Laura Ruby of Boulder, Colo., and Josh Metten of Fort Collins woke up Saturday morning after sleeping under the stars at the Prairie Festival in Salina, Kan.
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By KATHRYN SHATTUCK Published: October 2, 2012
SALINA, Kan. — On the final weekend of September, a pregnant moon illuminated the 600 acres of pasture and test plots at the Land Institute .. http://www.landinstitute.org/ .. on the outskirts of this central Kansas city, just beyond the western fringe of the tall grasses of the Flint Hills.
Up from the banks of the Smoky Hill River, a fiddle band sawed into the night as nearly 200 couples do-si-doed and galloped through a wooden barn.
At the crest of a nearby hill, still more revelers warmed themselves by a bonfire inside a giant hedge circle as musicians dueled softly at its perimeter.
And across the institute’s orchard and prairie hundreds of visitors erected tents, the better to commune with nature’s myriad species.
“It’s so beautiful to camp out there, with our little cookstove to make our breakfast and to hear the coyotes at night,” said Ellen Pajor, one of nine environmental club students who had made the journey from Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. “Being at the Land Institute instead of a conference center helps to immerse you in the topics.”
For two days, Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, lectures and walking tours, interspersed with art installations and musical performances, focused on climate change .. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier , agricultural practices and what the institute’s president, Wes Jackson, called “getting over the hump” in the use of carbon-based energy sources.
Informal estimates placed this year’s attendance at more than 1,200, an increase of nearly 20 percent over 2011, with participants from as far away as Tokyo. Local participation was strong, too — stronger than in the institute’s early days, when its longhaired devotees unnerved some of the more conservative Kansans with their tendencies to Dumpster dive and feast on roadkill.
Mr. Jackson, a plant geneticist who co-founded the institute in 1976, calls the festival “an intellectual hootenanny,” where ideas collide with music, art, food like bison chili, and bread and beer made from Kernza, the institute’s trademarked perennial wheatgrass.
But the democratic casualness of the environment — listeners sprawled on hay bales, children frolicking on the hillside — belied the seriousness of purpose as college hipsters and wizened hippies shared space with revered scientists and conservationists like David Orr, an environmental studies professor at Oberlin; Fred Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture .. http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/ .. at Iowa State University who is also the president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, N.Y.; and Douglas Tompkins .. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/international/americas/07patagonia.html?pagewanted=all , who has preserved more than two million acres of wilderness in Chile and Argentina.
“Wes and company do tap into obviously wonderful expertise from academia, but his brilliance is getting across that boundary line between the ivory tower and the land, and making the connections in fresh and interesting and challenging ways,” said the conservation biologist Curt Meine, a fellow with the Chicago-based Center for Humans and Nature .. http://www.humansandnature.org/ .. and the Aldo Leopold Foundation .. http://www.aldoleopold.org/ .. in Baraboo, Wis. “There are those who think of him as rather out there, but he would probably say that’s exactly where we need to be.”
This year Mr. Jackson paid tribute to his longtime friend and sounding board Wendell Berry, the literary voice of the agrarian community, who philosophized on the 35th anniversary of his seminal book, “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture,” which addressed rural and small-town landscapes at a time when environmentalism was still focused on the country’s wilderness.
The festival’s ability to connect the dots between the local and the global has lured Dr. Richard Stein, a dentist, and his wife, Peggy, a teacher, from Dodge City, Kan., for the last two gatherings.
“I felt like last year, after hearing the speakers, I really understood what’s happening in the world in a whole different way,” said Ms. Stein, who admitted to finding few liked-minded people in the state’s southwestern quadrant, now decimated by drought. “The big picture was even more clear. And it really helped us see where we needed to go in making some decisions with our lives.”
“I was always wondering if we would like it because we are not farmers,” she added.
“But we’re all eaters,” her husband interjected.
Mr. Berry’s prescription for the planet’s ills appeared tailor made for listeners like the Steins; Luane Todd, a retired grass farmer in Harrison, Ark.; and Howard Stoner from Troy, N.Y., who grinds wheat and rye using an exercise bicycle.
“It seems to me that it’s a bad move to get into a contest between optimism and pessimism,” he said of the current political tug-of-war over agriculture and the environment. “The steadying requirement is for hope.”
