by Dan Barber
One explanation for the population declines can be traced back to advances in farming technology and the subsequent consolidation of farmland. New tractors and other farm machinery did more work in less time. Take, for example, the combine, introduced in the 1830s. Until then, farmers spent hours harvesting, threshing (separating the edible part of the grain from the surrounding chaff), and cleaning their grain to prepare it for milling. True to its name, the combine consolidated these functions into a single machine, mechanizing the harvest and, in keeping with the Mennonites’ predictions, enabling fewer farmers to farm even more land. Between 1950 and 1975, the number of farms in the country declined by half, as did the number of people on farms. And the average size of farms nearly doubled, from 216 acres in 1950 to 416 acres in 1974. Nowhere were these trends more apparent than in the Wheat Belt.
But underlying all of this was a lack of biological diversity. Verlyn Klinkenborg, an author and editor who often writes about agricultural issues, argues that biological complexity has direct implications for social and cultural robustness. In other words, the Wheat Belt’s cultural decline is a reflection of its denuded landscape—the product of “what nature has made of us and we have made of nature.”
However unwittingly, chefs and bakers have played a part in that decline. Profiting from mountains of cheap flour, we’ve bought into the system. We’re complicit in the depopulation of the prairie, just as we have blood on our hands for the death of wheat.
CHAPTER 4
LATE ONE SWELTERING June morning a year and a half after my initial trip to his farm, I found myself back in Klaas’s fields. Klaas, intent on schooling me in the diversity of grass, told me to focus on a small circle of ground, no more than a few feet in diameter. We inched around the perimeter as he provided a grass-by-grass playlist.
“Here’s the wild garlic, and the yellow rocket, and that right there is”—Klaas squatted low for a gopher’s-eye view, brushing the other grasses aside—“yup, wild radish, right underneath.” I followed him, head down. The intensity of his obsession for the smallest detail—a divot in the ground, a grass that looked out of place—seemed almost comical, considering the vastness that surrounded us.
“Okay . . .” Klaas said slowly, stopping at a particularly lush spot. “Oat grass. And there’s fleabane, bladder campion, foxtail, dandelion, red clover, chamomile, quack grass—couch grass in England.”
“Weeds?” I asked.
“Grasses and legumes and forbs, and, yes, weeds. But ‘weed’ is an arbitrary word. When I was in Agronomy 101, the definition of a weed was anything that grows where you don’t want it to grow. How preposterous is that?”
Aldo Leopold asked the same question in his 1943 essay “What Is a Weed?” and answered it with a warning about blacklisting grasses for no other reason than what we mistakenly perceive to be their value.
“If I lose crop yields to weeds, I’m the one doing something wrong,” Klaas continued. “They’re not doing damage to the pasture. The opposite, actually; they tell me when I’m doing damage.” He pointed. “Orchard grass. I love orchard grass. Very pleasing to look at,” he said, taking his own advice. “And, hey! Hairy vetch—you know vetch, right? Great cover crop. And here’s sow thistle. I think that’s sow thistle—yep, sure, that’s thistle, for sure.”
The year Klaas stopped using chemicals, he began reading old farming books to learn how to eradicate weeds naturally. “I discovered that either they didn’t write a lot of books about weed control before 1945 or someone had thrown them all away,” he said. After a long search, he came across a book in a Cornell University library written by a German agricultural researcher named Bernard Rademacher. Rademacher was the leading authority on weeds in the 1930s, and he participated in some of the first research on chemical herbicides.
“Rademacher wrote something that turned our thinking upside down. He argued that successful weed control is all about promoting the growth of the crop: ‘Vigorous plant stands are the best means for eradicating weeds.’” Klaas gave me a goofy smile. “Vigorous plant stands are the best means for eradicating weeds—I read that to Mary-Howell and we just looked at each other and said: ‘Duh! Focus on the best plants! How come we didn’t think of that?’”
Klaas realized that the best way to ensure a healthy plant was through healthy soil. Attend to the plant’s needs and it will take care of itself.
I first learned about plant health from Eliot Coleman, who writes about the subject often. He was my Rademacher, but instead of writing about plant health and weeds, Eliot spoke of plant health and pest management.
Eliot claims that a healthy plant, living in healthy soil, doesn’t need pest eradication, because pests don’t attack healthy plants. It’s a simple idea, but powerful. Feed the soil, and the tiny creatures that live in it, with care and attention, and the pests will almost always be incapable of inflicting damage. In that sense, the idea of “Mother Earth” is turned around. We actually have to mother the earth, by feeding the soil properly. If we don’t, plants get sick. Or, as Eliot prefers to say, stressed. The sick part comes later.
The easiest way to understand plant stress is to think about what happens to our own bodies when we’re overworked or sleep-deprived. Our immunity weakens, and we’re more vulnerable to colds or, over time, disease. A small aphid attack is the plant equivalent of a cold; a flea beetle infestation is like a disease. As the plant’s health deteriorates, pests overtake its natural defenses.* Applying a pesticide spray, as chemical farmers do, works to eradicate the pest but not the root cause. Take medicine for flu symptoms and you can function—your friends might not even notice—but you’re not healthy.
