The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  Soil covers itself. On any bare patch, a green carpet of plants and weeds sprouts immediately, protecting the earth from the elements. Whispers of grass, poking their way out of sidewalk cracks, are evidence that even urban soil, sheathed in concrete, hankers for protection.

  As the plants grow up, the roots grow down, until eventually the roots (and dead grass, if cut and left on the surface) decompose into a sheet of humus. This nearly magical process—recommissioning plant material into organic matter—is accomplished by soil organisms, from earthworms and insects down to bacteria, the proletariat of the soil. The humus is then turned into salts—not the salt we sprinkle on food, but nitrates and phosphates, which help the plants grow. Add animals into a system, and their manure can help bring about the same outcome, but more quickly—in just a few months rather than several years. There is faster decay and faster growth.

  That’s a rough explanation of a complex system, but the core of the idea is that soil sustains itself (and actually improves itself) by working in a circle. Live roots become dead roots. Dead roots become food for soil organisms. What’s not eaten either nourishes new grass or becomes humus, a kind of long-term bank account that provides for the future needs of plants.

  What happens when farming is introduced? We upset the balance. By harvesting crops, we extract and export (and eventually eat) soil fertility, which requires that an equal or greater amount be returned to the soil. Sir Albert Howard, the British scientist and father of organic agriculture, called this the Law of Return, the word law suggesting—rightly, it turns out—that it’s nonnegotiable. Unless fertility is restored, soils suffer. Restoring fertility is the key to soil health, which means it’s key for flavor, as well.

  There are three parts to soil fertility, and Klaas described them to me by using the analogy of a successful company. The first is the profit part—we cash in on this in the harvest. Then there is the working capital—the engine of any business, which in the case of soil fertility are things like manures and composts that feed the soil directly. Finally, there’s the reserve, the bankable funds that feed the company’s productivity over the long run. Humus serves this purpose; as Albrecht said, it’s what gives any soil its “constitution.” Without all three in good working order, a company is likely to go bankrupt.

  Farmers have pretty much always understood soil fertility—even if they couldn’t explain it—and when they broke the law of return, either because they didn’t have animal manure or because they didn’t know how to apply it, they simply moved on to virgin land. Virgin land brims with fertility, so one needn’t be concerned with depletion—until, of course, it is depleted—as colonial Americans quickly learned.

  In their book Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas argue that, historically, food empires such as ancient Rome and Greece and medieval Europe built their success on the same system of careless banking. They grew food and transported it long distances to feed a growing population. They cashed in on the fertility without paying back the bank. This worked for a while, but ultimately the soils stopped producing.

  A CHEMICAL APPROACH

  Among the most important ingredients for fertility is nitrogen. Plants demand it; without it, they cannot grow. Nitrogen can be restored to the soil in two ways. The first is through leguminous plants like beans and peas (or, in Klaas’s example, clover), which “fix” nitrogen from the air.

  The other is through manure, which contains nitrogen (in the form of either ammonium or organic material) as well as other valuable nutrients. Historically, it was held in such high esteem for its value to the farm that, as late as the 1900s, a French girl from the countryside had her dowry measured by the amount of manure produced on her family’s farm. But this method of fertilization has a couple of drawbacks. Not all of manure’s nitrogen is available to the soil. And it’s a time-consuming process: animals graze slowly, and as long as they’re doing so, the land isn’t available for growing food.

  Farmers found their solution in 1840 with the publication of Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, by the German chemist Justus von Liebig. Rather than recycle nutrients, Liebig suggested that farmers could simply add certain chemical amendments to the soil. He reduced soil fertility to just three nutrients indispensible for plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—N-P-K, in shorthand.

  It seems crazy to think that soil’s rich biological fertility could be ignored in favor of just three chemical elements. But from a farmer’s point of view, the logic is tantalizing. If it’s the minerals in manure that provide fertility, why not just add in the minerals and forget the manure altogether? Age-old and laborious farming techniques no longer seemed so important when a one-way transfer of nutrients proved not only possible but also highly efficient.

  David Montgomery, in his book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, argues that Liebig’s discovery was a pivotal point in humans’ understanding of the universe, in that it showed us how to manipulate nature:

  Now a farmer just had to mix the right chemicals into the dirt, add seeds, and stand back to watch the crops grow. Faith in the power of chemicals to catalyze plant growth replaced agricultural husbandry and made both crop rotations and the idea of adapting agricultural methods to the land seem quaint . . . large-scale agro-chemistry became conventional farming.

  If the death of wheat is impossible to pin on any single thing—a “conjugation of seemingly unrelated events”—the demise of soil is more transparent. There was motive (farmers working to produce as much as possible), justification (increasingly exhausted soils), and now the means (science). Liebig’s findings opened the door for a few simple drivers of plant growth to replace the natural complexity of healthy soils.

  Liebig’s N-P-K model might have revolutionized farmers’ thinking, but it did not do it overnight. Initially, at least, buying minerals was prohibitively expensive.