And the last hope, he said, is this: “That no matter how bad things get, a person of good will and some ability can always do something to make it a little better.”
A version of this article appeared in print on October 3, 2012, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Out on the Prairie, Moon, Music and Lectures, Too.
Oats are shoveled into a conveyor's hopper at an Iowa farm in 1948, before corn and soybeans gained a near-monopoly on farmland. Alfred Eisenstaedt, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG Published: November 3, 2012
A couple years ago, I saw a small field of oats growing in northwest Iowa — a 40-acre patch in a sea of genetically modified corn and soybeans. It was an unusual sight. I asked my cousins, who still farm what my dad always called the “home place,” whether someone had added oats to the rotation of crops being planted. The answer was no.
The purpose of that patch of oats was manure mitigation. The waste that had been sprayed on that field came from a hog confinement operation, and oats were the only crop that would put such concentrated, nearly toxic manure to nutritional use and do it quickly.
Oats used to be a common sight all over the Midwest. They were often sown with alfalfa as a “nurse crop” to provide some cover for alfalfa seedlings back when alfalfa was also a common sight. Until about 30 years ago, you could find all sorts of crops growing on Iowa farms, and livestock. Since then two things have happened. All the animals have moved indoors, into crowded confinement operations. And the number of crops has dwindled to exactly two: corn and soybeans.
My uncle Everon, who died last summer, farmed the home place when I was growing up. He would have been surprised to learn that he was following the principles of an early 18th-century agricultural experimenter named Charles Townshend, who, apart from his fascination with turnips, was every inch a viscount. Townshend’s discovery — borrowed from Dutch and Flemish farmers — was that crops grow better, with fewer weeds and pest problems, if they are rotated in a careful sequence.
Townshend’s rotation — like the ones George Washington and Thomas Jefferson used — included clover, wheat, other small grains and turnips, which made good winter food for sheep and cattle. My uncle grew no turnips, but he, like all his neighbors, was using his own version of the four-crop system, at the heart of which was alfalfa.
Getting to the four-crop rotation wasn’t easy, historically speaking. The Romans knew about crop rotation, but by the Middle Ages, farming was based on the practice of letting the land lie fallow, unplanted — resting it, in other words. The purpose of that practice, like crop rotation itself, is to prevent the soil from becoming exhausted when the same crop is sown over and over again. In early American agriculture, only sophisticated farmers like Washington and Jefferson were using crop rotations in their fields. There was simply too much good land available. It was too easy to farm a piece and then move on when the soil was depleted.
In one sense, that is still how modern agriculture works. You look to the future and discard the past. A modern rotation includes only corn, soybeans, fertilizer and pesticides. Whatever you may think about genetically modified crops, the switch to those varieties has driven the rush to the two-crop system. Those crops are designed to tolerate the presence of herbicides. The result is that farmland has been inundated with glyphosate, the herbicide genetically modified crops are engineered for.
The very structure of the agricultural system, as it stands now, is designed to return the greatest profit possible, not to the farmers but to the producers of the chemicals they use and the seeds they plant. And because those chemicals depend on fossil energy, the entire system is inherently unsustainable. What farmers used to return to the soil in the form of labor and animal manure — not the toxic kind you find in livestock confinement systems — they now must purchase, just the way they buy diesel for their tractors.
In fact, as a recent study by agronomists from the Department of Agriculture, Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota shows, there’s nothing obsolete about four-crop rotation. It produces the same yields, it sharply reduces the toxicity of freshwater runoff, and it eliminates many of the problems associated with genetically modified crops, including the emergence of glyphosate-resistant weeds. It’s also simply better for the soil. A four-crop rotation using conventional crop varieties, along with much lower applications of fertilizer and herbicides and some animal manure, works every bit as well as the prevailing monotony of corn and soybeans.
This study is a reminder of something essential. Modern agriculture is driven by diminishing biological diversity and relentless consolidation, from the farms themselves to the processors and the distributors of the crops and livestock. But you cannot consolidate the soil. It is a complex organism, and it always responds productively to diversity. The way we farm now undervalues and undermines good soil. Our idea of agricultural productivity and efficiency must include the ecological benefits of healthy soil. The surest way to improve the soil is to remember what industrial agriculture has chosen to forget.
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