Eliot once illustrated this point with the story of a flea beetle attack he witnessed early in his career at an organic garden in Maine. In a large field of cabbage, he noticed a lone rutabaga plant that had somehow been mixed in by mistake. The cabbage plants were “healthy and vigorous,” but the rutabaga was swarming with flea beetles. A few days later, it was dead. Upon closer inspection, the farmer realized that the rutabaga had become so overgrown it had detached from its roots:
Whatever the cause of its demise, the flea beetles knew the plant was under stress three days before there were any visible signs. When the rutabaga died the flea beetles did not move to the cabbages. Because the cabbages were not stressed. Obviously insects cannot maintain a population on unstressed plants because such plants do not provide conditions conducive to insect nutrition and multiplication. The cabbages remained pest free. The organic farmer would look for the cause. The chemical farmer would treat the symptom and just spray.
Treating causes instead of symptoms is as elegant, but not as simple, as it sounds. To address the cause, you need to look for underlying problems—which means you need to have a certain kind of worldview.
It helps if your worldview includes the belief that nature knows best. A plant suffering from an infestation of pests is not a shortcoming of nature; it’s a plant you’re not mothering well. Either the nutrient balance in the soil is wrong or your crops aren’t being rotated properly or the variety cultivated is wrong for the area—or any one of dozens of other possibilities. Your job is to figure it out. Since the chemical farmer has the option of spraying the problem away, he tends not to bother.
BUILDING FENCES
My grandmother Ann never spoke about weeds or plant health. I’m sure she knew nothing about the subject. But every spring, she had coffee with Mr. Mitchell, the farmer who owned the cattle that grazed Blue Hill Farm, and Mr. Mitchell always said the same thing. “Ms. Strauss, my cows don’t eat much of anything until they get to your farm. I don’t know what it is about your grass, but they fatten right up.” When Ann heard “they fatten right up,” she looked like a child in front of a mountain of ice cream. She was proud of her grass, even if she had nothing to do with its health or virtue.
Mr. Mitchell’s praise worked just as well for an impression
able kid like me. I knew Blue Hill Farm was the most special place in the world, but now there was proof—bragging rights that meant a lot (who could argue with a fattened cow?), even if I never bragged (because who would care?).
Then a change happened on the farm that, at the time, I hardly noticed. The cows began to congregate at the fence line, necks down, to eat the perimeter grass. They stretched their necks under the fence to reach grasses that apparently were worth the strain. Then they reached over the barbed wire for a few bites. Pretty soon the cows ignored the fence altogether, pushing their way through and roaming the property. They tended to find their way to the gardens and then fan out all over the lawn. By August this was happening two or three times a week. I would wake to Ann snapping up her window shade and hear, “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” (If they were already in her beloved flower garden, it was “Oh, God damn it.”) The cows appeared gratified by their extra effort. Ann was furious.
By late morning, Mr. Mitchell’s sons, Robert and Dale, would arrive to usher the cows back into the pasture. We’d spend the next hour “fixing fence,” as the brothers called it—walking the line to find the weak places the cows might exploit. It felt like meaningful work, and it placated my grandmother, but by the end of the summer its futility had become clear. Unless we built the Berlin Wall, there was no way to ensure the cows would remain in the pasture.
Many years later, long after my grandmother died, I read the work of André Voisin, a French biochemist who studied the link between soil, animal, and human health. Voisin tells the story of French farmwomen in the eighteenth century who fed their cattle with roadside grass because they had no land of their own. These cows ended up yielding large amounts of milk, much more than other people’s pastured cows did. So farmers purchased the women’s calves for large sums, only to realize that once on pasture, the cows produced less milk. The farmers thought they were buying superior animals, but in fact it was the free, roadside grass that made the difference. Its diversity met the cows’ nutritional needs better than any poorly managed pasture.
Perhaps the cows at Blue Hill Farm had been telling us something similar. Mr. Mitchell’s praise of the land might not, for all I know, have been genuine—a small lie to soften my grandmother and persuade her to let the cattle graze for free. Or maybe the health of the pasture had diminished over time. Either way, the cows were telling us something, but instead of wondering what it was, we went ahead and fixed fence. We secured the borders, or tried to, because handling the symptoms of the problem (a faulty fence line) was a lot easier than dealing with its root cause (a hungry cow).
THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOIL
Klaas took Rademacher’s wisdom of weed control and made it his own. He moved away from his lifelong mission to destroy weeds—a Sisyphean pursuit for any farmer—and took up a suite of interrelated strategies to strengthen the plant.
“You can’t compartmentalize farming,” Klaas told me. “Soil fertility here, crop rotations over there, weed control somewhere else—it doesn’t work over time. All decisions should connect to plant vigor.” If plant vigor is properly supported, weeds can’t compete. Which was Klaas’s point. Is a weed really a weed if it doesn’t compete with the plant?
