Biomimicry Read online

  The homogenization of fields spread rapidly. Varieties of crops that had once been used because they did well on a south-facing slope or were able to prosper in the Banana Belt or the Little Arctic regions of a state were forgotten. In places like India, where there were once thirty thousand land-tailored varieties of rice, their replacement by one super variety swept away botanical knowledge and centuries of breeding in one fell swoop.

  Too late, farmers realized that touted yields were only promised, not guaranteed. In your part of the world, the fine print read, you may have to do a little goosing to get advertised yields—more water, more thorough tilling, more pest protection, more artificial fertilizer. But once the farmer next door had taken the bait and started to grow high-yielding varieties, you had to as well, so as not to be left behind. Together, like a slow pour over a large falls, we switched to a system of farming that mimicked industry, not nature.

  Chasing economies of scale, experts advised farmers to get big or get out. Mechanization allowed them to “service” larger fields with less labor, but it meant steep capital investments: more land, bigger equipment, enormous debt. For the small operator, there was suddenly no room to dance in the margin, or to take care of your land the way you’d like. When you are in debt for a $100,000 combine, you can’t afford to switch to alfalfa one year to rest the land. To hold the debt at bay, and to qualify for government subsidies, you have to farm volume.

  We quickly went from growing food to sustain ourselves to growing so much food it became a surplus—an export item and a political tool. The farm became just another factory producing another product that would keep the United States in the global catbird seat. The internal controllers, those farmers with their ears to the land, determined to pass on good fertile soil to their progeny, gave way to remote-distance controllers—agribusiness and public policy.

  To serve these “distance princes,” as Grassland author Richard Manning puts it, industrial farmers abandoned traditional ways of managing their lands, such as rotating crops, liming and fertilizing with animal manure, or producing a diversity of products in case one crop failed. Instead, they “focused” their farms—selling off their livestock and switching to one species grown in continuous cropping, which is, in effect, continuous robbing. They propped up flagging soil fertility with artificial nitrogen fertilizer produced with natural gas. Weed competition was quelled with herbicides, another petroleum product, while oil-based chemicals were used as a prophylactic against pest outbreaks (which by now were extreme, thanks to acres of identical plants with identical vulnerabilities). Suddenly, for the first time in ten thousand years of agriculture, farmers were beholden to the protection ring of petroleum and chemical companies, and were said to be growing their crops not so much in soil as in oil.

  Once on that treadmill, the feedback loops began. Weeds and pests are wily by nature, and even if you spray them one year, not all of them will die. Those that manage to hack an immunity explode the next year, requiring even heavier doses of biocides. In the escalating war of “crops and robbers,” the more you spray, the more you have to spray.

  Who’s winning? Since 1945, pesticide use has risen 3,300 percent, but overall crop loss to pests has not gone down. In fact, despite our pounding the United States with 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides annually, crop losses have increased 20 percent. In the meantime, more than five hundred pests have developed resistance to our most powerful chemicals. On top of that bad news, the last thing we want to hear is that our soils are also becoming less productive. Our answer has been to rocket-boost fertility with 20 million tons of anhydrous ammonium fertilizer a year—as many as 160 pounds per person in this country alone.

  Recently, the protection racket has jumped to a whole new level of menace. Tune in to TV in an agricultural state, and you’ll see a slick commercial for a crop seed that comes pretreated with a herbicide that kills weeds but doesn’t harm the growing seedling. Because the plant has been specially bred to grow unscathed by that brand of herbicide and none other, the company is assured future sales. There’s something unsavory about this. A dependence forms, and product loyalty is instilled with no question about the wisdom of using that product. Evidently, this latest move has been in the offing for quite some time. According to a December 1982 Mother Jones article by Mark Schapiro, at least sixty U.S. seed companies were sold between 1972 and 1982, all of them to chemical and petroleum companies. At last count, sixty-eight companies have plans to introduce their own seed/herbicide combos. Good news, they say: Now that farmers don’t have to worry about seedlings suffering from year-to-year herbicide carryover (which used to limit herbicide use), they can use as much as they want.

