The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  Albrecht, the longtime chairman of the Department of Soils at the University of Missouri, was born on a farm in central Illinois in 1888. After spending some time as a Latin professor, Albrecht studied biology and agricultural science at the University of Illinois as farmers plowed up the surrounding prairie soil. He earned a medical degree but then abandoned formalized medicine because (like Eliot Coleman) he found treating disease much less interesting, and a lot less effective, than exploring its causes. Albrecht went to the cause.

  He began with a simple observation, which more or less informed his life’s work. He saw cows straining their necks to eat grass on the other side of the fence, much like the cows I had once watched at Blue Hill Farm. Why, he asked himself, would a cow risk entanglement with barbed wire when acres of pasture were free for the taking? The question (which I never bothered to ask about our cows as a boy) led Albrecht to discover that cows—supposedly “dumb beasts,” passive and indiscriminate about their diet—actually spend their days in one long, exhaustive search for more nutritious pasture. Cows determine their next bite by swiping their facial hairs against the tips of the grass. The hairs act like antennae, sensitive to the grass’s richness. A quick calculation is made: Does this plant hold enough nutrition to be worth expending the energy required to take a bite? In many cases, Albrecht noticed, the cows didn’t bother.

  He had a hunch that these discerning diners made choices based on minerals potentially available in certain grasses. Chemistry, in other words, could explain a cow’s preference. Albrecht watched as cows walked past what was commonly considered “good grass” to eat seventeen different types of weeds that had been fertilized with calcium limestone, magnesium and phosphate. No wonder the cows deemed the other grass a waste of their energy.

  “The cow is not classifying forage crops by variety name, nor by tonnage yield per acre nor by luscious green growth,” he wrote, but she is more adept than any biochemist at assessing their true value. Albrecht came to the humbling conclusion that we can’t really identify a healthy pasture just by looking at it—we have to really see it, and that requires a deeper understanding.

  “Albrecht embraced chemistry for the answers,” Klaas told me. “He made the direct connection between soil health and pests and weeds by determining which nutrients were lacking, or, more to his brilliance, which nutrients were out of balance in the soil. He always said, ‘Feed the soil and let the soil feed the plants.’ And he saw the whole thing as a measurable, repeatable process.”

  Either cows are smarter than people or they’re just better eaters.

  OPERATION VELVETLEAF ERADICATION

  “The field was a total disaster back then,” Klaas said, still holding the velvetleaf in his hand. He and Mary-Howell had rented the adjoining farm in 1994, after the previous farmer abandoned it out of frustration. The farmer had “misused” the plow, Klaas explained. There were several places where the topsoil was so whisper thin, you could see the subsoil.

  “It was a crime lab of past sins,” Klaas said. “He said this field was worthless. He told me it would never produce anything of value. And when I got in here to really look around, I started to believe him. Weeds were exploding. The velvetleaf was this tall—” Klaas reached his hand high above his head. “Some grew to twelve feet. They looked like trees, with root systems like trees. They were so strong, I couldn’t pull them out with my hands.”

  That first summer, he decided to just walk the field and get to know it, mimicking Albrecht’s patience for detail. Klaas saw a field depleted of fertility and set out to restore it by planting a series of different crops.

  For more than three decades, the previous farmer had primarily grown corn. “I remember his corn started to go downhill,” Klaas said. The crop got smaller, and Klaas suspected it was also losing sugar content. “Albrecht always said compromised fertility shows up first in the quality of what’s harvested,” he said.

  “You can taste decline?” I asked.

  “Yes, you can. Before yield declines, before weed and pest pressures, you can taste it. The doom before the doom.” Considering that the farmer had been growing feed corn, I thought Klaas might be exaggerating its need to be delicious. Then again, if we’re going to eat the beef, why wouldn’t we want the cow to be provided with the best feed possible? This was Albrecht’s point.

