We’re Back!
The end of World War II came to a sudden halt in 1945 with the dropping of the atomic bomb. Actually, it took two of these horrific events to convince Emperor Hirohito and his advisers that Americans were dead serious about not invading Japan. Following the surrender, American troops mustered out of the military by the millions and integrated as best they could back into civilian life. During the war, food production had predictably gone down as the sixteen- to twenty-nine-year-old labor force went “over there.” In the movie Saving Private Ryan, based on a true story about four brothers who fought during World War II, the issue of farm labor shortages that war creates was a featured theme. Three of four Niland brothers were killed in combat. All of them had come from a farming family in Minnesota. The government, upon learning of this tragedy, issued an order to save the last one by removing him from active duty and shipping him back home. They reasoned that if he were to die, yet another farm might go under from lack of manpower. During the war, the country tightened its belt and endured life with a food menu that had a greatly reduced number of choices. Americans ate less dairy and beef, and consumed far more starch and…well, more starch.
To compensate for the diversion of fresh and value-added produce to the military, ordinary citizens began growing their own food. Victory gardens sprang up everywhere conditions permitted, and the result was that Americans relearned the value of a freshly picked ripe tomato. The war created another unintended agricultural opportunity, too. American supply convoys destined for the Pacific Theater of Operations encountered Japanese submarines, and the U.S. ships were sitting ducks. Huge quantities of supplies of all kinds were lost, including K rations. It’s not obvious who got the idea first, but many a commanding officer issued the order to establish hydroponic facilities on several of the captured islands. It is estimated that during the war, as much as eight thousand tons of fresh veggies were made available for Allied troops this way, helping to offset the losses suffered at sea.
After the war, hydroponics was discarded, forgotten entirely, as America turned its attention to growing crops on the land that was to become the site of the greatest agricultural initiative on earth. The baby boomers were now in their early teens and more interested in going to college than in staying down on the family farm. Apparently, this had little effect on the restarting of the U.S. food “machine.” Despite all its attendant horrors, the war had proved advantageous in many respects, including supplying the right moment for the innovation needed to fully mechanize an entire country’s armed forces. One group in particular was outstanding in this respect: the Construction Battalions known to everyone as the “Seabees.” This naval group was highly decorated for its clever and efficient use of construction technologies. Using cutting-edge earth-moving machinery perfected during the early phases of the war, the Seabees rapidly adapted them to the efficient conversion of native jungle into barracks, and even small cities. They became particularly adept at remodeling even the most hostile terrain into flat airfields. After the war ended, these same methods were applied to land that before the war was considered highly unsuited for any kind of agriculture, easily transforming it into productive farmland using mammoth earth movers and massive tractors fitted with all kinds of front-loading devices. Farming was coming of age in the new industrial-military complex of postwar Europe and the United States. Good-bye wetlands, hello corn and cotton fields. In filling in many of the swamps in the American Southeast, we also got rid of malaria for good in this country.
Nature Abhors a Vacuum
At the same time that the war was raging in Europe and the Pacific, quietly, without notice, the Joad family’s dust bowl was morphing back into its original ecological self: a series of tall- and short-grass prairies. It took only ten years for that wasteland to recover from the abuses of wheat and corn farming. How could this have happened? The riveting newsreel footage of 600-foot clouds of topsoil blowing across the plains states had convinced everyone that this was no place for humans to live, perhaps ever again. Yet, shortly after the mass exodus West, the wildlife returned. Seeds of native plants germinated and reestablished the tight-knitted, foot-deep root systems needed to hold in water from the odd rainstorm, and of course helped to preserve and restore the soil itself. Once the prairie grasses became the dominant plant species, all of the prairie’s animals came out of hiding, too. Kit foxes, prairie chickens, burrowing owls, prairie dogs by the millions, even antelope and small isolated herds of wild buffalo and longhorn cattle could be found wandering the restored landscape by the 1950s. Evidence of nature’s resiliency was everywhere. The depressing, lifeless landscape of the 1930s had returned to a good portion of its former glory, and without much in the way of assistance from us humans. In fact, it was because we left it alone by going off to fight the good fight that it was able to reach into its deep reserves of seeds buried under the sun-parched dust and rejuvenate a water-starved part of America.
Big Foot
Today, the world is getting hungrier by the minute. Basic nutrition, 1,500 calories of disease-free food, is already considered a luxury in some parts of Africa and India. Riots and hoarding routinely follow news about crop failures and projected shortages, especially when rice is the crop. The black market abounds with contraband rice and other essential grains, too, often confiscated from nongovernmental organizations (NGO) relief efforts to attempt to alleviate death by starvation. Darfur is a prime example of this current chaotic state of affairs. As alarming as all this sounds, it’s conceded by almost everyone, including the most pessimistic of the agro-critics, that the world is still in pretty good shape in terms of the amount of food produced. It is so ironic that just to state this fact sounds like someone made the whole thing up, but alas, things are what they are. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), food has never been more available than it is now. The USDA agrees with this.