  This is the kind of news that should worry all of us. At last count, leaching pesticide residues made agriculture the number-one polluting industry in this country. At stake is groundwater, which supplies half the U.S. population with its drinking supply, and which is nearly impossible to clean once contaminated. Farm families already know about contamination. Recent studies have shown that people living in rural parts of Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois are likely to have pesticide residues in their wells, and to have higher than normal risks of developing leukemia, lymphoma, and other cancers. Nitrate levels (from fertilizer) in the drinking water of many farm communities also exceed federal standards, which may be why miscarriage rates in farm families are unusually high.

  Nitrates are not the only thing draining from farmland. Money is, too. In 1900, if you put a dollar’s worth of material and energy inputs into your farm, you’d produce $4.00 worth of crops, an input-to-production ratio of 1:4. Today, even though we produce more food, our genetically pauperized, oil-hungry crops cost more to grow. It takes $2.70 worth of oil-based inputs to produce $4.00 worth of crops, an input-to-production ratio of only 1:1.5.

  Moreover, because of the crops and robbers feedback effect, we will continue to need more and more inputs. Already, Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel reckons that society spends ten kilocalories of hydrocarbons to produce one kilocalorie of food. That means each of us eats the equivalent of thirteen barrels of oil a year. Author Richard Manning cuts through these statistics to ask the important question: When you have a system that is one part farmer and nine parts oil, who do you think will have the ultimate power? Not small farmers, and certainly not the landscape.

  According to data collected by Iowa State University in 1993, most farm families now rely on off-farm revenues for one half of their income. Those who don’t make it wind up selling to those with ready cash—corporations, syndicates, investors. This spiral leads to fewer family farms and a brain drain from the rural countryside, a tragedy that Wes Jackson calls “fewer eyes per acre.” Already, 85 percent of our food and fiber comes from 15 percent of our farms. These megafarms are hardly what Thomas Jefferson envisioned when he saw a nation of yeoman farmers tending their 160 acres, beholden to no one.

  What’s most dangerous about this dependency—the crops on us and us on petroleum—is that it keeps us too busy to think what the real problems might be. Fertilizer, for instance, masks the real problem of soil erosion caused by a till agriculture of annuals. Pesticides mask a second real problem: the inherent brittleness of genetically identical monocultures. Money borrowed to pay for the fossil-fuel inputs masks a third real problem: the fact that industrial agriculture not only destroys the soil and water, it strangles rural communities. Though we don’t want to admit it, our farms have become factories owned by absentee interests. With our help, they are liquidating the ecological capital that took the prairie five thousand years to accumulate. Every day, our soil, our crops, and our people grow a little more vulnerable.

  What I want to know is, how long can our denial hold?

  Before I get too deep into despair, I remind myself that I am headed to meet the one group of researchers who have stepped from denial’s shadow and made it their business to expose the crumbling foundations of this system. The people at The Land Institute—fifteen st
aff members, nine interns, and three staff volunteers—are committed to devising an agriculture that is, in Director Wes Jackson’s words, “more resilient to human folly.” On one of my driving breaks, I reread The Land Institute’s literature, and its quiet, determined tone assures me as much as it amazes me. At core these researchers are farmers, and they think there is nothing more sacred than the pact between humans and the land that gives them their food. But they are also realists, and it’s made them revolutionaries. They’re not afraid to acknowledge that it’s not just a few problems in agriculture that need overhauling. It’s the problem of agriculture itself.

  The problem of agriculture is an old and pervasive one, explains Wes Jackson in a series of books including New Roots for Agriculture, Altars of Unhewn Stone, and Meeting the Expectations of the Land. It comes from an insistence on decoupling ourselves from nature, from replacing natural systems with totally alien systems, and from waging war on, rather than allying ourselves with, natural processes. The result has been a steady loss of ecological capital—the erosion and salting of soil, the steady domesticating and weakening of our crops. To find our way back, says Jackson, we have to remember what the ancestors of “our” crops were like in their own element.