  Another German chemist named Fritz Haber would help change that. In 1909, Haber succeeded in tapping into the atmosphere’s reservoir of nitrogen gas and turning it into molecules useful to living things. Like legumes, his new process “fixed” nitrogen, but in a handy and highly concentrated chemical form that farmers could simply feed to their soil. This Haber-Bosch process (Carl Bosch gets credit for upsizing the invention, in 1913, to factory scale) produces liquid ammonia, the raw material for making nitrogen fertilizer. By the time World War II was over, some of the munitions factories that had produced so abundantly for the war effort had been converted, in some cases literally overnight, to producing chemical fertilizer. (Ammonium nitrate is also the key ingredient in explosives.) Suddenly our attention turned from winning the world war to winning the war with nature.

  If there is such a thing as a smoking gun in the murder of soil, this was probably it. Natural limits on crop growing became irrelevant. As long as there was nitrogen (the air has a limitless supply) and the energy to run ammonia factories (which, thanks to the growth of the petroleum industry, there was), farmers would never again need to run animals on farmland or rotate their crops. Specialization was suddenly not only possible but practical.

  Writer and journalist Michael Pollan, who’s often described the pitfalls of an industrialized food chain, sees this relentless drive to monoculture as the “original sin” of agriculture. Monocultures breed more monocultures: once you’ve determined what it means to be efficient, and you have the technology to do it, why wouldn’t you, for instance, remove cows and haying from your farm and just grow corn?

  Which is exactly what happened. In 1900, diversification (at least on some level) was inherent to agriculture; 98 percent of farms had chickens, 82 percent grew corn, and 80 percent raised milk cows and pigs. Less than a hundred years later, only 4 percent of farms had chickens, 25 percent grew corn, 8 percent had milk cows, and 10 percent raised pigs. And, in many cases, the farms producing these commodities did so exclusively.


  Armed with synthetic fertilizers and new plant varieties (bred to soak up more and more nitrogen), grain farmers saw incredible results. Wheat yields at least doubled between 1900 and the 1960s. And corn showed even more staggering increases. Today we’re growing corn on fewer acres yet harvesting four times as many bushels (10.8 billion in 2012, versus 2.7 billion in 1900 ).

  Along with the new monocultures, meat production was transformed as well. Cows no longer needed to roam the fields and supply manure for soil fertility, so there was no reason for them to leave the barn. The farmer brought the field to them. As the system became more refined, and the animals’ living conditions more confined, farmers gained far greater control over protein production. Feed mills, feedlots, slaughterhouses—the entire animal food chain became industrialized.

  Not coincidentally, flavorful food dies a little, too, at this point. What Pollan called the original sin of monoculture also helped pave the way for the original sin of food preparation: large-scale food processing. The specialization of farming, and the reduction in crop prices, allowed the food-processing industry to take hold. Using technology developed to feed the military during World War II, the industry created processed food that saved time and liberated women from cooking.

  The rise of the American processed-food industry is nearly always examined through the lens of convenience, and of course there’s truth to the claim. But at the heart of these changes was Haber’s invention, which, by freeing the farmer from the constraints of nature, allowed the industrialization of the food industry to flourish. Some see Haber’s invention as the savior of mankind. Today about three billion people depend on synthetic nitrogen to grow the crops they eat, and in coming years the number will likely only grow. Others argue that Haber’s science has saturated the planet with excess nitrogen, creating a profound chemical dependency in agriculture and, in the process, precipitating many of the most vexing environmental problems we face today: soil erosion, global warming, pollution of streams and rivers, and the fouling of the world’s oceans.

  For good or ill, it’s hard to think of many scientific discoveries that have had a more profound effect on the world. It’s also hard to think of a discovery that’s been more disastrous for the flavor of food.

  SPEAKING FOR THE SOIL

  Not everyone bought into the degradation of soil life. The problems with the chemical approach to farming (what we now call conventional agriculture) were apparent almost from the beginning. As early as 1924, Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher and father of biodynamic agriculture, was warning farmers against a reductive approach to growing food, because he believed it harmed subtle ecological relationships that were not fully understood.

  But the opposition might have found its most influential spokesperson in an English botanist named Sir Albert Howard. Like William Albrecht, Howard saw soil health as a kind of universal string theory, a belowground answer to everything possible aboveground. Howard’s prescription was to begin “treating the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.” He studied soil science but also botany, plant science, animal science, medicine, and, late in his career, economics, because he felt all of these disciplines were ultimately connected.

  Disenchanted with the narrowness of university research (he found the work of “learning more and more about less and less” stifling), Howard decided to put his learning into practice. At the age of thirty-two, he was sent to India as a development worker to teach Indian peasants some of the modern ways of growing food. He remained for twenty-five years and ultimately determined that it was the Indian peasants who had taught him. Nature, he came to understand through close field observation, was the “supreme farmer.” Weeds and pests were his “professors of agriculture.”

  His book An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940, later emerged from this work and became the bible for the organic movement. If healthy soils were to last—if they were to be “sustainable,” as we now say—they would need constant feeding. Howard advocated on behalf of the soil’s tiny underground livestock. When fed well, he argued, they do their work to support the fertility of land and lead to a lot of good things, including more flavorful food. According to Howard, vegetables raised on a diet of N-P-K are “tough, leathery and fibrous: they also lack taste.” But vegetables grown with humus are “tender, brittle, and possess abundant flavour.”