Klaas and I walked to another field, this one growing spelt, an ancient species of wheat that has become one of the more profitable crops on Klaas’s farm. I wanted to learn about the mechanics of growing wheat like spelt, but Klaas was still focused on weeds.
“At a certain point you start to notice patterns—and when I see patterns, either in a repetition of certain grasses or the absence of others, I see it as the soil talking to me,” he said. “I know it sounds corny, but the soil has a language, and its language is at least partly expressed through what weeds are growing and not growing, what’s strong and what’s weak. The trick is to learn the language of the soil. To learn what the weeds are telling us.”
If you pay attention to which weeds proliferate, the soil will tell you what it needs. The presence of chicory or wild carrot or the lovely Queen Anne’s lace means the soil is low in fertility, a classic problem that arises when you harvest crops without returning nutrients to the soil. Milkweed is a sign that the soil lacks zinc; wild garlic means low sulfur. Foxtail grows most often in soils where water is poorly filtered, and thistle thrives when soil is too compact, so there’s not enough room and air for proper germination.
In Klaas’s telling, soil communicates pretty clearly, perhaps even more clearly than people. It doesn’t mince words, doesn’t get passive-aggressive when hungry or annoyed. What it needs is expressed directly. How much of what it needs depends on the type of soil and where it’s located. Factoring in these variables, Klaas can take corrective steps for the next planting to satisfy the soil’s demands.
That’s not to suggest that soil is needy. Soils can just as easily be overwhelmed by too much fertilization. I learned this lesson from Eliot Coleman as it relates to pests. Soils spoiled with an excess of nutrients become too rich. They lose balance. And pests eventually attack the weakness.
“The crops start to resemble a guy on the street who’s had too much to drink,” Eliot told me once. “He slowly walks toward you, and you know something isn’t quite right, but from where you’re standing you can’t put your finger on the problem. That’s what your crop starts to look like before an insect attack—not quite right.”
Klaas approved of the analogy. “Among the hardest lessons to learn in farming is that too much of a good thing isn’t good,” he said. Because farmers see how fertilization brings growth, they’re often motivated to overfertilize as insurance. The effect can be destructive. Galinsoga, a weed feared by every small farmer, grows out of soil thirsty for carbon—which it needs to sober up after the inebriating effects of too much fertilizer. It’s how the soil fights to balance the excess nutrients.
I told Klaas about a farmer who once told me that the sight of galinsoga is a declaration of war, that he would mow all his crops, take down the peas and the carrots—everything—just to get rid of the stuff. Klaas said he must have been applying too much fertilizer and guessed—correctly—that his farm was not organic.
“On a small farm,” he said, “you can deal with the problem of weeds by constantly weeding, or you can become a nozzlehead and just spray the weed or the pest away.”
On a grain farm the size of Klaas’s, weeding by hand is impossible. So weed suppression (without spraying the problem away) means listening to the soil and maintaining plant health. If your farm becomes so large you can’t identify the different grasses and what they are telling you about the health of the soil, then you’re not really farming, at least not at the right scale. Limiting yourself to what you can see, either by choice or, like the Mennonites, through the decree of steel tires, isn’t such an antiquated idea.
A CASE OF VELVETLEAF
So how do you grow great wheat?
I think that’s what I was learning. But I couldn’t be sure, because by late afternoon that same June day, Klaas and I had covered only two fields, and all the talk had been about wild grasses (formerly known to me as weeds). I was also learning that while I traffic, for the most part, in simple sums, farmers like Klaas deal in calculus. Klaas had spent the day not so much answering questions as making connections, a habit that made him slightly less frustrating to consult than the Oracle of Delphi.
I finally got my answer when we walked into a field growing soybeans, another profitable crop for the farm. Klaas reached for a broad-leaved green plant that seemed to be everywhere and, to my rookie eye, looked very nearly as vibrant as the soybeans around it. Velvetleaf, he told me. He turned over one of its leaves and smiled broadly. The underside was blanketed with tiny flies. There must have been several hundred, maybe even several thousand, on that one leaf. He turned over another infected leaf, and then another. Walking down the row, he continued turning leaves over for me to inspect, like a magician showing his cards.
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br /> “I wanted you to see what I consider to be my greatest success,” he said.
That the velvetleaf is a noxious weed (yes, absolutely a weed) and the tiny flies are a troublesome pest named whitefly not only didn’t trouble Klaas—it thrilled him. He was in that moment as satisfied and contented as I would ever know him to be.
Why the exuberance in the middle of a field riddled with pests and weeds? Klaas found inspiration in another soil scientist. “When we went organic, I started reading Dr. William Albrecht. “You know how sometimes we read something and immediately recognize we’re not going to think quite the same way again? That’s what it was like to read Albrecht. He said, ‘See what you’re looking at.’ I love that quote. Think about that. It requires close observation without prejudice. How often do we see something without really seeing?”
Klaas looked down at the velvetleaf blanketed with flies and held it in his hands. “A field of velvetleaf with an infestation of whiteflies can actually be a good thing. It can be the greatest success, actually, but you’ll only understand it if you’re able to see what you’re looking at.”