  Klaas’s first move was to plant spelt. But it wasn’t the spelt itself he was after, because in the mid-’90s a large market for spelt didn’t exist. He wanted spelt in the ground so it could pave the way for clover. Spelt is a perfect soil builder, because its extensive root systems reach deep into the earth, creating air pockets that allow the soil to breathe (aeration) and beginning what Klaas referred to as “the cleanse.” And spelt’s stalk, or straw, which Klaas plows back into the soil, provides a hearty boost of carbon.

  Clover was planted in the early spring, interspersed with the spelt that was just beginning to peek up out of the ground. Clover does the miraculous work of “fixing” nitrogen: grabbing it from the atmosphere, where nitrogen is abundant, and storing it in its roots. It also provides the soil with sugars, proteins, and minerals, and it furthers the soil’s aeration by attracting earthworms. All this had been missing from the previous farmer’s chemical regime. Synthetic fertilizers supplied the corn with nitrogen for fast growth, but the soil itself was ignored, never paid back for the harvests. According to Klaas, it was “like burning your house to keep it warm each year.”

  Nitrogen from clover is better than nitrogen from chemicals, Klaas told me later, because all the carbon keeps it in a stable form. “Without carbon, and without microbial activity in the soil, you can’t hold on to the nitrogen,” he explained. “It leaches like crazy.”

  He turned and pointed to Seneca Lake, less than a mile from where we were standing. It was picturesque and serene, but Klaas pointed out something I couldn’t have seen on my own. “Seneca used to be so clear it looked like a tall glass of water. But the nitrogen leaching from soils like this, over so many years, has darkened it. It’s polluting the great lake because the soils of Penn Yan can’t hold on to the fertility.”

  As the weather started to warm that spring, both the clover and the spelt grew in earnest. Since the spelt had a head start, it dominated the clover and was soon ready for harvest. (Had the clover dominated the spelt, we would be calling clover a noxious weed, which is why Klaas sees weed as such an arbitrary term.) With the spelt no longer competing with it for sunlight and nutrients, the clover exploded.

  “At this point, there were choices to be made,” Klaas said. “If we had cows, I’d have run them on the clover. Have you ever seen a cow on good clover grass? It’s a beautiful thing. It’s rocket fuel for ruminants. Even better, there’s no loss of minerals, because the manure returns them to the soil.” I pictured a herd of his cattle grazing energetically through the field, but then I remembered that Klaas didn’t have cows, or any animals at all, on his farm.

  “Mary-Howell doesn’t want to have to deal with animals,” he explained, adding quickly, “I don’t blame her, of course.”

  But Klaas and Mary-Howell view soil organisms as a kind of livestock in and of themselves. “What I say is, we have livestock—we have a lot of livestock on the farm—they’re just very small,” Mary-Howell once told me. “But we have to tend them with just as much intention and care as if they were larger livestock. Which means we have to feed them.”

  Klaas plowed the clover into the ground, along with what was left of the spelt stalks, which he kept instead of selling as straw. Nitrogen from the clover infused the soil, and the straw provided the expected hit of carbon—all the while supplying a rich diet for the soil’s “very small” livestock. The sick land started to heal.

  Klaas turned again to Albrecht and took a soil test. “That’s when it got really interesting,” he said.

  By “interesting,” Klaas meant complicated for those without a degree
in chemistry. Soil tests, one of Albrecht’s many contributions to the field, measure mineral levels in the soil. That means macronutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur—as well as micronutrients (otherwise known as trace elements) such as copper, iron, and manganese, which are needed only in small quantities. All are key ingredients in healthy plants—and tasty foods.

  The results of the soil test were surprising. The nitrogen levels had returned so completely that Klaas decided to plant corn. “I planned on waiting,” he explained, “but the soil test gave me a green light, and since we’re running a business here, and organic corn is always at a premium, I figured I’d go for it.” Even though the velvetleaf still persisted, the corn yield was good, with a sugar content that, while lower than those of corn harvests from his other fields, was still respectable. The gamble had been worth it.