  Once wild creatures, our agricultural charges were shaped by an ecological context that bears little resemblance to our farming. Their natural ecosystems ran on sunlight, sponsored their own fertility, fought their own pest battles, and held down, even built, soil. But long ago, plants were removed from the original relationships they had with their ecosystems and pressed into our service. Now, writes Jackson, “Our interdependency has become so complete that, if proprietorship is the subject, we must acknowledge that in some respects they own us.” To break this codependent cycle, we have to stop fighting our crops’ battles and instead raise hardy crops in a farming system that brings out their natural strengths.

  THE PARABLE OF THE PRAIRIE

  “Essentially, we have to farm the way nature farms.” Wes Jackson, sixty-year-old fourth-generation Kansas farmer and modern-day Cain-raiser, arrived at that simple conclusion years ago, before he had the language to speak of it. It was his sixteenth summer and he was away from his family’s Kansas farm, roping and riding on his cousin’s cattle ranch in South Dakota. He was amazed that no one planted or tended it, yet the grass came up year after year, drought or no drought, through snow and blistering sun. There were rattle-snakes coiled right in the middle of it, and burrowing owls standing sentry outside their holes. “There was a rightness to it all,” he says now.

  Another good rain fell while Jackson was working toward his Ph.D. in genetics at North Carolina State. His adviser, Ben Smith, popped his head in the door one evening and declared: “We need wilderness as a standard against which to judge our agricultural practices.” With this, the seed coat split, and a slow root began to burrow.

  When Jackson was thirty-seven, on the fast track to tenure after writing a successful text called Man and the Environment, he got uneasy. Though he had an enviable post as creator of the Environmental Studies Department at California State University in Sacramento, he felt he wasn’t where he was meant to be. To the astonishment of his colleagues, he and his wife, Dana, packed up their three kids and returned home to Kansas. They moved into a partially earth-sheltered house that they had built along the Smoky Hill River, and in 1976, they began a school that focused on sustainable living practices. That school would become The Land Institute, a nonprofit research organization devoted to “an agriculture that will save soil from being lost or poisoned while promoting a community of life at once prosperous and enduring.” This new agriculture would take wilderness as its model, nature as its measure.

  In Kansas, the wilderness was tallgrass prairie, the natural expression of the underlying layers of soil, the carnival of weather, the licking of fire, and the grazing of elk and bison. Prairie is what Kansas land wants to be, but for the most part, is no more.

  I am startled, then, by what I see when I turn down Water Well Road to The Land Institute. With no warning, the bristle of wheat fields yields to a softer ensemble of wild-haired plants, stems akimbo, saturated with color and raucous with flowers and tasseled stalks. As I watch, wind enters like a dancer onto a crowded floor, parting the crowd, causing a bobbing and dodging of plants in its wake. The whole thing sways crazily for a moment, then settles in a perfect hush, like a band ending a jam by feel.

  A sign by the road says that this is The Wauhob, a prairie miraculously spared a sodbusting, probably because it was up gradient, and hard to get plows to. My car literally rolls to a stop as I gawk, so welcome is this sight after the acre upon acre of ramrod efficiency I’ve driven through. From where I am now, I can see both wheat field and prairie, and it’s like a visual parable—Jacob and Esau, cut from the same cloth but of very different character. One is the expression of imposed will, the other the expression of the land’s will. An understanding intern spots me and interrupts his organic gardening chores to give me directions to the office.

  The Land Institute headquarters is a modern brick house that was once home to an older couple. The bedrooms are now offices, and there’s a kitchen and fireplace in the meeting room, where a dozen local women are stuffing envelopes and drinking coffee when I arrive. In “The Land’s” twenty years of existence, its original 28 acres have grown to 270, an amazing accretion considering that this nonprofit operates solely on private funding and has never gone into debt.

