestly explained that American farmers had stopped worrying about crop rotation. Garst told the Soviet leader, “Science today considers that approach outdated. And I think so, too.” In past years, planting the same crop repeatedly would have attracted pests and depleted the soil of nitrogen. “Now there is no such problem. We have herbicides and other such chemical substances that make it possible to combat pests,” Garst said. And there was no lon
ger any need to plant clover or alfalfa to accumulate nitrogen. “It is more profitable for me to buy nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, in mix form, and add this fertilizer.”

  On that same official visit, Benson led Khrushchev on a tour of the U.S. Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland. Benson, in his official remarks, said that there was a “constant give-and-take of information between government scientists and those in private industry,” adding that “we are all working together within the framework of our capitalistic free-enterprise society to benefit our farmers, all our citizens, and people throughout the world.” He listed hybrid corn first among the achievements of such cooperative efforts and introduced white-coated lab researchers who extolled the virtues of 2,4-D and chemical fertilizers. Khrushchev was unimpressed by the visit he made to a farm owned by President Eisenhower, dismissing it as “not on a scale such as we have at our collective farms and state farms.” Benson later remembered that Khrushchev bragged, “We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” Benson vowed that American farms would outproduce the Soviets through superior chemistry.

  By the end of the Eisenhower era, however, environmentalists began to raise concerns about the hundreds of commercial herbicides and pesticides being applied to American crops in quantities totaling hundreds of millions of pounds. In fact, a citizens’ group, led by biologist Robert Cushman Murphy and Mayo Clinic hematologist Malcolm Hargaves, brought suit against the USDA in 1958 to bring a halt to indiscriminate DDT spraying in New York State. Benson admonished doubters that “abandoning the use of chemicals on farms and in the food industry would result in an immediate decline in the quantity and overall quality of our food supply and cause a rapid rise in food prices paid by the consumer.” Later, when Rachel Carson, who attended those trial proceedings, documented the dangers of DDT and 2,4-D, including elevated incidence rates of rare forms of cancer, DuPont responded by opening a confidential file on her and intimating to her publisher that they might sue. But Carson’s message was already out. Her modest calls for mitigating the use of herbicides and pesticides were instead carried out as an outright ban on DDT, the passage of the Clean Air Act, and eventually the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.