We live in a world filled with inequalities and injustices so egregious that we can hardly bring ourselves to think about them. All the while, the earth’s rapidly changing climate continues to point the way to an unprecedented upheaval in just about everything, but especially about where we can and cannot grow our food. Over the next twenty to thirty years we humans will experience a transition period in which established, proven agricultural practices will no longer be able to meet the needs of a rising population. Just look at what we have already carved out of virtually every terrestrial ecosystem for our farming needs: a landmass equivalent to the entire continent of South America, an outrageous agricultural footprint, and not just from a land-use perspective, either. Almost all farming requires some form of irrigation, and on a global scale uses around 70 percent of the available freshwater to do so. What suffers most in this case is the availability of drinking water. Water that’s free of infectious diseases and toxins is becoming scarce in many places, especially where drinking water was already at a premium. In some water-challenged countries a barrel of drinking water is now valued higher than a 55 gallon drum of crude oil. In the process of irrigating fields, farming spoils the water it uses by producing runoff laden with salts and a whole catalog worth of agrochemicals applied in vast excess of what the plants really needed. Runoff can also include animal and human wastes. Taken together, farm runoff in all its forms is by far the world’s most damaging source of pollution, creating dead zones wherever major rivers empty into the ocean. While runoff is always a problem, it is an even greater problem during times of flooding. Predictions from climatologists warn that over the next forty years, flooding will likely become more frequent and more severe, and will occur in many places that have never experienced this kind of environmental disturbance before. Agricultural runoff has already trashed numerous estuaries, as it makes its way from rivers out to the open ocean. In fact, no other species has ever disturbed the earth as much as we have, not even the dinosaurs. With another 3 billion of us on the way, most of whom will live in less developed countries (LDC), it is est
imated that we will need to set aside another Brazil’s worth of land (109 hectares) to allow food production to continue as it’s practiced today if we are to meet their caloric needs. That amount of additional arable land simply does not exist. If people are starving, and indeed they are, then it’s due entirely to issues related to maldistribution and mean-spirited politics, not actual crop shortages. That is largely because we have learned how to force every last radish, ear of corn, head of lettuce, strawberry, and everything else we grow from land that was never biologically able to do so without our help.
Ribbit
In addition to killing off most of the world’s nurseries for shellfish and crustaceans, the overuse and misuse of agrochemicals has led to widespread ecological disruption in other zones, too. Two related examples will illustrate the point, although many others would equally qualify. In numerous wetlands throughout northern Minnesota, an unusual phenomenon has been noted and tracked. For at least the last ten years, a growing percentage of frog populations, mostly Rana pipiens, have been overproducing hermaphrodites, ordinarily a rare occurrence in nature. The cause of this teratogenic epidemic, elegantly documented by dedicated frog researchers including Dr. Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley, could have been certain chemicals known for their ability to interrupt frog development. In the end, only one emerged as the guilty toxin: atrazine, a commonly used herbicide. Atrazine is widely used to control a variety of weeds that compete with crops such as wheat and corn. Runoff into wetlands, particularly in the upper Midwest of the United States, has had a major negative effect on frog and largemouth bass development, causing huge numbers to convert to hermaphrodites (i.e., animals that have both male and female sex organs). Other effects of atrazine include inhibition of the immune system, placing frogs and other amphibians such as salamanders at higher risk from infectious diseases caused by trematode parasites. In April 2006, the European Union banned the use of atrazine. As of this writing, the United States has yet to follow their example.
The atrazine problem has sounded the alarm as an example of the unintended consequences of using an agrochemical whose mode of action was either not fully explored or just ignored by the manufacturer. In a series of related studies carried out in California, leopard frogs with deformed limbs or extra limbs were found to be present in unusually high numbers in ponds situated within intensive agricultural settings. They were examined for potential causes and given a complete toxicology screen. A particular species of trematode parasite (Ribeiroia) was found to be the only common feature among many other possible causes. Researchers further determined that frog susceptibility to the infection was increased by prior exposure to atrazine, which adversely affected the frog’s immune system. This herbicide is widely used throughout California in many agricultural situations. In the laboratory, the parasite was shown to cause leg deformities in a dose-dependent fashion. Interestingly, the parasite affecting California frogs has yet to be isolated from similarly affected frogs in the Midwest. More work is obviously needed.
The above findings are reminiscent of Rachel Carson’s original call to arms in the 1960s, in which she identified DDT as the culprit. In her chiding of the agrochemical industry in her book Silent Spring, Carson did not condemn them entirely for producing vast quantities of DDT; rather, she mainly took to task those who used that powerful chemical in ways for which it had never been intended. Today, we find ourselves coming full circle to yet another catastrophic head-on collision with the same industry. When will we learn to use our intellectual gifts wisely and in a focused manner to spare those life forms in nature that we value by fully testing each and every agrochemical before unleashing them on the farm? Apparently, the earth can be used as a guinea pig for new agrochemicals until harm is proven, while humans are protected from misuse of drugs by stringent standards that govern the pharmaceutical industry, which is so regulated, that it now takes on average ten years before a new chemo-therapeutic agent becomes commercialized.
