The Land Institute and the 50-Year Farm Bill

Agriculture is a major, if not the major contributor to loss of biodiversity, unclean water and ecosystem destruction, with ominous possible prospects for the future of our survival.  But there are many people thinking about how to lessen its impact.  Mark Bittman did a fine job a few weeks ago describing the work of one of those people.  Wes Jackson and The Land Institute that he founded 37 years ago on the Kansas prairie represent a growing awareness that agribusiness can and must change.  They are working to make it possible for agriculture to transition from annual monoculture, 80% of agriculture today, to perennial polyculture, that is, from growing a single crop that must be planted from seed every year to fields of multiple, complementary perennial plants chosen to contain pests and weeds, and contribute to soil retention, not erosion.

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The Land has done the hard work of perennializing a grain they call Kernza, although more needs to be done before it's finally commercially available, perhaps within 8 years. (See this for a report on bread made with Kernza flour.)  We think The Land will deserve a Nobel Peace Prize when Kernza's finally on the market.  Norman Borlaug was awarded one in 1970 for his work on the Green Revolution.  Perennializing grain will be even more significant, as it has the potential to decouple farmers from agribusiness and its unsustainable practices growing hybrid annual grains requires (indeed, to reverse many of the effects of the Green Revolution).  Agribusiness is big business, but trades short-term profit for long-term survival.

Why is soil erosion such a problem?  Because soil is essentially a non-renewable resource; it takes on the order of 1000 years to create 2 centimeters of topsoil, which, given conventional monocultural practices, can wash away in a single season.  Industrial-agriculture relies on monocultures based on annual plants that must be replanted each year, and that means plowing and loosening the soil.  And, annuals, with short lifespans, only put down short roots.  

When soil erodes, it takes with it tons of toxic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers that were applied during the growing season, which end up in rivers, and then the mouths of rivers as in the Gulf of Mexico, where they can create huge dead zones, thousands of square miles of hypoxic waters, unable to support marine life (except for jellyfish, which thrive in these hypoxic zones; it's not a good sign when jellyfish take over).  Perennial plants with their deeper roots can be a major contributor to the prevention of soil erosion.  And, polyculture well-considered requires less toxic chemical use, less fertilizer, and less tilling of the land.

NASA-NOAA map of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; Wikimedia

5-Year Farm Bills/50-Year Farm Bill
But Bittman, and Jackson in the video accompanying the op/ed, already told this story beautifully.  What we want to talk about today is the 50-Year Farm Bill proposed by Jackson and colleagues.  Since the Great Depression, food and farm policy in the US has been structured according to farm bills that are passed every 5 years or so.

These bills have been largely political mine fields and pork barrels that maintain agribusiness more than they are solutions for the real environmental, cultural and financial problems plaguing agriculture today.  It's not all bleak, however -- since the 1990's a small fraction of the budget has been dedicated to funding beginning farmers, minority farmers, organic farmers, and fruit and vegetable farmers (these are "specialty" crops).  This has been important.

But, the 2008 Farm Bill has expired, and the temporary extension passed by Congress did not include funding for these programs. As Brian Snyder, president of PASA, Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, put it in a recent blog post, 'What's at Stake in the Farm Bill?":

Even taken together, these important reform efforts are still a fairly small fraction of total farm bill spending, but they have an outsize impact – and they are helping to create the foundation for a more a more sustainable and equitable farm and food system in America.

Good news: these innovative programs were all funded as part of the last farm bill that ran from 2008 to 2012.

More good news:  they also receive renewed, and in some cases increased, funding in one or both of the Senate and House farm bills currently being considered in Congress.

Very bad news: when the current farm bill had to be extended in January to give Congress more time to complete it, nearly all of these innovative programs were denied funding in the farm bill extension that was negotiated between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and passed by Congress on January 1 of this year.

The Congress is currently debating very different versions of the new bill from the House and Senate.  One of the major sticking points this time around, at a time in our history when one of the fiercest debates in Washington is the extent to which the government should help the undeserving poor, is the amount of money that will go to the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), food stamps -- this is thanks in no small part to tea partiers who've decided that it's their job to keep tax money from people who need it.  But innovative farm programs are also at stake.

Again, as Brian Snyder writes,

Congress should seize the opportunity to get our food and farm policy back on track.  Congress should pass a new five-year farm bill that includes robust funding for the programs that keep our families fed and healthy, build local economies, protect and restore natural resources, and spur the next generation of farmers.

Cap carbon!
How soon Congress will pass a bill is not at all clear, mired as it is in extremist politics.  The Land Institute, in any case, proposes a much broader view, with attention to food security and sustainable practices for the long term.  Jackson and Wendell Berry wrote in an op/ed in The New York Times in 2009, "We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities." The aim is to bring about gradual change in the way agriculture is done, to stop "the ecological spending of ecological capital necessary for food production".

The 50-Year Farm Bill document includes this paragraph:

Perennialization of the 70 percent of cropland now growing grains has potential to extend the productive life of our soils from the current tens or hundreds of years to thousands or tens of thousands. New perennial crops, like their wild relatives, seem certain to be more resilient to climate change. Without a doubt, they will increase sequestration of carbon. They will reduce the land runoff that is creating coastal dead zones and affecting fisheries, as well as saving and maintaining the quality of scarce surface and ground water. U.S. food security will improve.

Wendell Berry puts it less prosaically in a piece he wrote about the 50-Year Farm Bill published in  The Atlantic last year. As always, his concern is for traditional agricultural communities and sensible practices. 

I have described the need for a farm bill that makes sense of and for agriculture -- not the fiscal and political sense of agriculture, as in the customary five-year farm bills, but the ecological sense without which agricultural sense cannot be made, and without which agriculture cannot be made sustainable.

The program would need the support of the president, the Department of Agriculture, the Congress, non-profits, corporations and citizens.  Five-year farm bills would be incorporated into the plan, and head incrementally toward food security and sustainable farming.  This is, we think, a good idea, but even better would be if, in addition to sensible farm policy, bold political decisions were taken to limit anthropogenic climate change, such as those recently recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change such as capping carbon emissions, limiting the burning of fossil fuels.

Sensible and smart as it clearly is, we're not terribly hopeful that such a 50-Year Farm Bill will be adopted any time soon.  Our politicians don't think long-term because it doesn't pay off in the immediate currency of politics, even if a long-term policy like this one would produce handsome returns in many ways down the road.

We're not hopeful that meaningful carbon caps will become law either, sensible as they are, for much the same reason.  Is the groundswell of interest and research into sustainable agriculture evidence of an incipient revolution in how we do business, though?  We can hope.

We will never see the real answer, however.  What we're doing is leaving the surprises for our descendants, who will have to face the societal consequences of our long-term neglect.