  Howard’s virtue was neither pious nor self-serving. He was calm and steady in his faith in nature, and his writing is so matter-of-fact (this from a lab scientist, remember) and effortlessly contemporary that his books read more like thoughtful journals than the organic manifestos they would become.

  “The maintenance of soil fertility is the real basis of health and of resistance to disease,” he wrote in An Agricultural Testament. Howard saw farmers heading in the other direction. He saw the chemical trend as, at best, shortsighted and, at worst, a folly that would result in the collapse of soil’s productive capacity. Artificial manures, he believed, “lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.”

  Healthy soil brings vigorous plants, stronger and smarter people, cultural empowerment, and the wealth of a nation. Bad soil, in short, threatens civilization. We cannot have good food—healthy, sustainable, or delicious—without soil filled with life.

  CHAPTER 6

  BACK WHEN THE STONE BARNS Center opened for business in the spring of 2004, the soils growing the vegetables for Blue Hill were already filled with life. That wasn’t just luck. Ten years after I first read Eliot Coleman’s advice on growing healthy plants, he was hired to consult on the center’s creation. Eliot’s charge was to identify the best land on the property for cultivating vegetables.

  The first time he came to visit the site was on a crisp fall afternoon in 2002. As the daylight faded in the cold, slow burn of late November, Eliot seemed anxious. He had decided on a relatively flat, healthy field running the length of the property. But then we came to the bottom of another long field, sloping upward from the largest of the stone barns (Blue Hill’s future dining room), where the dairy cows had been milked in the 1930s and ’40s. Eliot stopped and scanned the six-acre expanse.

  “The cows probably pastured here,” he said softly, almost to himself. When I turned to look, Eliot had dropped his bag and started running. He traversed the old pasture, slaloming back and forth, dodging rocks and thistle, all along rotating his head to study the position of the waning sun. He ran past what would later become home to rows of tomatoes, cucumbers, fava beans, parsnips, and eventually the Eight Row Flint corn, until he arrived at the highest point, where he raised his finger to the sun. Then he was off again, to the northeast corner of the field, where he stopped, hands on hips, and scanned the land intently. Even in his early sixties (and still today), there was something hopeful and blithe in his pursuit. Eliot is like a wild horse—curious, observant, sly, and energized by an intuitive connection to nature. I watched him in awe.

  “Hey, fucking cool,” he said on his return, his dirty blond hair gleaming in the dull light. His eyes were wide and nearly pulsating; he looked to be breathing through them. He had a fistful of soil, and he turned his hand up so I could have a look.

  “Black enough for you?” he asked. “This is the field. Forget the other one. It’s making me hungry just thinking about what you’re going to grow here.” I asked if he had changed his mind based on the field’s position in relation to the sun.

  “The sun? Oh, hell, no. I was looking at the sun because it’s so damn beautiful right now.” He squinted his eyes, admiring the last of it setting in the distance. “No, I wanted to make sure this had been pasture for the cows.”

  Eliot explained that the field closest to the milking barns was usually the one most grazed by the cows (why walk the cattle farther than necessary at 5 a.m.?) and therefore the most mineralized by manure. In this case, he was rig
ht. The field, we later confirmed, had once been grazed by the Rockefeller family’s dairy cattle.

  “I bet there’s a deep layering of organic matter,” Eliot said. “It’s going to grow vigorous, absolutely delicious plants.”

  Having mapped out the land, Eliot was assigned his second task: help find a farmer. Here he had the good sense to consult Amigo Bob Cantisano, the legendary and widely influential sage of California organic agriculture. I first met Amigo at Laverstoke—he had been among Eliot’s Fertile Dozen. Mutton-chopped and mustached, he has thick, silvery-black Rasta hair down his back, and he speaks through a spitball of chewing tobacco, making him look more Pancho Villa–like than plain old Bob-like. (Which may explain why he’s simply called “Amigo”—the name his girlfriend gave him in high school.)

  Amigo recommended Jack Algiere, a young farmer he had grown to admire after consulting with him on an organic olive farm. “I’ve worked with so many farmers over time, I can’t remember one from the other,” he told me, though I wondered if his years spent under the herbal influence might also account for the haziness. “Sometimes I’ll work with a guy who could have been a rocket scientist if he had wanted—you know, they’ve really just got it going on up here,” he said, drilling his index finger into the side of his skull. “Jack’s one of those.”

  16.9

  Jack turned out to be as gifted as Amigo Bob promised, and as curious as Eliot about how to grow great-tasting food.

  One day, during an especially cold stretch of winter in 2006, a few years after Blue Hill at Stone Barns opened, Jack came running into the kitchen, smiling big. Jack has curly hair and—especially back when his beard was still full and flowing—the look of a man who works closely with nature. You might say (although he wouldn’t) that he’s sort of a cross between Paul Bunyan and a young Bob Dylan.