Enough negativity for the moment. We should probably pause here and reflect on what we have accomplished, regardless of the ecological price we have had to pay for inventing methods to achieve a predictable food supply. These methods have allowed the human population to rise to 6.7 billion strong as of June 2009. With enough of us here now, we should be able to collectively rethink how we can get out of this mess and get on with our lives more in harmony with the land.
The Haves
Every bit of today’s farming in the developed world is driven by technology. New kinds of farm equipment, new planting strategies, global-positioning systems for microcrop selection, and other high-tech approaches have extended the life of most soils far beyond their natural carrying capacity for producing, regardless of the crop in question. Research results from numerous graduate schools of agriculture throughout the world have led the way in changing what once was a hit-or-miss situation with regard to what and where we can farm into a predictable science of crop production. The agrochemical industries have been quick to adopt these new findings and have commercialized them to not only help the farmer but also to bolster their own profit margins. The Ag business is booming; fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide product lines have become their bread and butter. No one denies the fact that these products have helped greatly in ushering in the second green revolution. Yield per acre for nearly every crop improves each year and will likely continue to do so for a few more years in many places. That is not to say that there are no problems looming on the near horizon, even for those fortunate countries with minimal environmental impact on their agricultural industries. But fossil fuels also figure into the equation. Higher yields are linked to increased fossil-fuel use by new farming machines. In the United States, more than 20 percent of all burned fuels goes to agriculture. The price of food is also linked to fossil-fuel use, and in 2008, the cost of food worldwide nearly doubled compared to the year 2000.
The Have-Nots
In stark contrast, things are quite different if one lives in a less developed country. As of 2009 there were forty-nine LDCs, most of which were in tropical regions of Africa and Central America. LDCs cannot afford commercially available fertilizers and are forced to use human and animal feces. This turns out to be the best way of spreading intestinal parasites from person to person. Worldwide, there are some 3 billion human infections with geohelminths (worm parasites of the gut tract transmitted through fecal contamination of the soil) that severely limit the health of an entire generation of children. Those LDCs that are located in tropical zones have poor soils to work with, save for those few countries in East Africa that are blessed with volcanically generated soils. It is well established that the vast majority of tropical soils are shallow at best, and cannot store significant amounts of carbon belowground. In addition, since it rains for a good portion of the year, valuable nutrients in the form of fallen leaves have to be recycled in days, as opposed to temperate-zone forests that may take an entire year to recycle their leaf litter into reusable nutrients. Last, tropical soils are poor in essential stored micronutrients because of leaching caused by the abundant rainfall. Growing significant amounts of food in these situations is impossible without nutrient supplementation, if not from feces then from the ashes of burned trees and shrubs that were cleared to make room for the crops (“slash and burn” agriculture). In this scenario, only three years’ worth of crops can be harvested before the itinerate farmer has to move his family to yet another pristine forest site, where he then repeats the process. It is the single most common cause of deforestation in the tropics, with gold mining coming in a distant second. It is also the reason why in the tropics malnutrition is commonplace and starvation is routine, especially when a crop fails.
Crop failure can result from any number of things that are not factors in temperate climates. One that is foremost on the minds of all sub-Saharan African farmers is invasion by locusts. This voracious insect pest can actually smell the ripening of crops hundreds of miles away and see
k them out before they can be harvested. The bottom line is that either the local affected population goes hungry and perhaps even starves to death, or they end up eating a diet heavy on locusts. Such was the case in Niger in 2003, when farmers there lost an entire year’s worth of crops to the pest.
In the end, if and when our time on this planet has run its course, the human species will be judged not by the number of billionaires it has produced, or even by the exquisite art it has created over the entire span of its evolutionary history. Rather, it will be evaluated on how well it looked after its own kind and the rest of the life forms on which it was wholly dependent. Was the human culture based on equal sharing of resources in which every individual got enough water and food to live an adequately healthy life, or was it a species that encouraged greed and hoarding of resources for one group or country at the expense of others? We must answer this question in advance if we are to change from a destructive force of nature into one that has learned the true value of symbiosis. Learning how to provide for ourselves in every way—including producing food—in ways that do not encroach on the rights of others, such as the hardwood forest, will test our ability to think through the problem until we have solved it. I believe we can.
Chapter 4
Tomorrow’s Agriculture
There is nothing wrong with change, as long as it is in the right direction.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
Rapid climate change (RCC) is the most important environmental issue that we face today, and it will continue to command our attention for the foreseeable future. It is literally rearranging the terrestrial landscape, and in ways that we have only recently begun to decipher, thanks to a new generation of satellites designed to measure things such as sea surface temperature, cloud formation, and droughts that affect crop production (see the images at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov).
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