  Ecologist Jon Piper greets me in the foyer and asks about my drive, all the while migrating toward the door, as eager as I am to get out into the prairie. Piper is in his late thirties, bespectacled and bearded, with a quiet forbearance for visitors like me. He knows that what I experience here, my dip in the prairie sea, will be as important as what we say to one another. “We’ll make a conceptual loop,” he tells me. “Starting where all our thinking starts.”

  As we wade into the knee-high Wauhob, Piper comes to life, unconsciously bending and turning the heads of the plants as he talks, like a teacher touching the heads of students as they work. Though never planted by human hands, the prairie is choked with blossoms, grasses gently pouring over, seeds setting, new shoots growing, runners crisscrossing the earth in a web of decay, growth, and new life. There is no hint of hail damage or drought wilt, no such thing as weeds. Every plant—231 species in this patch alone—has a role and cooperates with linked arms with the plants nearby. I see diversity of form—grasses splaying upward to different heights and widths, a sunflower’s bold expanse, a legume’s dark leaflets, fernlike in their repetition.

  Piper talks about the plants as if they are neighbors in a community—the nitrogen fixers, the deep-rooted ones that dig for water, the shallow-rooted ones that make the most of a gentle rain, the ones that grow quickly in the spring to shade out weeds, the ones that resist pests or harbor heroes such as beneficial insects. He also points out the butterflies and bees, the pollinators with wagging tongues, spreading rumors from one plant to another.

  Beneath this unruly mob lies 70 percent of the living weight of the prairie—a thick weave of roots, rootlets, and runners that captures water and pumps nutrients up from the depths. A single big bluestem will have twenty-five miles of this fibrous plumbing, eight miles of which will die and be reborn each year. These root remains, together with the leaves shed from above, will fall into the welcoming jaws of a miniature zoo—ants, springtails, centipedes, sowbugs, worms, bacteria, and molds. There are thousands of species in a single teaspoon, all tunneling, eating, and excreting, conditioning the soil crumb by crumb. Through their magic, dissolved nutrients are released to thirsty roots or stored in humus—the tilth that transforms the prairie into a living sponge.

  The character of this belowground world is an expression of the bedrock, organic matter, rainfall, temperature, light conditions, and most important, the plant and animal community above. Pluck or plant something new and you change the microecology slightly. Plow, spray, and harve
st every year, and you change it plenty. Some of the organisms you lose might be those that sponsor fertility, or help stave off insect and disease attacks, or produce hormones that tell a flower to unfurl or a root to push its snout deeper into the soil. It takes years to tune such an orchestra of microhelpers, but just moments to silence it.

  The secret of the prairie is its ability to maintain both above-ground and belowground assemblies in a dynamic steady state. It’s not the fact that nothing changes on the prairie (patches are always pulsing with change), but that the changes are never catastrophic. A prairie keeps pest populations in check, rebounds gracefully from disturbance, and resists becoming what it is not—a forest or a weed garden.

  “Our goal at The Land Institute is to design a domestic plant community that behaves like a prairie, but that is predictable enough in terms of seed yield to be feasible for agriculture,” says Piper. To illustrate, he heads downslope from The Wauhob to stand in the zone between the prairie and wheat field I saw earlier. “Down there is our current agricultural ideal; we know it isn’t sustainable, mainly because it loses soil and requires nonrenewable inputs. Up where you are, we have a sustainable ideal, but it won’t feed us. Conceptually, we’d like to be somewhere in here, between the controlled rigidity of the wheat field and the wildness of the prairie.”

  It’s a concept that I’d read about in chaos and complexity literature. There exists a sweet spot between chaos and order, gas and crystal, wild and tame. In that spot lies the powerfully creative force of self-organization, which complexity researcher Stuart Kaufmann calls “order for free.” Tropical agroecologist Jack Ewel also alludes to this free ordering when he says, “Imitate the vegetative structure of an ecosystem, and you will be granted function.”