  So what was next? Most farmers would follow a successful corn harvest with soybeans or, if feeling lucky, another planting of corn. Plant the most profitable crop, in other words, if the soil allows it.

  “I went with yellow mustard,” Klaas said, and then he leaned his head back and smiled mischievously. My expression didn’t change, which I could tell confused him. Had I known about the improbability of planting yellow mustard, I would have said, “Holy shit, Klaas. You planted a weed in your already weed-infested field?!” That’s what his Penn Yan neighbors said. Why cultivate a weed, they wondered, and on top of that lose all potential revenue on the harvest?

  The answer came from the Albrecht soil test, which had indicated a deficiency in sulfur, one of the macronutrients that’s essential for the development of vitamins in plants and plays an important role in root growth. Actually, the soil test merely proved what Klaas had already noticed: the field was filled with yellow flowers. Older farmers had always told Klaas that yellow-flowered weeds thrive in sulfur-depleted fields.

  “Here’s a classic case of ‘see what you’re looking at,’” Klaas said. “It wasn’t until the soil test confirmed a deficiency in sulfur that I could see the yellow flowers for what they were—a virtual advocacy group for the addition of sulfur.”

  Eliot Coleman has compared a good organic farmer to a skilled rock climber. Both “are interested in solutions, each one simpler and more elegant than the last.” On first glance, the analogy seems a little asymmetrical: one inelegant move by the rock climber can be catastrophic, while a bad rotation decision by the organic farmer might only amount to a few yellow flowers in his field. But as the mistakes accumulate, the results for the farmer can be just as disastrous, including a much less delicious harvest.

  And herein lies the point: if the farmer is made to believe that his rotation decisions don’t really matter, that their equivalent “next step” up the rock face isn’t critical, then he is not motivated to forgo a profitable harvest to plant yellow mustard.

  Klaas turned the mustard into the soil, allowing the sulfur to take full effect. But he knew he needed to again restore nitrogen levels. “I could have planted soybeans for the nitrogen at this point—they’re a legume, after all, so they fix nitrogen. But to be honest,” he said, leaning in very close to me as if he were afraid of offending the surrounding crop, “soy is a little lazy. It’s a profitable plant, but it’s lazy. I got more out of what I went with: kidney beans. My kidneys get top dollar for canning. Not huge money, but who cares, right? I’m banking the nitrogen that the beans are fixing into the soil for a future crop.”

  After the kidney beans, the obvious choice was to go back to corn. “I went with wheat instead,” he said, turning away too late to hide another grin. “I chose wheat because I don’t like to go too long before I plant a crop that actually feeds people. Going back to corn was totally possible—the nitrogen was there—but at the end of the day, I want people eating what I grow.”

  The fact that a farmer can make more money feeding animals than feeding people is a problem with the marketplace, Klaas said, reiterating a point he had made to me many times before. “If too much of the farm is cultivated in corn, I’m encouraging a diet where herbivores [grass eaters like cows and sheep] are fed grain.” He paused to consider the implications. “It gives me indigestion just thinking about it.”

  But then the question was, what kind of wheat? Modern wheats are hard on the soil—extractive rather than restorative, like spelt—and Klaas is judicious about planting them. “I obviously get more money from the newer varieties, but, again, I pay for it,” he said. “The full accounting includes what’s drawn from the soil bank.” Klaas chose emmer, an ancient wheat once grown throughout the American Northeast. Emmer is known for its large root systems, providing optimum yields without large fertility requirements.

  Almost as soon as the emmer had been harvested, Klaas noticed a change in the velvetleaf. “It was still there in big numbers, but it wasn’t as tall. It didn’t look as healthy,” he said. “The environment was changing.”

  A group of agricultural scientists, having heard about Klaas’s experience with the velvetleaf, came to his farm to study it. “They visited every week and eventually pinned the declining health of the velvetleaf on a fungus, anthracnose,” Klaas said. “But anthracnose had never killed anything on an organic farm. They were convinced, I think, because they were fungal guys. They knew fungus, and to them the velvetleaf was dying because of a fungus attack.” He laughed. “They turned out to be right—the velvetleaf had anthracnose—but they were wrong, too. That’s not what was killing the velvetleaf. They completely missed the whiteflies.” Klaas turned the leaf over once more so I could again see for myself. It seemed impossible that anyone could have missed them.

  “It’s true. It wasn’t until I came out here one day that I saw the velvetleaf for what it had become—a diminished, sick plant—not a healthy plant that happened to have a fungal virus. That’s when I could see it. Just like Albrecht said: See what you’re looking at. The whiteflies suddenly appeared for me. They’re nature’s cleanup crew, attacking the least fit species.”

  I looked at the soybean plants (Klaas’s most recent rotation) and realized they were growing a mere three inches from the velvetleaf, yet they remained completely untouched by the whiteflies. The soil conditions had changed so drastically that the soy had become the dominant species, impervious to attack, while the velvetleaf, once twelve feet tall with a mile of hardened roots, had shrunk. It was literally suffocating, a weed shriveling in on itself.

  CHAPTER 5

  WHY SHOULD A CHEF CARE about how farmers manage weeds and pests? Spraying the problem away has damaging environmental implications, so there’s that, of course. And because we prepare food, chefs are closer to farming than, say, lawyers and accountants are. But everyone eats, which means that chefs presumably shouldn’t be more outraged about bad soil management than lawyers or accountants are. Poor soil health, with its resulting weed and pest problems and the chemicals needed to solve them, affects chefs no more than it affects everyone else.

  Or does it? The more I learned from Klaas, the more I saw the error in that way of thinking. These kinds of questions matter quite a bit more to chefs, because how soil is managed, and how a farmer negotiates weeds and pests, is the single best predictor of how food will taste.

  Fruits, vegetables, animals—and, for that matter, grains—grown in poor soils make it harder for chefs to cook delicious food. Truly delicious, like the Eight Row Flint corn polenta I tasted as if tasting polenta for the first time. If soil is compromised, there can be no such thing as great food. Which is unfortunate, since the short history of soil in this country, like that of wheat, is another story of degradation and death.

  A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF SOIL

  Soil is alive, and not just in the metaphysical sense. It inhales and exhales, procreates, digests, and constantly changes temperature. When growing properly, soil organisms breathe as we do—taking in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide into the air. In that sense, an open field
of pasture grass is not unlike a packed stadium of football fans during a tense fourth quarter.

  And like us, soil contains a lot of tiny living creatures—a complex community of bacteria, microbes, fungi, worms, grubs, bugs, and slugs. I remember Klaas dropping to his knees during my first visit to his farm and digging to fill his palm with dirt. “Right here, there are more organisms in this soil than the entire population of Penn Yan!” he said. “That’s a lot of life to feed.” I raised my eyebrows in a futile attempt to look impressed. But Klaas was merely being modest; the number of creatures in soil is really much greater. One teaspoon of the good black stuff has been said to contain more than a million living organisms, though scientists now consider even this figure far too conservative—it’s well over a billion. Soil is literally teeming with life.

  Klaas’s handful of soil most likely contained ten thousand different species of microbes—not individual organisms, but species—all of which aggressively modify their habitats to suit themselves. And yet they are also so interrelated, so connected to one another and the surrounding ecosystem, that studying them individually under a microscope has until very recently been next to impossible. They simply cannot survive long enough without their neighbors.

  Soil has a personality, too. It manipulates its environment to get what it needs (think of weeds), and, according to Klaas, it talks to you—if you learn to speak the language. In his book The Tree, Colin Tudge describes living tissue, with its complex design and endless capacity for self-renewal, as “not a thing but a performance.” The same is true of soil. Now that I was beginning to see that food’s flavor depends on soil health, and that soil health depends on a thriving population of organisms, I wanted to know, if only in the crudest way, how the performance works.